This May I will be delivering the undergraduate commencement speech for Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering at the University of Florida, my undergraduate alma mater of nearly 20 years ago. The commencement will be live streamed starting at 2 PM on Friday May 5.
Today, the college has more than 10,000 enrolled students, curriculum that spans 10 departments, 15 degree programs and more than 20 centers and institutes.
To say that this is an incredible honor to me is an understatement; I was floored by the invitation and, recognizing the responsibility that comes with such an invitation, have put significant thought into my remarks to the graduates, family and faculty that will be in attendance. I focus on two primary themes: the importance of meaningful relationships, and the opportunity before you to change the possible, both on and off this planet.
I am posting my remarks here for posterity’s sake and to allow them to be shared or commented on after the event itself. Congrats to the new graduates, and Go Gators!!
Investing in Relationships to Change the Possible, May 5, 2023
· Thank you and congratulations to the graduates, parents, friends, faculty and administration in the room. Today is a big day and you should all be very proud.
· I am profoundly honored and humbled to be here with you today to celebrate your accomplishments on this momentous occasion and to share a few thoughts as you embark on the next phase of your lives. I’m Jenn Gustetic and I graduated from this college in 2005 with my aerospace engineering degree and have since then had a career that has taken me from homeland security, to the White House, to my current role as a senior executive at NASA—the best place to work in the Federal Government for the 11th year running. My UF education and overall experience played a foundational role in getting me here.
· Today I want to talk to you about the importance of meaningful relationships, and the opportunity before you to change the possible, both on and off this planet.
· First, I want to talk about relationships. Relationships make you stronger, but building strong relationships is incredibly hard as they require investing your time, good listening skills, empathy, and trust. Good relationships challenge you, teach you, provide you opportunities to grow, and provide anchors and meaning to life.
· When preparing for my remarks today, I sought advice from a number of people-Unfortunately, my sister and brother in law are FSU grads and my NASA communications lead is an Alabama grad, so I couldn’t--as a self-respecting Gator grad--consider any of their feedback. But in all seriousness, when preparing for my remarks I did seek counsel from relationships that are very important to me—including people with different backgrounds than me and some of your contemporaries. For the last 7 years I have mentored undergraduate women interested in the space industry. These relationships are precious to me. My mentees teach me about how the current environment is changing for engineers compared to 2005 when I graduated, but our conversations also reveal to me what challenges are consistently similar. For example, completing school is always exciting but also predictably stressful. It’s so important for you all to be confident in the skills you do bring to the workforce at this point in your career, but the uncertainty is admittedly overwhelming. Though it seems like you need to have all the answers right now, you don’t. You’ll never have all the answers. I certainly don’t at 40 and I don’t expect to at 60 or 80. As I’ve aged, I’ve come to see this as liberating as opposed to paralyzing. I don’t need to have all the answers because life surprises us despite our best efforts for control. I don’t need to have all the answers because and I can work in teams to increase collective intelligence, be resilient and adapt. But again, that liberation requires relationships.
· In the last few years in particular, you have all experienced a profound world event during your college experience, as did I. As a sophomore, I vividly remember leaving the Zeta Tau Alpha house after eating breakfast to drive to volunteer at a local middle school on the morning of September 11, 2001. As history has proven, 911 reshaped our world and as the contours of what had happened took shape, it caused me to take an interest in public policy. It set me on a path of civic involvement by working for my government, but also volunteering with nonprofits and prioritizing being a good neighbor, family member and friend. It reinforced to me, early in my college experience, that cross-sector relationships can either make things better, or worse, and I wanted to be a part of making things better.
· You all lived the majority of your college years through another event that reshaped our world—COVID19--and are entering a world and workforce that is also going through a profound transformation. Remote interactions have made cultivating relationships hard. Zoom calls can feel like they are filled with empty “how are you?s” that make you eager for the moment you can just end the awkward, disconnected interaction. Building meaningful relationships through both remote and in-person interactions takes relationship hygiene: investing your time, good listening skills, empathy, and trust.
· I know you each want to have you mark on this world, your community, or your family in your own way. To challenge the status quo, we need authentic relationships. We must truly see each other and trust the contributions we each have to offer.
· Relationships that bring the full of human ingenuity and passion to the table have been absolutely critical to changing the possible in the aerospace industry over the last couple decades. Today’s aerospace is not yesterday’s aerospace. The space industry I graduated to in 2005, let alone the space industry of the last century, is profoundly different than what you are graduating into.
· When the Apollo Program began in 1961, hundreds of companies contributed but NASA issued the bulk of its contracts to a few large “name brand” aerospace companies. There were only a few key players. As remarkable an accomplishment as it was, the cost for a brief visit to the Moon was high and diversity was low.
· Now is the Artemis generation, the generation that will send the first woman and the first person of color to the surface of Moon, the generation that is preparing for much longer duration missions to new lunar destinations that lead us to Mars and beyond. This public-private pursuit engages contributors with a rich diversity of thought and backgrounds, including academic and commercial partners, large and small, working for themselves and NASA, and more women and people of color than ever before. We are tapping into all of human ingenuity for discovery and exploration, and we are stronger for it.
· The current trend in the space economy is one of growth and opportunity, as the government-directed human space activity dominated by a privileged few is replaced by a more inclusive model in which public initiatives co-exist and work in partnership with private aims. The expansion of the space economy presents opportunity to everyone in this room. The global space industry could surge to over $1 trillion and 1.5 million jobs by 2040.
· But what’s at the root of all of this opportunity creation? Relationships.
· As fellow engineers, you are likely familiar with the work of SpaceX, Northrop Grumman and Boeing to deliver cargo and crew to the international space station through commercial services. Over more than a decade NASA has been working in partnership with these private companies to develop commercial capabilities learning from government experience in the decades prior. Today we routinely launch cargo and crew to the ISS with these capabilities, but it took good relationships between NASA and our commercial partners to achieve those outcomes, and to address challenges encountered along the way. For example, when SpaceX was faced with specific challenges associated with Dragon’s re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, they worked with inventors at NASA’s Ames Research Center to learn from NASA’s experience with lightweight heat shields and collaboratively adapted it to for their entry, decent and landing system. Over many decades, NASA had developed and shared a lot of tacit knowledge about re-entry systems, passing it down from engineer to engineer to make them work. And many of those engineers would actually cross back and forth to different organizations to help to spread that knowledge. Organizations, as well as individuals, also gain from meaningful relationships. And the space industry is better for it.
· You can also bet that the development of not only these heat shield technologies, but nearly every engineering system also comes with a lot of failures. But failures are just opportunities to try again with more knowledge and skills than we had before. And those failures, whether we took a risk or not, are investments that make us better, more knowledgeable people, researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs. We all fail, I certainly have. For example, getting into my first job at NASA was not straightforward. I certainly felt like a failure when I wasn’t selected for one of the first jobs I interviewed for. But in the end, it was cultivating authentic relationships that actually helped me get my first job at NASA. A friend and colleague with whom I’d built trust and mutual respect over a couple years on an interagency working group provided me his advice and actively championed me once he discovered I had an interest in NASA. His guidance helped me find a role that was actually a better fit. Fast forward 11 years and I’m leading early stage innovation at NASA. If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.
· I want to offer one additional thought about learning as you venture into this next chapter. UF has given you the tools and continued your education in how to think… how to solve bounded problems. I challenge you to now think about how to frame the problems themselves. This is one of the differences between scientists and engineers. Scientists generally think about how we frame the problem and create hypotheses; engineers generally think about how to optimize the best solution from known problems. I challenge you to question your assumptions about the problem itself. Engineers are not traditionally trained to challenge the assumptions behind the problem statement itself, so it’s hard, but it will make you a more well-rounded thinker.
· Engineering is a worthy pursuit; your education was worth the time, effort, and expenditure required to obtain your degree and build foundational and transferable skills. It’s taught you how to think, and even if you don’t practice engineering—like me—doors will open for you as you learn and build meaningful relationships.
· That being said, I know many of you have overcome visible or invisible challenges and barriers to get here and some of those barriers aren’t always recognized by those around you. The fact that you have overcome so much to be here today is huge. Celebrate how far you’ve come and the effort you have put towards yourself. These experiences and the lessons you have learned will serve you well as you find yourself facing new and sometimes even old visible and invisible barriers in this next phase of your career—whether it’s to graduate school, the workforce, or somewhere else based on your life circumstances.
· Life is about the process, not just the destination. So enjoy and nurture the relationships you build—in your personal and professional life. I know many of you have begun doing that with networking and building lifelong personal and professional relationships right her on campus. Nothing will be more powerful for you in changing the possible, challenging assumptions and solving complex problems than the relationships you build and the groups you change the world with.
· Relationships support us... Relationships teach us… Relationships challenge us… Relationships help us achieve more.
· I want to end today with a parting challenge for the Artemis generation: Your generation will explore space not only as astronauts but as passengers, tourists, and pioneers. During that pursuit I challenge you to not only to take space, but to make space. There is room for many innovative ideas, new technologies, and voices, and the pursuit of excellence can change the world. How are you going to get involved and who are you bringing with you? NASA and your fellow global citizens are relying on people like each of you to keep moving us forward to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
· Thank you, go gators, and congratulations.