Commencement

With Congressman Jay Obernolte

US Congressman Jay Obernolte proudly represents California’s 23rd District in the US House of Representatives. Congressman Obernolte holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering and applied science from Caltech, a master’s degree in artificial intelligence from UCLA, and a doctorate in public administration from California Baptist University. Before pursuing politics, he built a successful software company and became a martial arts teacher, a jet-rated pilot, and a certified flight instructor. Today, Congressman Obernolte serves on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. He is the chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, and, notably, the congressman was recently appointed chairman of the House of Representatives Task Force on Artificial Intelligence. He is also the only serving member of Congress with a graduate-level degree in AI, and we were happy to have him as the commencement speaker for the class of 2024. 

It’s not the case that you should have everything figured out right now, and it’s okay to change that as you go through your life.

Below is an edited excerpt from Congressman Jay Obernolte’s address. The full recording of the commencement address and ceremony can be found by scanning the link at the end of the article. 

Thank you very much for the warm welcome. It is an honor for me to be able to share this momentous occasion with you. It’s momentous because we are not only celebrating the achievements of these remarkable young people seated behind me, but also wishing them well as they go off into the rest of their lives, and that’s why we call this a commencement. 

This is not just the ending of their high school education; it is the beginning of their adult lives, and that’s why it’s tradition for a commencement speaker to offer words of wisdom to the graduating class, to offer some good advice that they can take with them and use the rest of their lives. However, I’m going to upend tradition a little bit and instead offer them some bad advice. Rather, I’m going to talk about the advice I was given when I was sitting in their shoes and about the fact that it ended up not being good advice, although it was well-intentioned, but bad advice. From there, I want to talk about what I wish my commencement speaker had said instead.

I remember vividly what it was like to be up on this stage getting my diploma in high school. It was a time of great uncertainty for me. I felt a lot of fear. I felt a lot of angst because everyone always asks you questions when you’re graduating. What are you doing next? Are you going to take a gap year? Are you going to college? Where are you going to college? What’s your major going to be? Do you have a girlfriend or boyfriend? When are you getting married? Are you going to have children? 

It is overwhelming because when people ask you these questions, the underlying message is that you should have it all figured out. I remember vividly sitting up on that stage, feeling that fear and that anxiety. Even though I was the valedictorian of my high school class and gave a speech at my commencement, I don’t remember what I said. But I remember every word that my high school commencement speaker said. He said this: “You can do anything you want to do. So, stride boldly in the direction of your dreams.” Oh, that sounds good, doesn’t it? 

I admit I was a little bit skeptical about that first part, and I’ll tell you why. I already had an experience where I remember watching the Summer Olympics, and the most amazing sport I’d never noticed before was gymnastics. Those athletes were superhuman. And so I went to my mother and said, “Mom, I figured it out. I know what I want to be.” And she said, “Well, what is that, honey?” And I said, “I want to be an Olympic gymnast.” 

Her reaction was just about like yours right now because do you see a budding gymnast in this body? She didn’t either, but she was very gentle about it. She said, “Well, honey, you know that might not be a path open for you. And I said, “No, no, I really want to do it.” And so I made her sign me up for gymnastics classes. I went for a whole summer before it finally became clear to me what had been clear all along to everyone else: no matter how hard I tried at being a gymnast, I was lacking one little itsy bitsy tiny thing called talent. 

That matters. It could be something I did as a hobby. It could be something I enjoyed doing, but I was never going to be really good at it and certainly not good enough to go to the Olympics. So, you know, that was in the back of my mind when my commencement speaker said, “You can be anything that you want to be.” 

So I was not so sure about that. In fact, a study was done in the 1970s when I was growing up that asked young people what their dream job was and what they aspired to be. Can you guess what the number one dream job in the early 1970s was for young people? A NASA astronaut.  It was right at the end of the Apollo space program. We had seen men walk on the moon. This was foremost in everyone’s mind, followed closely in second place by, at least for boys, an NFL quarterback. 

Interestingly, they did this study again last year. Do you know what the number one answer was? Can you guess? A social media influencer. So, think. What do those three jobs have in common? You can throw in Olympic gymnasts there, too, if you want.

What they have in common is many people might aspire to be these things, but vanishingly few people actually achieve them. So that should be an object lesson for all of us, and I will tell you a little secret. We’re not supposed to tell young people this, but I will break the rules here. Can you be anything that you want to be? No, you can’t. But that’s okay. It’s okay to change what you want to be. It’s not the case that you should have everything figured out right now, and it’s okay to change that as you go through your life.

As an absurd example, think about if I was on my deathbed and I had achieved all these things in my life. I served in the US Congress. I was the mayor of a city. I built a successful company. I raised an amazing family. Now, think about how ridiculous it would be for me to feel like my life was a failure because I’d never achieved that dream of being an Olympic gymnast.

So much for, “You can be anything that you want to be.” Now, let’s unpack the rest of what my commencement speaker said: “...go forth and stride boldly in the direction of your dreams.” I thought a lot about that because I was trying to decide what I wanted to do after high school, and I wasn’t absolutely sure. So, to stride in the direction of my dreams, I needed to know what my dreams were. What did I want to do? 

I’ll tell you one thing that I knew. I knew I didn’t want to do what I was currently doing, which was being a newspaper carrier for The Fresno Bee. That job was and remains one of the hardest jobs I have ever had in my entire life. A big truck would deliver these huge packets of newspapers at 4:30 in the morning. I had to be up by 5:00, and the first thing I had to do was fold the newspapers, put a rubber band around each one, and put them in a bag if it was raining. By the end, my hands were black with newspaper ink; someone probably should have told me to wear gloves. 

Then I would get on my bike with a load of papers in front and back, and you might think of Fresno as a sunny and warm place, but I can tell you from personal experience that in the winter, it is cold, it is damp, it is dreary. And a lot of times, it is so foggy that you can’t even read the street numbers. So, you better know your route well because you can’t know what streets you’re supposed to deliver to by looking at the number on the street. 

Also, you might think of Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley as flat, but that’s not how I remember it. There were hills everywhere, and I rode up and down them. It was a hard job, and the hardest part of the job was I had to collect money from people. Many people don’t know this about newspaper carriers, but if you stiff the newspaper carrier, you’re stiffing the carrier, not the publisher. If you don’t pay, they’re the ones that take the hit—not the newspaper publisher. That’s how it worked for us in The Fresno Bee. So, I had to go to people and ask them to pay for their newspaper subscriptions, and I was the one who would pay the price if they failed to do that. It was a hard job. I certainly didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life. 

So I asked myself, “What are my dreams?” because you have to know what your dreams are before you can stride boldly in their direction. 

I had a really inspirational teacher when I was in high school. He was the one who taught physics, and I worked with him very closely because he had written a physics textbook for Addison–Wesley, the textbook manufacturer. He asked for some help writing some laboratory software to accompany the textbook. I knew how to do this because when I was in fifth grade, my father brought an Apple II computer home from work on which I taught myself programming in BASIC, which was a really interesting hobby for me.

So when my physics teacher said, “Hey, you can help me write this interfacing software?” it turned out to be a really interesting form of programming for me. It ended up being published, and we actually got royalties on it, so I thought to myself, “Wow, okay, maybe this is a sign.” Physics is what I meant to do, so how can I stride boldly in that direction? Well, I applied to all the top colleges for physics in the world, and much to my surprise, the top college for physics accepted me, The California Institute of Technology—Caltech, as we call it. It is probably still the best place to go for physics anywhere in the world. I was overjoyed. I was striding boldly in the direction of my dreams! 

If you enjoyed this excerpt, watch the entire 2024 Commencement address & ceremony using this link.