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4 HACKLEY REVIEW COMMENCEMENT SUPPLEMENT 2017 Cum Laude The Cum Laude Address Carmen Maria Sanchez Pinilla ’07 Visit our online gallery to view and download more photos Carmen Sanchez ’07 offered the Cum Laude Society Address on June 5, 2017. Salutatorian of her Hackley graduating class, Carmen played Varsity Soccer and Lacrosse and was actively involved in campus community service. She went on to Princeton, where she majored in Politics and Psychology with a minor in East Asian Studies, and worked briefly at Goldman Sachs before discovering her passion in the advertising world. Since entering the advertising field in 2012, she has developed branding strategies and advertising campaigns at various agencies for Dianne Fahy ’92, Cum Laude Society Secretary, Carmen Sanchez ’07, Michael Wirtz. clients in a variety of industries, including Microsoft, FEMA, Colgate, SeaWorld, and Dress for Success. She believes that smart advertising has the power to inform and transform hearts and minds for the better, and is dedicated to doing good work for good causes. Outside of the office, she volunteers as a tutor at a correctional facility in lower Manhattan and is an avid soccer, basketball, and baseball fan. Carmen is a Colombian-born Peruvian who spent the majority of her childhood in Senegal before crossing the Atlantic to enter the seventh grade at Hackley School, and she is now proud to call NYC home. Thank you for inviting me to share this special evening with you. I believe that celebrating the success of others is often more fun, and more meaningful, than celebrating your own, and I am honored to be your fan tonight. Your unwavering dedication to a job well done has qualified you to enter into this club of high-achievers. For that, I hope you feel proud and excited for what lies ahead. Being hailed as the smartest kid in the room tends to produce the expectation that you’ll answer difficult questions correctly and confidently. When you reach milestones like these, your relatives, your friends, and even strangers will likely ask some form of this question—“What’s the plan?” If you presently do not have the answer to this notso-easy question, welcome to the not-so-exclusive club of very smart people who don’t have “the plan” figured out. Years of confidently delivering correct answers may make it difficult for you to believe what I now know to true: that not knowing answers can be surprisingly rewarding, as long as you never stop asking the right kinds of questions. I contend that there is no correct plan—and that the answers to questions like this one can and should change—many times—if you’re learning anything at all. I know a girl who graduated high school very confident she would become a lawyer: specifically, a criminal lawyer, specializing in white-collar crime (she already had a degree in binge-watching Law & Order). In college, she took politics and psychology classes—the pre-law recipe—and interned at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. For her college graduation party, her family bought her a cake in the shape of the Supreme Court, with all nine justices—all edible—sitting on top.
The new members of the Hackley Cum Laude Society chapter: 5 Front row, from left: Camille Butterfield, Madison Chen, Isabella Ampil, Olivia Giacomo Second row:, Connor Wilke, Grace Henrich, Sabrina Fleishaker, Luisa Stalman, Aurora Straus Third row:, Amanda Patterson, Riya Mital, Sarah Lucente, Owen Friesen Back row:, Gabriel Welch, Jamie Leonard, Uriel Garcia, Matthew Bonanno, Alexander Popov Shortly after eating that cake, she started her job as an analyst in the legal department of an investment bank, working with seasoned lawyers who offered valuable wisdom and advice. She was totally on track for law school. As she started to fill out her law school application, she asked herself a scarily simple question: “Carmen, is this what you want?” All of a sudden, the correct plan didn’t feel right. At first, I was terrified. Because not knowing is terrifying when you’ve convinced yourself that being certain is the best way to be. But then, something great happened. I dared to not know—to talk to friends, and friends of friends, and even strangers, to ask them how they chose their majors; how they chose their first jobs; why they switched jobs; why they liked—or didn’t like—their current jobs; how they defined success; and did they think they were succeeding? Their answers led me to three more questions which I believe are the three key questions that can best guide us in pursuing success in work and in life: 1. Can I do this well? 2. Do I do this well, but not so well that I don’t make mistakes and learn from them? 3. (and this one is key) Am I excited about doing this every day, even when the road gets rough? These questions nudged me toward a new career path in advertising—a path I did not plan for, but a path that feels right based on the criteria I have proposed. This is not to say I have it all figured out. What it does mean, though, is that I have found a job that keeps me asking the kinds of questions that will ensure I keep learning and growing. To me, that’s success—not the end of a carefully executed plan, but a constant state of positive change. Hackley’s approach to education hints at this definition of success. As I prepared to speak with you all this evening, I was brought back to 10th grade history with the great John Van Leer, who on very select occasions told our class to “BURN IN HELL.” One might think that this reprimand followed cases where we had failed to give him a correct answer; looking back now, I realize that he reserved the warning for when he found us not bothering to ask enough questions. It is by being constantly curious, constantly skeptical —even of our own convictions—that we can avoid the hell of being content vs. happy, busy vs. productive, fine vs. fulfilled. Each of you has been blessed with the immense potential that springs from the combination of an excellent education and a personal drive to succeed. I hope you capitalize on that by choosing college classes that make you smile as much as they push you outside of your comfort zone, by choosing friends that support you at the same time they challenge you, and by choosing a career that makes work a passion, not a chore. You, the luckiest and brightest among us, have a duty TO NOT BURN IN HELL, because if you do, there’s not much hope for everyone else. When in doubt, don’t rush to an answer. Instead, pause, and take the time to ask the hard, rewarding questions, because a brave question is always more inspiring than a correct answer. JVL and Hackley taught me that, and I urge you to carry that with you as you go on to rock this world. Thank you—and congratulations again.
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