It was a pleasure and an honor to deliver the University of Indianapolis commencement speech for the 2022 school year. Congrats to Indiana’s newest graduates!!!
Thanks to Robert Manuel, the Board, faculty and staff for awarding me this honorary doctorate of letters. I’m so excited about your RB Annis School of Engineering opening this year, and creating accessible engineering education for students of all backgrounds.
The following is the text of the speech I shared on graduation day.
I want to thank President Manuel, the Board and you, the University of Indianapolis graduating class of 2022 for having me here to share some remarks with you today.
I am incredibly humbled and grateful to receive this honorary Doctorate. Now, at least on paper, I can keep up with my parents who are both academics.
I am not an academic, I’m an engineer.
I am the head of AR Hardware for Reality Labs at Meta. Basically, my job is to figure out how to get the world’s most revolutionary software inside the perfect piece of hardware.
But I could’ve missed that chance.
When I went to Stanford to study product design and mechanical engineering, I really struggled.
Don’t get me wrong, I have and had a lot of privilege. I was a middle-class white kid from New Hampshire. But when I got to Stanford, I didn’t feel like I belonged.
AND it was nothing like the cutting-edge design approach you have here at the R.B. Annis School of Engineering. I was spending all my time studying problems other people had solved, I wanted to solve new problems.
I was a super Type-A kid who was suddenly failing, white knuckling it the whole way. By my third year, I had changed majors. I had gotten mono. I couldn’t focus.
Stanford said, “Take a year off.” Which is the nice way of saying, “Please leave. We’re not sure you’re going to make it.”
These are the things you don’t see on someone’s LinkedIn profile.
I tried to find a job in tech. But, without my degree, it was challenging to get anybody to believe in me. I took a regulatory compliance role at Gymboree, NOT an engineering job.
I found my way into a small start-up called OQO working on the world’s first ultra-mobile handtop PC. I was finally in San Francisco at a little start up surrounded by queer people, and I loved it.
In 2007, Apple offered me a position as a hardware designer on their Macs. They hadn’t released the iPhone yet, but they were already THE best place to go to design hardware.
They made finishing my degree a loose condition of my employment.
The transition was hard.
99% of people I was working with had an engineering degree, and honestly, I didn’t need another reason to be excluded. Even with my degree, as a woman it was pretty clear that I was going to have to work harder and be twice as good to succeed.
My mom did also call me and say, “Caitlin, I’m only going to say this once, it will literally kill me if you don’t go back to school.”
Within 3 weeks, I had negotiated my return to Stanford. On top of working insane hours to launch products at Apple, I graduated with my degree in mechanical engineering.
I wanted to make my parents proud. But it’s also hard to overstate the importance of being able to show a team you want to work for that you can complete something incredibly difficult.
By nature of the fact that we are all here together today, you ALL have done something incredibly difficult. You are graduating University during a pandemic.
You’ve foregone milestones, taken on unprecedented challenges, and reconciled with issues ranging from climate change to racism in ways that no generation that’s gone before you can even comprehend.
Engineers love rules, but there are no rules for what you’ve been through the last two years. So instead, I’m going to share six things that helped me build my path in the world, things I hope will serve you as you design yours.
#1 – DON’T BE AFRAID TO FAIL
I was terrified when I got asked to leave Stanford, and maybe even more terrified when Apple asked me to go back.
I truly believed if I couldn’t make things work at Apple, I’d never have any influence as an Engineer, the only thing I had ever really wanted to do with my life.
But, my friend Jeff Dauber likes to say, “Your momentum is what matters not your final destination.”
Early in your career you don’t know what you want but that’s ok. It’s really important to guess. Pick what’s challenging, pick what seems impossible. Find people that inspire you and move toward them.
I had a successful 6-year run at Apple. I helped design the first aluminum Mac Book Pros, spent three years leading the Mac Book Air teams, and was asked to lead the Mac Pro team, one of the pinnacle moments in my career.
When I got the phone call from Mark Zuckerberg saying, “Come to Facebook, we need to get good at hardware, and you can teach us.”
My friends thought I was crazy. They said, “Caitlin, they don’t even make hardware.”
But I said yes anyway.
8 years ago, we weren’t even a speck, today Meta is a world leader in consumer electronics and hardware design, and the QUEST 2 is a major success.
Sometimes faith leads us beyond reason, and a lot of times, that works out.
#2 – GET INTO THE MUD
In 2017, in the heated aftermath of the Presidential Election, I went on a motorcycle trip in Baja, Mexico with my friend Kevin. He’s a 58-year-old white guy from the Midwest, and I’m pretty sure he’s a Trump Supporter.
We rode together through rain and mud for five days, and I’ll be honest, we found very little common ground politically. But he was also the person who when I got stuck in the middle of a river crossing of the river on my Harley, came back and pushed me out.
Research has shown time and again that positive experiences with someone we fear, or dislike will result in changes of opinion.
We all know someone who has different politics and opinions than we do – a lot of the time these people are in our own family! We owe it to ourselves to sit with the discomfort, to engage — none of the great breakthroughs come from taking the easy road.
I would urge you all to get into the mud.
#3 — BUILD YOUR OWN BOARD OF ADVISORS
Like 60,000 other women across 188 countries have done, in 2013, I joined a Lean-In Circle. 8 women, each an expert in her own field, all from different industries came together once a month for six years. And we still come together to run major decisions by each other.
Our goal was not to become best friends, but to support one another in furthering our careers.
Having a group of people outside of my work life and my personal life, to discuss how to negotiate, navigate career politics, bounce-back from failure, define and redefine my purpose has been nothing short of life changing.
Thanks to this group of women, I have increased my salary, changed my career trajectory, taken more risks, and become a better leader.
Find people who aren’t afraid to say no to you, even when it’s hard. People who will hold you accountable to your goals and your values and celebrate your success.
People who will push you to do more than you dreamed possible.
Which brings me to #4 – FIND YOUR VOICE
As I became a leader in my field, I wanted to use my platform to have influence more broadly for women in tech, people who aren’t yet thinking about diversity in design, and a whole host of other issues I care about in the world.
The problem was, anytime I thought about public speaking, my pulse would begin to race, and my palms would begin to sweat.
At the urging of my women’s group, I decided to invest time and resources in delivering vulnerable content on stage. The first time I spoke at a big conference I was completely unprepared for the connections I would make with people afterwards. Today, I’ve spoken all over the world to audiences of up to 15,000 people.
If you go after what you love and you’re good at what you do, you’ll find people want to know how you got there. If you hold onto your fear of putting yourself out there more than your desire for change, you’re missing a huge opportunity.
And sometimes it’s not always the opportunity we expect.
#5 – BE OF SERVICE
Use your talents to move the world in the right direction
Three years ago, I was asked to join the Board of Axon, they make Tasers and are the world’s largest producer of police body cameras. I knew that becoming a board member would be jarring to my very progressive San Francisco bubble.
But I also knew that I could help ensure that Axon’s products are designed with communities as well as law enforcement in mind. I knew that I could advocate for hardware with excellent reliability and reduced environmental waste, and champion ethics-driven decisions.
This is so high stakes.
The look and feel of these weapons matter.
And, especially after George Floyd’s murder, and the deaths of so many others. Body cameras have to be consistent, accurate and safe. They just have to work. And then, policies have to support keeping them on.
I don’t know if I can make our communities safer. But one thing I doknow is that when you are appalled by what’s happening in the world, but too scared to engage — nothing changes.
And that’s a reality I can’t live with.
And finally, #6 — DON’T BE AFRAID TO MAKE YOUR OWN RULES.
I’ve shared what has worked for me. I found the momentum to make my own way. YOU will be the experts in making yours.
Your needs will be different than mine, or your parents. You are less likely to work in the same room or even the same country as your colleagues than we are.
You are less patient on things like compensation than I was, and more eager not to be led, but to be listened to.
As a class, your superpower is that you have proven you can adapt.
I wake up every day, knowing that the world is changing. In the next generation of technology, most of the screens in your world are going to become obsolete. Instead of looking down at our phones all the time, we will all start looking up. Technology will be more mobile and wearable which is a big difference and a huge opportunity.
Can our approach to designing the next generation of products, to caring for, educating, and influencing the next generation of people truly change the world?
I believe the answer depends on who’s building it.
Diversity matters. If we only one let one kind person design our products, we get too many products that only serve one kind of person. And, I’m not just talking about VR.
Whether you want to be a nurse, a teacher, a scientist, or an investor – you are co-creators of the world you’ll live in and the reality the next generation will face.
We are all designers, and we must do the work to design for everyone.
In closing, I want to give a HUGE shout out to all the parents, familyand friends here today, for holding up big expectations for your kids in a very difficult time and loving them through their journey to get to this moment.
And my most heartfelt congratulations to you, the University of Indianapolis Class of 2022 for making it here today, in a world full of challenges no generation before you has ever seen or experienced.
I can’t wait to see what you’ll create, how you’ll fail, get back up again, and what you discover along the way.
Thank you.
