Greetings! Friends, family,faculty and staff. Welcome to Boston University on such a beautiful Fridaynight.
各位朋友，家人，教职员工，大家好！欢迎大家在这样一个美丽的星期五晚上来到波士顿大学。
My name is Yujing Cai, and I am agraduate from the Master of Mathematical Finance program. I come from Nanjing,China, one of the oldest cities in the world. Right now, my family is sittingsomewhere over there. They travelled, literally across half of the world to seetheir baby girl graduate and talk in a language they don’t understand.Therefore, I am tremendously honored to share my perspective of 6 years at theQuestrom School of Business.
One of the things I always enjoyeddoing while waiting for classes was looking at the different country flags inour atrium. Sometimes my friends and I even have silly competitions going on tosee who knew more flags, and it often amazed me how many different cultures andnationalities are represented in our community.
In a community, so diverse, mutualunderstanding doesn’t come easily, so I tried hard to be adaptive from the beginning.Soon, I found myself adjusting to the bigger food portion, and railways in themiddle of the road. I even tried fortunes cookies for the first time in mylife! Soon, I felt so content with this progress and I gradually built a cozy nestwith people of my culture, my age, and who thought and acted exactly like Idid. Why bother talking to anyone else? The coursework and job-hunting werealready so tiring, and meeting people outside my circle just seemed so scaryand unnecessary.
Then one day something changed. It wasa normal school day, and I was in the atrium looking at the flags as always. Isaw that the flag of China was surrounded nicely by the flags of Canada, Chile,Colombia, and DR Congo, and suddenly it struck me that I didn’t know anyone ofthose nationalities. What a waste it was for me to ignore the diversity ofexperience and opinions that the Questrom community had to offer! I wasdetermined to change, but it wasn’t easy.
I experienced the awkwardness ofhaving to explain a joke that no one understood, the nervousness of askingquestions about other cultures that seemed so obvious and silly, and the angerof defending my beliefs only to get suspicion and aloofness in return.Fortunately, these discomforts weresoon taken over by things like the amusementof teaching my classmates to pronounce my last name, Cai, using a part of theirtongue that they didn’t know existed, the excitement of promoting our Math Finance cultureawareness events in the Questrom Graduate Council, the satisfactionof knowingall the secret authentic restaurants around Boston and the astonishment ofseeing the world and myself in a way that I could never have imaged before.
During the past 2 years of graduateschool and 4 years of undergraduate before that, I have been so proud to seethat our school grew fromSchool of Management to Questrom School of Business,and that our community is growing stronger and more vibrant each year, and thiscouldn’thave happened without the effort of everyone here to share, to inspire, and toembrace each other.
Let’s now think about the future. 20 yearsfrom now, what kind of challenges are we going to face, as family members, asbusiness owners, as human beings? Nobody knows.To cope with that amount ofuncertainty, we will need a diverse set of skills and knowledge, andmost importantof all, an open mind to learn. That’s why we have beenso lucky to be part of the Questrom community that cultivated such freedom ofan open mind.
So, congratulations, class of 2017!Forwhen you walk outside that door today, you are already equipped with one ofthe most critical skills to succeed in the future, the ability to embracediversity. Thank you so much!
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