2018 UC Berkeley School of Information Commencement Speech

These are the remarks I delivered to the graduating masters in information management and systems class of 2018 at the UC Berkeley School of Information as the elected student commencement speaker.

Transcript:

Graduates, faculty, parents, relatives, and everyone who I paid to come: good afternoon and welcome.

Before I begin, I’d like to acknowledge Dean Anno Saxenian, the faculty, and staff who all work tirelessly to make the I School the uniquely incredible institution that it is.

Specifically, and most importantly, I’d like to thank some special people in my life:

• Everyone over at Stack Overflow,
• My former IMSA co-President and dear friend, Shannon Hamilton, who’s currently in North Carolina for her sister’s graduation and couldn’t be here today,
• My parents, Tom and Wendy, who you all must refer to as Mr. and Mrs. Yip, if you know what’s good for you,
• My brother, Ivan, and his wife, Kathy,
• My kids, Curry and Clay,
• And of course, my wife, Cindy, who has made countless sacrifices these last two years somehow balancing marriage, raising our first child, the birth of our second child, AND work at the hospital saving lives…

…but she didn’t have to take IOlab, so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that bad.

I love you, honey, and to you, my mom, and all the other mother’s out there, happy early Mother’s Day; you all have the hardest job in the world and we would be nothing without you. So let’s give them all a round of applause.

Now, as you all know, once a generation, the Dean selects one person based on merit, unprecedented good looks, and someone who is definitely not a downer, to be the MIMS commencement speaker. Oddly specific, I know, I didn’t make the rules, but humbly I say to you, Dean Anno, I accept.

Last year’s commencement speech was delivered by the great Paul Glenn who was both tall and deep. I am unfortunately neither of those, so naturally, the theme of my speech today will be about disappointment

And contrary to popular opinion, I actually do have something serious I wanted to share with you all.

Many of us are conditioned to think of disappointments as a bad thing, as proof of our failures or acknowledgment of our discontent.

Perhaps this feeling grew truer for us with every passing reading response about the technium, every runtime error, every fruitless all-nighter, every failed attempt to name our final projects, and most notably, every time we’ve been asked: “so, what is the I School?”

Yet, it was disappointment that initially drove us to apply to the I School:

• Disappointment with the status quo, with our skill sets, our jobs, our work environments,
• Disappointment with the world as it was but unsure of what it could be.

It was that all-too-familiar pang of being let down that led to a desire for something more, something better.

And gradually throughout these two years, something amazing started happening.

We started finding disappointment where we never did before:

• A company’s unlawful data collection practices,
• A poorly designed survey,
• Biases in machine learning algorithms,
• A poorly designed survey,
• Ineffective isotypes,
• Or worst of all, a poorly designed survey.

And as our disappointments grew, our ambitions grew as well.

From every disappointment arose a passion to do things differently, to do things the right way:

• From every tough assignment, a renewed vigor to improve,
• From every failed venture, a better pivot,
• From every job rejection… crying and even more crying.

This is what these last two years have taught me: that disappointment gives way to greater purpose.

We would not feel disappointment if we did not expect something better — a better algorithm, a more intuitive UX, a more comprehensive privacy policy, fewer pie charts.

We would not feel disappointment if we did not yearn to be something greater just as we did when we made that decision to apply, to come together and forge a new destiny for ourselves: to be a better data scientist, engineer, product manager, researcher, or designer.

Whether we care to admit it, it’s been our collective disappointments that have been the harbingers of hope, of direction, of growth, of community, and it is our perseverance through disappointments and failures that gives me great hope for our next endeavors.

As we embark on our journey outside the I School, our paths will invariably change, our dreams and desires not quite what we had imagined…

but that’s ok…

because it is our shared journey, and our ability to persevere in spite of disappointment, in creating good out of disappointment that will shape our legacy and the I School’s legacy moving forward.

And those are legacies worth fighting for: that as members of the School of Information, we are anywhere and everywhere technology needs us to be:

• To be visionaries of what can and cannot be, but also defenders of what should and shouldn’t be
• To know not just what heights and marvels to achieve but more importantly, how to achieve them.
• To truly be masters of information — using information, in all its ugliness, beauty, and glory…to create technologies and improve society not because it can make money, but because it is the right thing to do, the good thing to do, the beautiful and true thing to do.

My dream is that one day, the question: “What is the I School?” will no longer be one that needs asking, but instead, one that provokes an impassioned response where:

• When people need to prevent information from being misused, they turn to the I School.
• When industries are figuring out how to stop technology from being abused, they turn to the I School.
• Or when some mysterious new technology emerges and nobody knows how to organize it, use it, or how to best serve society and the greater good with it, what do they do? … They turn to Yiyi Chen.

As the I School readies itself for the next batch of eager, young…or old minds… I want to share with you what inspires me as we move on:

What inspires me is all of you.

From the veteran fighting a new battle against public misuse of technology, to the computer scientist from Kenya building a startup to help her country’s small-business owners,

From the introverted UX designers more concerned about the quality of work than the attention they deserve, to the extroverted programmer turned renegade tech journalist,

From the former Hollywood executive laboring endless nights to reinvent herself as a product designer, to the mother training data models while also training her child to sleep, and of course… to every single one of you who I’ve had the privilege of being with these last two years.

Together, we persevered.

Together, we formed a community that could tackle any problem, create every solution, and organize every supermarket.

And it is together, that there is no industry we cannot impact, no position in which we cannot thrive, and no disappointment we cannot use to create a better and brighter future.

Thank you, and congratulations to all of you!