Written critique

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I am honored to be with ( HYPERLINK "http /www .youtube .com /watch ?v JPL_NjBjUWE " more

Added : February 17 , 2007

Below is the transcript

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world . I never graduated from college . Truth be told , this is the closest I 've ever gotten to a college graduation Today I want to tell you three stories from my life . That 's it . No big deal . Just three stories

The first story is

about connecting the dots

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months , but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit . So why did I drop out

It started before I was born . My biological mother was a young , unwed college graduate student , and she decided to put me up for adoption . She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates , so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife . Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl . So my parents , who were on a waiting list got a call in the middle of the night asking "We have an unexpected baby boy do you want him " They said "Of course " My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school . She refused to sign the final adoption s . She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college

And 17 years later I did go to college . But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford , and all of my working-class parents ' savings were being spent on my college tuition . After six months , I couldn 't see the value in it . I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out . And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life . So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK . It was pretty scary at the time , but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made . The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn 't interest me , and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting

It wasn 't all romantic . I didn 't have a dorm room , so I slept on the floor in friends ' rooms , I returned coke bottles for the 5 ? deposits to buy food with , and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple . I loved it . And much of what I...