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This is the text of my 2019 commencement speech to graduates at the Brandeis University Rabb School of Continuing Studies. Video also available online.
Thank you very much. To Karen Muncaster, Vice President for the Rabb School, and to Anne Marando, Associate Vice President for the Rabb School, I thank you for inviting me to join you today. I also thank the faculty, administrators, and staff of the Rabb School for the opportunity to address you all.
By most predictions, I shouldn’t be here enjoying the privilege of speaking to you all today. As a child from a broken home of the 80s, a single parent household led by a mother who worked three jobs at a time just to provide the best support she could for her kids, I grew up amidst persistent financial uncertainty, a life dictated by a simple algorithm of the date of the next paycheck against the date of the next catastrophic failure to our health, to our automobile, to our familial livelihood. Our financial health played so tight to the line that I had to argue with my mother to take the next SAT, the next AP test, the community college calculus course to make up for it not being offered in my high school. I grew up in southern California…
