Cognitive Science Graduation Speech

The following speech was delivered on May 17th, 2018, at Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus.

Good morning, everyone. I wanted to start with thanking everyone that helped us get here today. Our families, first of all, for always being there for us, whether we liked it or not. Our professors and our GSIs and also all the other educators and mentors that we have been blessed with over the course of our lives. Our advisors, Catherine and MacKenzie, who have put in so much work and time for one of the fastest-growing majors on campus. Our CS project partners, for dealing with 2am questions about the autograder and incoherent comments in the GitHub commits. And our friends and partners—the people we feel the luckiest for finding, especially on a campus of 30,000 other students. None of this would have been possible without your guidance or your support or your leadership, so I think I speak for every graduate here when I say thank you with all the gratitude from the bottom of my heart.

We’re here today to celebrate our achievements in graduating with a degree in cognitive science. But let’s be honest, unlike the previous commencements, we deserve it a bit more than they do. The laundry list of experiences that the Cognitive Science Class of 2018 has gone through reads like a Russian novel: we lost both the fried food at Golden Bear Café and late night dining at Crossroads and Foothill, we had to wrestle with a new course enrollment system that was more confusing to navigate than Dwinelle Hall, we had the election, the first year and a half of President Trump, and the worst part? We were stuck on the CogSci 1 waitlist the whole time. Yeah, we’ve been through a lot.

And in spite of all of these obstacles, expected and unforeseen, we’ve gotten a lot done. We’ve taken classes in many different departments, and I’m not just talking about easy breadth requirements. These were upper-division classes with three numbers in their name and juniors and seniors raising their hands to talk in discussion sections.

We’ve conducted research, the actual, grown-up kind of research that takes years of drudgery and data collection, the kind of research that runs the very real risk of returning underwhelming results, the kind of research that we throw ourselves into anyways because it asks questions about the things that we’re passionate about.

We’ve even started companies in rapidly-growing markets, companies with business models and VC funding and the occasional blockchain thrown in for good measure.

And that’s the beauty of cognitive science at Berkeley: such diversity of experience is something uniquely endemic to the program. Some of us run conferences; some of us run marathons. Some of us have even taken an upper-division Philosophy class.

But no-one’s done all these things. And as obvious as that seems, I think it’s a reality a lot of us tend to forget, especially in the era of social media, where so many of us, myself included, are often stuck to our phone screens, glumly comparing the behind-the-scenes of our daily lives to other people’s highlight reels on Facebook or Snapchat or Instagram. Online, it seems like everybody’s done everything.

Well, I certainly didn’t accomplish all the things I just listed. I never worked on a long-term research project or started my own company. I definitely haven’t run a marathon.

And that’s okay. 

If anything, my experiences with the goals that I wasn’t able to meet, and the things that I didn’t do, have been some of the most important moments of my four years here.

So I’m going to share with you three things that I didn’t get done at Cal, and what I’ve taken away from each of them.

The first thing that I was never able to do during my time at Berkeley is take the Mushrooms of California class, which is offered through the Plant & Microbial Biology department and includes a four hour lab session where students get to hunt for mushrooms around campus. I can already hear you all thinking, “What does that have to do with anything?”

Allow me to explain:

I first heard about the cognitive science major from my friend Andrew, who was the person I happened to sit next to in my very first lecture at Cal, Linguistics 100. We hit it off through our mutual love of language and a shared extracurricular, so we decided to take the same linguistics class the next semester too.

At the time, I, like every other ambitious freshman, was planning on triple majoring in English, Linguistics, and CS. I didn’t want to miss out on learning anything, and to me those three represented a balance of the subjects that interested me the most. When I told Andrew about this, he instantly replied: “You should seriously consider cogsci, every class you take can be in a different department. At least take CogSci 1 and see what you think.”

I was hesitant. I had already signed up for my phase 1 classes, and sure enough, CogSci 1 was at the same time as Mushrooms of California. I only had room for one. After two days of tortured internal debate and methodically picking apart the pros and cons of both classes, I panicked last minute and chose CogSci 1 when I realized there were only ten more empty seats left.

And sure enough, every semester since then, whenever California Mushrooms has been offered, it’s always been scheduled at the same time as a cogsci major requirement. So I never got to take the class.

But through CogSci 1, the class I did get to take, I found a major that I was interested in and, like my friend said, let me take upper-division classes in many different departments. I also found a community of passionate people, the Cognitive Science Students Association, and through that club I discovered my future career path and met some of my closest friends, and none of that would have been possible if I had taken that California Mushrooms class.

Look, I know I don’t need to repeat the “one door closes, another opens,” Robert Frost, “Road Not Taken” stuff. You’ve heard all that already. For me, the biggest lesson I learned from not taking California Mushrooms was that you can’t get too hung up on the choices you did make.

Do I ever regret taking CogSci 1? Sometimes. After all, I think mushrooms are really cool. But I refuse to let that regret live rent-free in my head. (I mean, it’s the Bay Area, so I’d at least charge $1200 a month.) I’ve learned to fully embrace my choices as a part of who I am.

The second thing I was never able to do at Cal is answer the question: “So what is cognitive science?” I’m sure that’s a disappointing thing to hear for many of the parents in the audience today, for whom the last four years of holiday dinners and summer vacations have yielded a similar dearth of answers.

That’s where the diversity of the cognitive science experience comes into play. Everyone has taken a different set of classes and extracurriculars, and everyone has a different career path and a different set of interests, so no one really comes out with the same idea of what cognitive science is. After three years in the program, I’m pretty sure the only things every CogSci major knows are that Phineas Gage had half his head blown out in 1848, that phrenology is racist, and that you don’t actually only use 10% of your brain.

This might sound perplexing, but I’ve never really minded not knowing exactly what it is I’m getting a major in. If anything, I feel like this lack of definition is one of the defining aspects of the field.

Cognitive science asks some of the foundational questions of what being human means. Questions about the nature of the mind, about the structure of language, about the origin of consciousness and memory. Cognitive science is thinking about thinking.

This focus on the meta means that a lack of definition allows the field to continually reflect on itself and its progress, so that as the questions develop, so do the tools we use to answer them.

It’s similar to koans in the Zen Buddhist tradition, statements or questions that monks would ponder over for months or, in some cases, even years. Things like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Here, it’s not the answer to the questions that’s important, but rather it’s the thought process by which it was derived.

By not answering, we fall in love with the question.

And that brings me to the third and final thing that I never did at Cal:

During the Spring semester of my freshman year, I wrote down a bucket list of all the things that I wanted to get done during my time here. Some were easy ones, like “get lost in San Francisco.” Others were a bit trickier to pull off, like “use every public bathroom on the Berkeley campus.” And at the very bottom, I quickly scribbled down “fall in love.”

Look, I’m sorry, I was seventeen back then during my freshman year. I wasn’t jaded yet.

I never got that done. I never anticipated how much work I’d have, how little time there would be. And I found so many other things to put my efforts into instead. I started writing poetry and doing photography and making ice cream. I picked up the violin again. I hung out with my friends, almost every day.

And that was so worth it.

The last thing I learned, less than a month ago, is that sometimes your goals change. Sometimes the things you start off thinking are important, even essential, drift off the list, not necessarily forever, but at least for now. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s natural.

Now, before I go, let me leave you with a disclaimer. Take everything I just said with a grain of salt. Look, I’m only twenty. I can’t even order a drink yet.

But between not taking a California Mushroom class, not knowing what my major does, and not falling in love, one thing’s for sure: there’s still a million things I haven’t done, and I’m looking forward to learning from all of them.

Thank you.