Honored graduates, honored guests, esteemed faculty and staff: Good day!

I’m Hazel Sive, Dean of the College of Science at Northeastern University and welcome! This is truly, a wonderful celebratory moment, the culmination of so much hard work with these well-deserved, important awards. Warmest congratulations to each of you Science Huskies graduating! Let’s have a round of applause for each graduate!

Your family, supporters and friends have been along for the journey of your degree! Please join me in thanking them! Congratulations Science Husky families!

Each of you graduating today has been accompanied by your teachers, mentors and advisors. Please join me in a vote of thanks to everyone responsible for your education!

Today, I want to encourage you. I want to encourage you that your future is sound, your opportunities many. When you came into this elite University, I told you that a degree in science is a stepping-stone to anywhere, and a wise investment in your future. That is true in any year, in any economic landscape. It is true today and will be true in years to come.

Your education in the College of Science has given you key knowledge in your area, it has given you problem-solving skills, confidence, a creative, can-do spirit, an ethical and respectful mindset, experience as a responsible worker and as a spokesperson for the Good Power of Science. You have these flexible skills in hand, and they will allow you to take advantage of many career opportunities, and to pivot as market employment shifts. Now and for always, you are among the most employable people on the planet. Well done!

At this time, I know you’re choosing your next steps – some of you have chosen, others of you are thinking hard. You have great freedom to decide where to put your talent and your time.

I want to encourage you that your future is in your control, and it will be exciting, exhilarating, interesting, scary, unsettling, empowering, and OKAY. You will find next steps in education, in a job, in a career.

Today, I’m not going to tell you to change the world, to follow your passion or to be resilient. Lots of other people who speak to you this weekend will tell you those things, and they are good words for you to consider.

Rather, I want to encourage you today to think in a different way: to think about finding a path forward through Scaling your Future. The word Scale has lots of meanings in English, and for our conversation today, scale means how wide an impact you want to have, how many people you would like to affect in your future, in your future career, whatever that may be.

Why is scale important? Because in my view, your work and career should not only be interesting and useful, but should also be comfortable, for your health and satisfaction; and figuring out a scale of work that fits who you are is a most useful thing to consider.

I’m going to get us thinking about Scaling your Future by telling you two stories, stories that have influenced me, and that reference my home country of South Africa.

The first story is called The Egg Man. When I was a little girl, far away in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Egg Man would come to our house. We thought he must be unhoused, and he always carried a large cloth bag and battered suitcase. He had a burlap sack turban and few teeth. He would open the suitcase and ask my mom if she wanted to buy some eggs. The smell indicated that the eggs were very far from fresh and my mom said no, but would he like some food?

Mom invited him in, but he preferred to sit on the back steps, and I would sit beside him. He did not talk much, but would show me his toothbrush, a stick with frayed edges and how he used this to clean his remaining teeth. I was not alarmed by the Egg Man because my mom was not. She saw his need and could help. That was all.

My mom would make him two very thick sandwiches, peanut butter and jam and put these and two oranges in a brown paper bag. She brought this out with a large tin cup of steaming hot tea, and he started in on a sandwich and the tea while I sat beside him.

When I thought about this story recently, I realized why it’s such a strong memory – it was a small scale of assistance my mom could give, but it made a large scale of immediate difference to one person. The story of the Egg Man remains for me a paradigm that every scale of engagement is important.

None of you will have heard of the Egg Man before. But my next story spans a huge scale and will likely have parts familiar to most of you, that are very personal to me. It’s an empowering, important story all about Epilepsy and the Good Power of Science.

Epilepsy is the most common neurological disorder, actually a set of disorders, that affect 1% of earth’s population or 80 million people. You may be affected or know someone who is. I know about this very well, because my dad had severe epilepsy and it was a large part of my childhood.

Now, epilepsy involves seizures that happen when nerve cells in your brain, called neurons, that normally send out carefully controlled signals, suddenly send an uncontrolled burst of signals to the body, that cause uncontrolled movements.

In ancient times epilepsy was attributed to punishment by the gods or possession by evil spirits, and until recently, affected people were greatly discriminated against. Even today, there is fear and challenge associated. Two things changed thinking around the disorder: one is the brilliant scientific research that has opened understanding of how our nervous systems work, and the second is identification of effective medicines that combat seizures.

My Dad’s seizures punctuated our family and my childhood. Dad was very kind, and smart, but his seizures were terrifying. Sometimes they happened in public, while we were enjoying burgers in a restaurant, and one time while our family was watching a movie in Johannesburg’s biggest theater.

The worst part was that no-one in my family would discuss what was wrong. There was no internet to ask in those days, but I found some information in the school library and told my mom that I thought Dad had epilepsy. It was the first time the illness had been openly named in our family.

Before I was born, my parents had journeyed to Boston, to the Massachusetts General Hospital here to get my Dad treatment. He was prescribed a mixture of pills that he took for decades. But the pills only partly fixed his seizures and made him a sleepy, dulled person to whom words came with difficulty.

When my Dad was in his seventies, he switched to a new doctor who changed his medicines. There was something new to prescribe. And just like that, amazingly, Dad’s seizures were controlled. And suddenly, he could think and talk easily. It was like a curtain had opened and the person who was really my Dad was revealed. He was funny and could express his opinions easily. He asked me about the research I did. It was absolutely wonderful, and a wonderful demonstration of the power of research.

The understanding that seizures are caused by bursts of overactive nerve cells took millions of hours of scientific research. Neuroscientists (and some of you are trained in this area) had to understand what neurons are, how they communicate and how they coordinate their activity in the brain.

Every dollar supporting the research has been worth it.

In parallel, medical doctors, and scientists including biologists, chemists and physicists began searching for anti-epileptic medicines. Anti-epileptics target the complex machinery by which neurons send and receive signals. One of the early medicines that my Dad took was called phenytoin – still marketed as Dilantin, which blocks a channel whereby sodium moves out of neurons. The challenge is to get medicines that dampen neuronal activity and suppress seizures, without the side effects like my dad’s. Over many decades new anti- epileptic medicines have been developed, none perfect, but some really effective. It’s a huge triumph of scientific research.

The scale of the impact involved in this story is complex. On one hand the scale was small but deeply important to my Dad and our family; on the other hand tens of millions of affected people have been helped, a huge scale.

Importantly, the story is unfinished, because for one third of people affected by epilepsy, 27 million people, existing medicines do not help at all. For these people with presently untreatable epilepsy, there are millions more hours of research needed. Today, we must have an unwavering commitment to perform crucial research that leads to crucial solutions for this and other disorders.

The research dollars are small, and the impacts are immense.

And now, what about you? What scale in your career might be comfortable for you? You don’t need to answer now.

In my own career, I’ve been committed to educating students, to performing important research and to helping run great universities. I’ve taught around 10,000 students total in my classes, and in my own research group, I’ve supervised hundreds of students. I’m most comfortable with the scale of one at a time. Even in a large class, I try to have 300 individual conversations with each student. That scale is comfortable for me – perhaps it goes back to the Egg Man, so I may contribute directly, individually, usefully.

With the notion of scale in mind, you can explore your interests, and be open to new pathways that will reveal themselves as you walk along your lives. I’d encourage you to draw on your excellent training in the Good Power of Science, folding in consideration of the scale at which you might want to engage. Any scale that is comfortable is fine, and a great start to making the contribution you want to, to give you a meaningful path forward.

I’ll conclude with words of encouragement about working at small scale from the great American poet Emily Dickinson:

If I can stop one heart from breaking I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,

Or help one fainting robin Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

I’m confident that you will find your unique, interesting, useful pathway, at a scale that is comfortable.

I’m confident that you will take your excellent Northeastern University training, and let it help you move forward.

I’m confident that you will be wonderful, empowered Science Huskies forever. Congratulations once again!