Stanford International Relations Commencement Speech: Sinclair Cook ‘18
The following is a speech written by Sinclair Cook, International Relations ’18, who was selected as a student speaker at the International Relations (IR) diploma ceremony on June 17, 2018, at Stanford University.
One of the main reasons I chose to attend Stanford was the university’s substantial offering of interdisciplinary majors. From Symbolic Systems to Earth Systems to Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity to Management, Science & Engineering, many of these majors appealed to me as an incoming freshman because they prided themselves on examining questions from a variety of perspectives, unfettered by a single academic point of view. One thing I came to realize as I explored these programs, though, is that telling someone what major I was considering was often met with the same two-word response: “What’s that?”
International Relations (IR) is one of the few interdisciplinary majors on this campus that does not tend to elicit such a reaction. People, including me, often have a solid preconception of what the discipline “International Relations” entails. Freshman year, my assumptions were the following:
· All IR classes would be about the United Nations (UN).
· All IR students were obsessed with Model UN.
· All IR majors would end up working for the UN.
Of course, after taking a few IR classes, I quickly learned my preconceptions could not have been further from the truth. In addition to the fact that not all of us will end up working for the UN — a few will become consultants — another thing became abundantly clear: there is very little that can be said about all IR majors. It’s even possible that due to the breadth of options in the IR program, other than PoliSci 101 and Econ 1, some of you here today took an entirely different set of courses from me during your time at Stanford. While I devoted myself to learning Chinese and Japanese, studying abroad in Kyoto, and focusing on development in East and South Asia, I have friends in IR who learned Arabic, studied abroad in Cape Town, and spent their time researching nuclear proliferation and cybersecurity.
Despite the surprising diversity of interests among us, we all prepare to graduate from Stanford today with identical bachelor’s degrees conferred by the same interdisciplinary program: International Relations. So, other than the fact that we are all gathered here to celebrate our final minutes at Stanford, took Polisci 101, and are likely thrilled by the euphoric rush of getting course petitions approved by Professor Tomz, what else unites us?
I believe we IR majors share a hunger to understand and address complex problems that extend far beyond our individual communities — problems so big that we cannot solve them alone. More importantly, though, we have learned to recognize that addressing such problems requires a special sort of patience.
Gaining such patience is no easy task, and I’m sure each of us has studied incidents where international actors lacked the patience to understand the nuances of a problem. For example, earlier this quarter, in my seminar Diplomacy on the Ground with Professor Robert Rakove, one of my classmates criticized Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam during the Vietnam war, arguing that Lodge displayed little effort to understand Vietnamese history, society, and politics.
Numerous experiences throughout my time as an IR major have taught me the value of patience in the type of problem-solving we do. Through being patient in my Japanese and Chinese classes over multiple years of study, I grew from sounding like a 2-year old to being able to discuss political issues. Through the hours I spent wandering through the stacks of Green Library and flipping through 150-year-old manuscripts in the Hoover Archives preparing for research papers, I learned that the information I need is nearly always waiting to be found if I look hard enough.
But the experience that taught me most about patience during my IR career was spending this past summer as a research intern at a policy think tank in Seoul, South Korea. After studying in both China and Japan, I had convinced myself that despite not knowing Korean or taking any classes specifically focusing on Korea, my previous experiences living abroad would be adequate preparation for the summer ahead.
However, there were a few challenges I did not anticipate. During my first few weeks in Seoul, in addition to contending with the tough cultural learning curve of adapting to a Korean workplace, I was refused service at multiple restaurants and was accosted by an older man while waiting for a bus. Having an extremely limited Korean vocabulary, I could only make out one word, which the man kept repeating: oegug-in — foreigner. All along, I was receiving alarming emails from the State Department reminding me to remember the locations of nearby bomb shelters whenever North Korea did something threatening — which, if you’ll remember this past summer, happened quite often.
During my summer in Seoul, I had to contend with the fact that I was in a country where I could not communicate, a country where some people did not welcome my presence, a country that was facing the closest thing to an international incident I had ever experienced. The most effective thing I could do to stop feeling powerless, I realized, was to study Korean every night and to learn everything I could about Korea, despite my limited time remaining in the country. As an American intern from Stanford, I had all sorts of privileges. I had the privilege to assume others would accommodate my Korean inability, but I was also privileged with the time and means to engage more deeply with Korea. I chose to take advantage of the latter.
By the end of my summer, I spoke just enough Korean to communicate, and I felt I had obtained a deeper understanding of the country. I believe this impulse to study the language and history of the country I was in and address my ignorance came from my skills learned as an IR major. While the classes we all took may have differed greatly, the variety within our coursework forced us repeatedly to contend with unfamiliar histories, adapt to foreign cultures, and speak new languages. At the start of each quarter, we took classes on subjects of which we were ignorant and emerged at the end not experts, but with our ignorance kept in check.
While we have learned so much during our time at Stanford, more likely than not, the knowledge we have accumulated here will not be nearly enough to solve the types of problems we hope to tackle. Luckily, we have the rest of our lives to hone the patience to start learning again and again from square one. While total expertise takes time to build, eliminating total ignorance, as we’ve learned better than anyone, takes at most ten weeks.
Thank you all for inspiring me to answer my own questions, and congratulations, Class of 2018!
View more graduation highlights via Instagram. For more information about Stanford University’s 127th Commencement, click here.
