Dean Heathock, Chairs Klinman and Chakraborthy, incoming Chair Harris, my distinguished faculty colleagues, members of the 2003 graduating class, dear family members and friends.

It is with great pride that I participate in this Commencement Ceremony of the College of Chemistry.  I myself received a Ph.D. from this College of the University of California at Berkeley in 1960, some 43 years ago.  A degree from this College is a ticket to an exciting professional life – and I have been having fun ever since!  I thought it would be interesting for you if I showed what is waiting for you – gaze into the crystal ball to get a glimpse of your future.

With this degree you have become a member of a distinguished family.  The College of Chemistry was established in 1872 and the first Ph.D. was granted in 1885 to John Stillman who later founded the Chemistry Department at Stanford.  G. N. Lewis became the Dean of the College of Chemistry in 1912 and since then the College has educated generations of first-rate scientists.

A Division of Chemical Engineering started up in 1946 and became the Department of Chemical Engineering in 1957.  To give you an idea of the enormous impact this College has had in the United States, consider this:  Since 1915 the number of BS, MS and Ph.D graduates is 12,000.  We have record on over 8,000 graduates who occupy leading positions in industry or in academia.  2/3 are in industry and 1/3 in academia.  In addition, we also have 2,000 postdoctoral alumni in our records.

During your years as students we aim to provide you with a professional education of the highest quality.   This we do with a faculty that is rated No. 1 among all the Chemistry Departments in the country and No. 2 among the Chemical Engineering Departments in the U.S.  (after MIT).  You were already pre-selected by your accomplishments and talent when you entered the College of Chemistry, and now that you graduate you are among the best and brightest of chemists and chemical engineers this country can educate.  You are destined to lead this country as a professional in some capacity, working and managing in industry, enhancing the global presence of the US, and disseminating knowledge around the world as entrepreneurs participating in new ventures, as academics teaching new generations of students and carrying out research at the frontiers of science and technology.  You will be following the footsteps of thousands of graduates of this College who did just that.  Of the chemistry faculty in the top 10 universities in this country, 25% has a degree from Berkeley or were postdoctoral researchers in the Department.  It is commonly said that 10% of the researchers do 90% of the new science that is uncovered.  Berkeley has a large fraction of this 10%, both as students and as faculty.  Because Berkeley is a Research University, along with the top 10 universities in the United States, it receives a large fraction of federal funds in support of its research.  We also have many generous alumni whose recent support of the College includes a building, Tan Hall, and several endowed chairs for our faculty.  Our research equipment is world-class and the College was always a leader in developing prototype instruments in our own shops that open up new fields of chemistry research.  Several of our Nobel Prizes came from this type of research, Giauque in low temperature chemistry, Calvin for research in photosynthesis using carbon isotopes, and Lee for gas phase chemical reaction mechanisms using molecular beams.  A recently established center for interdisciplinary research and fabrication facility in nanosciences, called the Molecular Foundry, is spearheaded by Berkeley Chemistry Faculty.  Because of this track record, Berkeley graduates from the College of Chemistry are highly desirable on the job market.  Your chances of landing the job you want are much better than for other graduates from most other places, in good times or in bad times.  Statistics show that the success rate of Berkeley graduates in any position is considerably higher than other graduates from most other Universities.  Thus having a Berkeley degree is like money in the bank; you can draw from it symbolically or literally.

If you are to follow the career path of a typical College of Chemistry graduate you are likely to become a leader in industry or in academia

How will all this happen?  How do you turn from a fresh Berkeley graduate into a leader of industry or academia?  Your motivation and your Berkeley experience in the College of Chemistry prepare you for future leadership.  To have a glimpse of this process let’s trace out what happened to you in Berkeley while you were a student in the College of Chemistry.

First of all, why did you choose the profession of chemistry or chemical engineering?  Well, consciously or subconsciously you chose this profession to get where you want to go with your life.

So what really motivates you?   You want to be independent; put your stamp on the world; make your own decisions – or you want security, a profession where unemployment is near zero and has been that low since the great depression of the 1930’s.  Or you want to have impact – to shape the future of a company or of your own company, or shape the future of your country in a government position of influence.  You decided that chemistry or chemical engineering will get you there.

You certainly did not choose an easy path when you decided to get a chemistry or chemical engineering degree in Berkeley. You had to work very hard to survive scholastically.  Invariably you had bad days – midterms way below average, failed laboratory   experiments.  It may have been in Physical Chemistry, Advanced Organic Chemistry, or in Process Control Chemical Engineering.  What got you into Berkeley is talent, ambition and self confidence.  However, when you see so many of your fellow students do so much better than you do in a test your self-confidence is shaken.

And then you learn to overcome disappointment and try again.  At some point success comes, maybe because you grasped a difficult concept after enough repetitious reading or learned some math you did not understand before, or just organized your thoughts better, or your time better – and it worked!  The most important lesson is that we all fail and we fail often.  The key to success is to try again and again until you succeed.  Those who are afraid of failure stay in their comfort zone and do not even try.  I see that behavior from many talented people and it always saddens me.  Since you are sitting here you are a success and you learned how to be one.  Perseverance and the ability to learn new science on a broad front and to organize it into a tapestry we call knowledge are what brought you to these ceremonies, and we congratulate you on your success.

So how about leadership?  How should you use all this accumulated knowledge of chemistry and chemical engineering to become a leader in Industry or in Academia?  You start by creating your own job.

Things are not as they seem to be!  You have a job offer because your background matches well the job description.  The job is well defined and all you have to do is to perform in it according to expectations.  A perfect match.  Right?  Wrong!  If all you do is to fill the slot you are not the right person for the job.  You are from Berkeley Chemistry or Chemical Engineering so the company, or the university department, expects you to tell them what to do, how to chart their future course.  The job you want does not exist.  You have to create it for yourself.

To do that you have to first establish credibility – be very good at what you are doing.  This is where your Berkeley education comes really handy.  Remember that in four years you have changed from a high school student, who knew very little chemistry, into a chemist or chemical engineer who is eagerly thought after by companies for employment or the best graduate schools in the country.  Or, if you came as a graduate student, who was passively absorbing information from lectures as an undergraduate, you have become an independent researcher at the frontier of your field.  You have the talent, the knowledge and self-confidence, all you need is to gain experience. You can show by your creativity, quality of work and productivity that you really are one of the best and brightest who can lead by example and inspire others.  You are given the opportunity to lead change that is necessary for the survival of any organization.   Create new science, new technology, follow new ideas and test new concepts.

The reasons for the needs to lead change are clear.  During the last 25 years momentous changes have occurred in the way we do science and technology.  The technology is changing with ever increasing speed and there is convergence of several technologies from different fields to make a product.  The technology content of a toy, a doll or a videogame, that I buy for my grandchildren is mind boggling.  We have pills that slowly release their active constituents in our body, we have artificial heart valves and kneecaps made from polymers that are biocompatible.  The microprocessor is the product of complicated chemistry that is spatially controlled on the nanoscale.   No wonder that Intel and others in the field hire mostly chemical engineers and chemists!  We have multilayer glass fibers for communication, magnetic film for information storage, disease resistant crops of high yield that eliminate hunger in the world, and smart bombs that can reach their target with an accuracy of ± 10 cm.  Even a check-out counter in the supermarket with its optical reader of the bar code that registers the price in a computer that is connected to a light emitting diode display is superbly sophisticated.  And the frozen orange juice we just bought is in a paper container which is coated by five different polymer films that act as barriers for oxygen diffusion, bacterial contamination, reflect heat and prevent biodegradation by light.

As a result companies cannot match the speed of technology change with the needed research that moves slower, and therefore research is shifted to universities with equally profound changes of research style.  Research has become more oriented to solve problems that are interdisciplinary in nature.  We use a combination of instruments, we synthesize, characterize and do reaction studies all in the same group.  And we use computers to facilitate taking data or to use theory.  Whether you work in technology or research you will have to lead the constantly changing enterprise that should keep you young and vigorous forever.  Times have never been brighter for science -- and technology and chemistry is in the center of it all.

As G. N. Lewis wrote in the introduction to his book on chemical thermodynamics “Science has its cathedrals, built by the efforts of a few architects and many workers”.  Be an architect and put your stamp on the future and build a structure that benefits and enriches the lives of many.

It is possible that you may not succeed in some of your enterprises and that your well-conceived plans don’t work out.  There will be opportunities to start fresh.  In the United States, unlike in many other countries, there is no social stigma attached to failure.  There is a respect for those who try, and who are then readily recycled in new positions.  The experience that comes from the failed attempt provides a higher probability  of success for the second time.

There are also responsibilities that come with leadership.  You must have the vision to see beyond the daily challenges and focus on the final goal.  You must develop judgement on how best to proceed to reach your final goal, to place the right people in the right place, and not to compromise your integrity.  And you must be a mentor for the younger generation and for those in need.  There is no future without a new generation of talent.  You were mentored by your parents and teachers, including those here in Berkeley.  You can pay all that back when you become a mentor to help others.

Berkeley and the College of Chemistry is part of your life and part of your extended family.  I hope you made many friends with students from around the world, as Berkeley is one of the most international places of learning on this planet.   Located at the Pacific Rim, it is a meeting place for students and scientists from many countries and cultures.  These friendships last for a lifetime and you have become a member of the global village.  It is likely that whatever job you land it will take you all over the world, and you can speak the international language of Chemistry everywhere.  And you will meet the friends you made in Berkeley again and again since this campus populates the industries and universities around the world.

Please come back and let us know how and what you are doing.

A close relationship between you and the College can go a long way to help fulfill your dreams.

Good luck to you all, we are very proud of you.  Go for it.  Go Bears!