Johnathan D. Chen

Original Transcript (not fully delivered bc school didn’t like some of my jokes):

Hello everyone, how nice it’s been getting to know all of you these last four years, how lovely it’s been meeting your families these last few days, and how terrifying it is to know what we’ll all look like in a few decades. By that point, this will all be a blur, so what I'd like try today is to distill this four-year time lapse into three moments. Because in two days, we'll commence the rest of our lives, and what we'll reflect on are moments like these.

Moment one is a story on challenges and meaning.

Halfway through my sophomore year, I realized my roommate Spencer was enrolled in that kind of class that reduces the dorm into solely a bed and shower. For Spencer, it was just a bed without the shower. His team was building an autonomous robot hockey player to compete with other classmates'. Their hockey robot was designed according to the law of conservation of momentum, which states that when two objects collide, the heavier one wins. But come demo day, they realized their super heavy robot couldn't actually detect the puck; they built a buff but blind hockey player. I watched as they decided to ditch the puck seeking feature, and manually moved the bot in line with the puck and goal, then unleashed it at full throttled. It zoomed across the track, shoved the opposing team's feeble goalies out of the way, caught the puck, moved it into the goal (score) then broke the goal at full speed. They didn't win but it was awesome. The joy was in the work.

Regardless of profession or career, we can all relate to this, that feeling when we throw ourselves so completely into something that still isn't working. It's when I saw snap story after snap story from people finishing their multi-hundred-hour CIS380 projects, where my friends built an operating system from scratch. They wrote captions of “most brutal but rewarding project yet,” “Would never wish this upon anyone, ever,” “Glad I did it.”

And I remember my own projects, most recently when our Senior Design idea was still failing at 3:30AM the morning of the presentation. I dozed off in the lab for a few peaceful moments until Matt, my hardware partner, jostled me awake with a fire in his eyes I hadn’t seen in a while. He whispered, "Johnathan, it works.” Eight months of work culminated into those two words, echoing through the lab then our brains for the rest of the semester.

“It. Works."

I’ve been thinking a lot about why moments containing those two words are so meaningful. Is it the superhero power we feel after a project is successful? Perhaps, but I think those moments mainly matter because they came after so many months of texts and conversations that said, "It doesn't work." That final Eureka! moment is what everyone sees as the "beauty of engineering," but that the project is successful is not why it is meaningful. It is meaningful because of the drive, or the responsibility, of knowing that failure is expected. This isn't an engineering-specific muscle, but we're now trained to realize that our work is not a photograph—it's a painting, with layers of mishaps and debugging and problems we wrestle with and wrestle against that we continue to paint over.

We've spent these past four years assuming a responsibility to challenge ourselves and try, even when failure is likely, a responsibility to understand that everything seems impossible until it's not. Seeing how far we can go, how much we can stretch—that’s the responsibility that makes challenges meaningful.

I think Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben got it wrong in this regard: It's not that with great power comes great responsibility. Instead, with great responsibility comes great power: the power to create, to make, to manifest wonderful things into existence.

My second moment is on times of difficulty, the familiar and the familial.

When I was five, my family moved from Dallas, Texas, to my current home in Shanghai. That first day after the move, I looked out the window and saw only farmland—no playgrounds, no playmates, no play. The morning after, I discovered the school commute was an isolating 35 minutes long, with no schoolbus friends, just mom, who kept mentioning how chubby my baby feet were. 5-year-old me told mom through the rear-view mirror that I “didn’t mind” the move but with just enough passive aggression that she knew I did. It was a stupid complaint, one so small and entitled. Because over time, in the space of that commute, the minivan became a sacred room of community for its two occupants: me and mom. I realize now that that car ride, the thing I initially resented so much, was how I ended up meeting my mother.

By chance or by design, these car rides exist everywhere at Penn. Sometimes, all you need at the end of the long day when your circuits are shorting literally or metaphorically is to know there's someone like Sid Deliwala who will always stay late to help. That you can always go to Houston Hall and hear “One Bowl” then ask for extra spicy sauce. That Dean Composto is always trying to create the best possible curriculum. That there’s a 5:00AM custodian who most of us don’t see but who prepares the lab for us all. These people feel like sunshine. A sunshine you can always depend on.

I once heard a story that the high-rise field’s zig-zagging paths weren't originally paved. They started out as grass, and over time, the University Architect followed the worn shortcuts and cemented pathways there. It was a type of architectural natural selection. As students we do not know who created these paths, even though we walked them almost every day, but we have always implicitly understood that those paths were created by footprints left in all the places longing to be explored. Our families and the people here today were the ones who left those footprints for us in the past. And now, it's our turn to do it for the future.

So that brings me to my third moment, which is right now, here, together with you.

At some point in the last month, we left our final footprints at Penn. Maybe it was a friendly Locust Walk “hello,” which we didn’t realize would become the last goodbye. For the past four months, I've kept hearing, or maybe I'm the one who’s constantly asking, "Where has the time gone?" Well, I think, come Monday's graduation, the answer will reveal itself: Where has the time gone? Away. Time goes away.

That today feels so bittersweet is strange: Commencement is one of the few days we all knew was coming, ever since Convocation. We did not know, could not know, when we would walk into our favorite class, when we would meet our best friend, when canvas grades and cit-sender would invade our email, but today, this day, this one was known from the beginning. Everything has an expiration date, even the home we have created here for ourselves. They say Penn is a bubble, and right now, I don't want it to burst.

As I contemplate leaving this place of great comfort and risk, I find myself realizing as hard as it was to get into Penn, it might be harder to get out. To paraphrase Macklemore, I wish somebody would have told me that these were the good ol' days before they were over. It's time to close our 50 suspended Stack Overflow tabs, turn off the soldering iron, for the systems engineers to put down their… math? Still not sure what they do. But it’s time to move on.

Because yes, time goes away. But, thankfully, away is a place too, and it's where we head to now.

So, to all the people who upended space and time to capture a five-second glimpse of us walking across a stage in a sea of black robes, here's to you. Here's to all our support vectors: biological, chosen, and virtual. It's from you that we learned what it takes to make it through the hard times, and it’s because we needed you that we know that what is challenging is worth chasing.

You know what we get to do now that we're leaving? All of us—regardless of profession or career path—all of us get to go create things. Big, vast, great, beautiful things that dictionaries may one day write down as the definition of "ambition." Big things that nudge our lives forward in better ways, or maybe even just less worse ways. This is a great job. Which is another way to say, this is a great responsibility.

What a perfect way to say thanks to those who made it possible. Thank you.