“When you heard your speaker was Alex Wallace, you were probably thinking, who is he?” Alexandra Wallace Creed, CC ’88, joked.
On Tuesday, Wallace, senior vice president of NBC News and former executive producer of “NBC Nightly News,” spoke to the Columbia College’s class of 2011 about her struggle to figure out what she wanted to do with her life after graduation. What guided her was looking at the clues to who she “really was”—exactly what Wallace encouraged graduates to do.
“I looked at the puzzle pieces. I hoarded newspapers. I worked best at crazy hours of the night. Could I make money leveraging this?” Wallace said, recalling the questions she asked herself.
But she wasn’t always aware of her passions. After graduation, she recalled taking a year off before going to law school, going door-to-door with her resumé. “I do not recommend this,” she laughed. During her year off, Wallace began an internship with CBS News, where she found herself doing something she loved.
“I found myself in drug dealers’ homes,” Wallace said, describing the efforts to get stories. After the graduating class laughed loudly, Wallace insisted, “I was reporting, thank you!”
Despite her tumultuous search for a career, Wallace advised the graduates to find a place where they fit and to do something they are passionate about.
After telling a story about how her kindergarten teacher called her an “intensely curious child,” Wallace emphasized the importance of looking within. “The clues to who you are are all around you,” she said.
While Wallace highlighted the role of her own inquisitive spirit in her career search, salutatorian Elizabeth Lyon also encouraged graduates to keep asking questions.
Lyon referenced a paper she wrote for her Literature Humanities class in which she raised questions but didn’t answer them. “My professor was deeply disappointed with it,” Lyon said. “On the side margin, it was written, ‘These are all questions one should be trying to answer.’” But for Lyon, raising questions that could not be answered was something she encouraged her fellow graduating seniors to do.
“Awareness of the passion common to all of us is testament to a strong conviction,” Lyon said, “even if these questions cannot be answered.”
Columbia College Dean Michele Moody-Adams also urged graduates to critically participate in social and political debates—while also telling them that they may want to consider “which pictures you want to take down from your Facebook page.”
While students laughed at Moody-Adams’ joke about Facebook, they booed shortly after, when Dean of Student Affairs Kevin Shollenberger accidentally called them the “class of 2001” in his introduction to the senior class gift.
Ninety-five percent of seniors contributed to the senior fund—the most participants in the history of the college, according to Scott Allen Maxfield, chair of the senior fund executive committee. All told, the fund raised $21,341 in contributions and received a matching gift of $50,000.
Senior class president Sean Udell closed the ceremony by sharing experiences he had heard from his classmates, ranging from memories of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech and Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential election win to the more “seemingly banal” experiences of late-night Hamilton Deli runs and long meetings in the IRC.
“The more I heard, the more I realized that our memories wouldn’t overlap in that neat, tied-up-in-a-bow way that I had hoped,” Udell said.
But he did find one unifying factor, he said. “For everyone, friends were present in every story we told.”
jackie.carrero@columbiaspectator.com
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