jerry yanThank you, Chancellor Tseng… Aloha! Distinguished guests, faculty, graduates, and the ohana of the graduating class of 2009. Congratulations to the graduating class! You’ve reached the end of a long and rigorous journey. You’ve completed your last final exam, wrapped up your last soil analysis, and finished your dissertation on Hawaiian poetry. And now, following this milestone occasion of your graduation, you get to dream like the rest of us — you know, the kind of dream where you show up to your English lit class for the first time of the semester and the professor asks everyone to get out their pencils for the final exam.
I’m very honored to be the last person you hear from before you walk across this stage to receive your hard-earned diplomas. I’d imagine that the university invited me to speak here today not only because I’m a part-time Hawaii resident, but because they took pity on me. You see, the idea for Yahoo! was born when I was procrastinating my PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford in 1994… and the company took off before I had a chance to finish my degree. So I never actually earned my Ph.D. And that I will receive Honorary Doctorate today — without even setting foot in a lab — is quite amazing. Mahalo!
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