Winter Commencement 2023

Today is a celebration. As a community, we are marking a moment in the lives of you, our graduates. We are celebrating the hard work, devotion and dedication you have shown in quiet moments throughout your time at Carolina. We are celebrating every accomplishment: From the exams you aced to the thesis you wrote…From the first time you finished a lab assignment to the first moment you stepped into a faculty member’s office hours.

Large and small, each accomplishment is worth celebrating and today we honor the moments you chose to hunker down and study for another hour…the times you chose to finish that reading before opening Netflix on your laptop, or to review those class notes before heading out to Franklin Street.

A thousand little moments have added up to this big one, and it’s those contributions and accomplishments we honor today. We are remembering your time here at Carolina, yet we are NOT celebrating an ending. We are NOT marking the end of a journey. We are NOT closing the book. Your story is not over. You are still at the beginning and we are marking the turning of the page to the next chapter.

It’s been a chapter filled with both challenge and opportunity. Like all great stories, it hasn’t been easy. But easy is boring. In your chapter at Carolina, a global pandemic shut the world down and we had to figure out how to reopen. Wars started and continue raging in Europe and the Middle East….Chat GPT is changing the way we think about work. And as I know you’ll never forget, we beat Duke in Coach K’s last season….twice.

People look to our leading global public research university — to our brilliant faculty, our dedicated staff, our devoted students and passionate alumni — for insight and leadership. They will look to you now, and trust that you have done the hard work, put in the hours. They will look to you as you write the next chapter. Each one of you is off to do great things. You may not know what that is yet.

But that’s the best part of stories….you have no idea what the next chapter will bring.

I’m a firm believer in roadmaps, in knowing where you want to go and plotting the path to take you there. And yet, there is so much of life that you can’t anticipate or predict, and in many ways that is the beauty of it. You have to be nimble to seize opportunities. You have to pivot. You have to embrace the unexpected. You have to keep reading to see where the story goes.

And so, my advice to you is this: go for it.

Make this next chapter an unexpected one. You don’t always know what the future is going to hold. You may have a plan, an offer letter in hand, the next 5, 10, 20 years planned out. Yet the next chapter might throw you off completely.

So take what comes your way and go for it. You are built for this, so make that change, take that leap, and dare to follow the voice in your head.. None of us can predict what the future holds. When I was an athletic trainer on the Pittsburgh Steelers sidelines, I could not have imagined being up in front of you today.

Jason Kilar, Class of ’93 with his double major in journalism and business administration, did not imagine founding a small company called Hulu. Zena Cardman, a double Tar Heel with a masters in marine sciences, couldn’t have predicted that she would be a NASA astronaut, training to go into space as part of the Artemis mission. And when Anson Dorrance graduated in 1974 with a degree in English and philosophy, he wouldn’t have dreamed of his 921 victories as head coach of the UNC women’s program, the most in the sport’s history.

Yet it is the unexpected, the surprises, that make a story good. We wouldn’t keep reading if we knew what the next chapter would hold.

Graduates of the nation’s first public university, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I am so excited to read your next chapters. We are so proud of you and know that this place is always your home, wherever your story takes you.