毕业典礼英语演讲稿

2023-12-27 22:08:00 来源 : haohaofanwen.com 投稿人 : admin

下面是好好范文网小编收集整理的毕业典礼英语演讲稿，仅供参考，欢迎大家阅读！

毕业典礼英语演讲稿

毕业典礼英文致词

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 papers. 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 stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. let me give you one example: reed college at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. because i had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, i decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. i learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. it was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and i found it fascinating.

none of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. but ten years later, when we were designing the first macintosh computer, it all came back to me. and we designed it all into the mac. it was the first computer with beautiful typography. if i had never dropped in on that single course in college, the mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. and since windows just copied the mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. if i had never dropped out, i would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when i was in college. but it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. you have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. this approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

my second story is about love and loss.

i was lucky – i found what i loved to do early in life. woz and i started apple in my parents garage when i was 20. we worked hard, and in 10 years apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. we had just released our finest creation - the macintosh - a year earlier, and i had just turned 30. and then i got fired. how can you get fired from a company you started?

well, as apple grew we hired someone who i thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. but then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. when we did, our board of directors sided with him. so at 30 i was out. and very publicly out. what had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

i really didn't know what to do for a few months. i felt that i had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that i had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. i met with david packard and bob noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. i was a very public failure, and i even thought about running away from the valley. but something slowly began to dawn on me – i still loved what i did. the turn of events at apple had not changed that one bit. i had been rejected, but i was still in love. and so i decided to start over.

i didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. the heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. it freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

during the next five years, i started a company named next, another company named pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.

pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, toy story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. in a remarkable turn of events, apple bought next, i retuned to apple, and the technology we developed at next is at the heart of apple's current renaissance. and laurene and i have a wonderful family together.

i'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if i hadn't been fired from apple. it was awful tasting medicine, but i guess the patient needed it.

sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. don't lose faith. i'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that i loved what i did.

you've got to find what you love. and that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. if you haven't found it yet, keep looking. don't settle. as with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. and, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. so keep looking until you find it. don't settle.

my third story is about death.

when i was 17, i read a quote that went something like: "if you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." it made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, i have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "if today were the last day of.

毕业典礼英文发言稿范文

president clinton:

thank you. thank you, president chen, chairmen ren, vice president chi, vice minister wei. we are delighted to be here today with a very large american delegation, including the first lady and our daughter, who is a student at stanford, one of the schools with which beijing university has a relationship. we have six members of the united states congress; the secretary of state; secretary of commerce; the secretary of agriculture; the chairman of our council of economic advisors; senator sasser, our ambassador; the national security advisor and my chief of staff, among others. i say that to illustrate the importance that the united states places on our relationship with china.

i would like to begin by congratulating all of you, the students, the faculty, the administrators, on celebrating the centennial year of your university. gongxi, beida. (applause.)

as i'm sure all of you know, this campus was once home to yenching university which was founded by american missionaries. many of its wonderful buildings were designed by an american architect. thousands of americans students and professors have come here to study and teach. we feel a special kinship with you.

i am, however, grateful that this day is different in one important respect from another important occasion 79 years ago. in june of 1919, the first president of yenching university, john leighton stuart, was set to deliver the very first commencement address on these very grounds. at the appointed hour, he appeared, but no students appeared. they were all out leading the may 4th movement for china's political and cultural renewal. when i read this, i hoped that when i walked into the auditorium today, someone would be sitting here. and i thank you for being here, very much. (applause.)

over the last 100 years, this university has grown to more than 20,000 students. your graduates are spread throughout china and around the world. you have built the largest university library in all of asia. last year, 20 percent of your graduates went abroad to study, including half of your math and science majors. and in this anniversary year, more than a million people in china, asia, and beyond have logged on to your web site. at the dawn of a new century, this university is leading china into the future.

i come here today to talk to you, the next generation of china's leaders, about the critical importance to your future of building a strong partnership between china and the united states.

the american people deeply admire china for its thousands of years of contributions to culture and religion, to philosophy and the arts, to science and technology. we remember well our strong partnership in world war ii. now we see china at a moment in history when your glorious past is matched by your present sweeping transformation and the even greater promise of your future.

just three decades ago, china was virtually shut off from the world. now, china is a member of more than 1,000 international organizations -- enterprises that affect everything from air travel to agricultural development. you have opened your nation to trade and investment on a large scale. today, 40,000 young chinese study in the united states, with hundreds of thousands more learning in asia, africa, europe, and latin america.

your social and economic transformation has been even more remarkable, moving from a closed command economic system to a driving, increasingly market-based and driven economy, generating two decades of unprecedented growth, giving people greater freedom to travel within and outside china, to vote in village elections, to own a home, choose a job, attend a better school. as a result you have lifted literally hundreds of millions of people from poverty. per capita income has more than doubled in the last decade. most chinese people are leading lives they could not have imagined just 20 years ago.

of course, these changes have also brought disruptions in settled patterns of life and work, and have imposed enormous strains on your environment. once every urban chinese was guaranteed employment in a state enterprise. now you must compete in a job market. once a chinese worker had only to meet the demands of a central planner in beijing. now the global economy means all must match the quality and creativity of the rest of the world. for those who lack the right training and skills and support, this new world can be daunting.