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(Note: These are prepared remarks by , Batza Professor of Art and Art History; Director, Division of Arts and Humanities, given at ´ó·¢²ÊƱ’s 193rd convocation.)

Greetings to President Herbst, Dean Hicks, my colleagues on the faculty, and of course a warm welcome to the class of 2017, our transfer students and their families.

It is a great honor to stand before you tonight and I want to thank the President and the Dean for this opportunity. You have already spent many hours in conversation with advisors and peers and received extensive orientation to various aspects of life at ´ó·¢²ÊƱ. The semester starts tomorrow and my job is to welcome you to our scholarly community—specifically to the classroom and the intellectual adventure you are about to begin.

You enter college in 2013 and many of you probably already know that ´ó·¢²ÊƱ is deeply attached to the number 13. Weirdly 13 is our lucky number and we hope it will be lucky for you. While you are attending ´ó·¢²ÊƱ we will also be planning for our bi-centennial celebration to take place in 2019. So you are here to learn from all of us but we will also be learning from you as we celebrate ´ó·¢²ÊƱ’s past and imagine its future.

As ´ó·¢²ÊƱ students you join an extraordinary community of individuals who earned the opportunity to be here through hard work and careful planning. I imagine you also had the support of many family members, advisors, and friends. But now you move forward on your own. ´ó·¢²ÊƱ offers you many opportunities for excellence; but you will need to make choices about how best to pursue these opportunities. I am asking you to think tonight about how you exercise choice in the context of multiple opportunities, and how you do that in a way that facilitates your intellectual growth but also moves you closer to your personal goals.

I will first share with you some stories about how experiences–some random and some deliberate—have shaped the lives of past students in ways they might never have expected. And I will also offer some personal observations and suggestions that I hope will help you maximize your own experiences here and allow a ´ó·¢²ÊƱ education to be an agent of your own transformation.

I begin with my own story. I am a professor of Art History but I started college as a Math major. Why? I was good at calculus in high school and that seemed a good enough reason to major in Math. But I ultimately lost interest in Math and shifted to Psychology. Then in my junior year I had a powerful study abroad experience. A semester in Italy opened my eyes to a universe of art, culture and personal history—my father was born in Italy—that I had scarcely known existed. (I also met my husband on this study abroad program-not an insignificant detail of my biography).

So I returned to my senior year of college an art history major in a psych major’s body. Because I went to a liberal arts college, I was able to reconcile these interests by doing a senior thesis on the psychology of creativity. I then went to grad school in art history prepared to think as much about the physical nature of perception and the development of the mind’s creative faculties as I did about artistic traditions and cultural history.

Mine is a professor’s story but I have known many ´ó·¢²ÊƱ students whose lives and careers were shaped by an education that allowed them to follow their passions in multiple ways and often with multiple detours.

Mark Falcone, ´ó·¢²ÊƱ class of 1985, was similarly transformed by a study abroad experience, also in Italy. Mark was a history major. His study of Renaissance Florence taught him about the historic relationship between the prosperity of cities and a strong civic investment in the development of great art and architecture. Mark is now a large-scale real estate developer in Denver, Colorado, where he has distinguished himself as a visionary urban entrepreneur who is strongly committed to the idea that the arts are crucial to the future vitality of our cities.

Jennifer Heldman class of 1998 is a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. Jennifer studied astrogeophysics at ´ó·¢²ÊƱ, a concentration she chose because it involved interdisciplinary scientific inquiry that combined courses in physics, astronomy, chemistry, and geology. Her childhood fascination with the solar system drove this enthusiasm and while at ´ó·¢²ÊƱ Jennifer spent a summer as a Space camp counselor. She went on to earn a PhD in Planetary Science and now she gets paid to study Mars.

Finally, I have recently reconnected with a former student—Julian Farrior ´ó·¢²ÊƱ class of 1993. Julian double majored in Economics and Art History at ´ó·¢²ÊƱ and then obtained his MBA. Today he is CEO of a company he founded called Backflip Studios that produces gaming software for mobile devices. Julian hires computer scientists, software engineers, and artists and relies on them all equally to sustain innovation in his company.

What do these stories have in common? They involve the kind of intellectual curiosity, imagination and mental agility that characterize the education you will receive here if you remain open to the unexpected relationships between courses, disciplines and ideas.

Learning for many of you up to now has been mostly about thresholds of achievement. You have been on your way here. You are still are on your way, but now it is to the rest of your life. It is time to stop thinking about education as jumping through hoops or clearing hurdles. In these four years you will have the freedom to explore and grow in ways that were not possible before you came and may never be easily achieved again.

Your circuits are probably overloaded by now. But when things calm down and the flush of starting college has subsided—you may well ask yourself how you are supposed to do this? On a practical level—how do you get the most out of being at ´ó·¢²ÊƱ?

First, be mindful of the fact that everything you do here can potentially contribute to your future. Your choice of academic major is important, but there is value in not rushing in with pre-conceived ideas. And remember that you will gain crucial insights and skills in numerous ways, not solely in the program or department you commit to as your concentration.

Course choices can and should be about experimentation and curiosity as well as utility. (Not about the time of day. We can’t all teach at 1in the afternoon.) You will need good communication skills in the workplace so take classes that require you to write. Take them especially if you do not like to write and don’t think you are very good at it.

A course in philosophy will challenge you to examine fundamental questions that have fascinated human beings for centuries. And it will also cultivate your ability to construct a persuasive argument a