Commencement Remarks to the Class of 2026: The Doors Worth Walking Through

Good morning and welcome to Hewitt faculty, families, friends, and most importantly, the Class of 2026. Congratulations! My name is Susannah Meyer, and a little over a decade ago I sat right where you're sitting, as a member of Hewitt's Class of 2015. I'm so honored to be back.

I'm a Hewitt lifer: thirteen years up and around the spiral staircase. I know how meaningful today is, and how strange it can feel to leave somewhere you've grown up. But I'm so excited for you. What's ahead is bigger than you can picture from this seat.

If you read my introduction in the program, you might think I showed up to my life with a plan. Stanford, big tech, leading engineering teams, building startups. From the outside, it looks like a straight line. It wasn't. I drew that line in hindsight. While I was living it, what I was really chasing was something I'd wanted for as long as I can remember: perfection. I loved learning, but more than that, I loved being good at learning. I was the kind of kid who started practicing for the fourth grade multiplication bowl in third grade, who spent recess on the roof with a stack of spelling bee flashcards, who made study guides so thorough that classmates offered to pay for them. My first failed startup.

I can still tell you, in detail, about the afternoon in the library when I missed my answer at the multiplication bowl. Seven times five. The heat in my face, hands shaking, heart beating too loudly to focus. That's the thing about perfectionism: you don't remember the wins. I won the middle school spelling bee — I even beat a couple of teachers — and I couldn't tell you a single word I spelled right. But I can tell you the word I lost on: beret. I have never worn one since, on principle.

The racing heart became the feeling I organized my life around avoiding. I was sure it was a warning, a sign I wasn't prepared. So I collected accomplishments in defense against it: editor of the paper, head of community service board, a drawer full of awards. I was collecting proof so I could believe I was enough.

The Class of 2026 chose this year's theme: Oh, the Places You'll Go. The truest part of the book, to me, is not the high fliers soaring to high heights, but a place in the middle: the Waiting Place. A place, Dr. Seuss writes, for people "just waiting" for a yes or a no, for "Another Chance." I've spent more of my life there than I'd like to admit. What I want to focus on today is how I learned to stop waiting, and go. So let me tell you about a few places I almost didn't go.

The first was a classroom, right here at Hewitt. After freshman year, Mr. Nauman — who taught us to type in lower school, beneath orange keyboard covers — encouraged me to take Principles of Programming, Hewitt's intro programming course. You might think I'd have said yes on the spot.

I didn't. I was terrified. Math had rules and right answers, the satisfying click of working something out. Programming was open-ended and uncertain - something I might be bad at. Before the class even started, I emailed Mr. Nauman to ask what I should study to prepare. For an intro class. I wanted a guarantee I'd be good at it before I ever tried. I was so nervous I talked my twin sister, Rebecca, into taking it with me.

That class changed the course of my life, and gave me direction. I found the spark of what drives me today: building systems to solve problems. I tinkered on my own, took courses online, won a national computing award, and before I left for Stanford to study computer science, I spent summers as an intern at JPMorgan and Bloomberg. All from a class I almost talked myself out of, because I didn't know if I'd be good enough.

You don't earn your place in the room and then walk in. You walk in, and that's how you find out the room was always yours. You don't find the way and then go. You find the way by going.

The next place I almost didn't go was back to Facebook, because the first time I was there, as an intern, I broke it. Like, actually broke it. One small mistake — a file in the wrong folder — took down posting, messaging, and commenting globally. At 20 I found myself on the phone at midnight with a screaming VP of engineering, telling him the only place left to test the fix was production. It was the exact catastrophe I'd spent my whole life trying to avoid: failing, in front of everyone. To my surprise, it opened doors. People trusted me more, not less, because they'd watched me own it. So remember: you'll have moments you're certain are the end of the world. More often than not, they're the start of something new. Lean into them, because the hardest moments will teach you more than the easy ones ever could.

So I went back to Facebook full-time, and got very good at succeeding within the system. The performance scale topped out at a rating called "Redefines Expectations," given to one percent of the company. I worked tirelessly for a year, and I got it. I remember opening the review packet, seeing the rating, and feeling my heart pound - not with relief, but with dread. Now I had to keep it up. I didn't celebrate or tell anyone. I just started preparing for the next cycle, logging every single thing I did each day, a paper trail to audit myself against so I could prove I hadn't fallen behind.

When the pandemic came, the office closed, and my calendar emptied. Somehow I was busier than ever. My Waiting Place didn't look like waiting. It looked like 18 hour work days in the dark, the tossing and turning of insomnia, and constant sickness. I told myself I was driven, but I was hiding - waiting. I'd done everything right, and I felt worse than ever.

Dr. Seuss has a response to the Waiting Place, and it’s what I most needed to hear: "NO! That's not for you!" So I stopped. I took medical leave to focus on my health, and I got a dog - a bernedoodle named Wagyu, whose joy is simply the day in front of him. 

For the first time I could remember, I wasn't keeping score. And I realized that happiness for me was never on the other side of any rating or review. So I left my first job out of college. Sometimes leaving the Waiting Place doesn't mean walking into a new room - it means walking out of one you've outgrown.

There's another kind of place I almost didn't go, and this one wasn't a physical location. It was a room I found myself in, job after job: a room where someone had already decided I hadn't earned my seat. Sometimes I laughed it off, like when I interviewed a candidate twice my age for a job at Facebook. He mistook me for his personal "interview greeter," before telling me he'd have performed better with a qualified interviewer. He did not get the job.

When I left big tech for the work I love most — small teams, hard problems, constant learning — I was hired to work for a leader I was thrilled about: thirty years of experience, brilliant on paper. Instead of teaching me, he told me I was being evaluated in my first thirty days, and that some of the team had wanted to hire, in his words, "a more experienced dude." When I asked questions in meetings, he'd tell me in colorful language to stay out of it. I came to learn that the loudest, most certain voice in a room is very often the most frightened one, and to never mistake confidence for competence. 

Over those months, I stopped asking for permission and started making my impact undeniable: finding points of failure and fixing them myself. Within six months, I was head of engineering: not because anyone handed me the title, but because I'd stopped waiting for it. 

For most of my career, no one in the room with a title looked like me; all of my managers have been men. But being underestimated is not the same as being unqualified. Some of you are going to walk into those rooms and be the leaders I didn't see on the way up. You won’t need anyone's permission.

Today, I'm the first engineer at Kepler, where we build technology that can prove it's right - that shows its work, instead of just asking you to trust it. Ironically, I spent my whole life demanding that same proof of myself before I'd believe I was enough.

But the proof never actually settled anything. The one signal I could have trusted, I spent years running from: the racing heart. It was never a warning. The racing heart is simply what it feels like to stand at the edge of something that matters. It isn't fear telling you to run; it's the sign that what's in front of you is worth it.

Once I understood that, I stopped waiting to feel ready. I learned that you can't control the how of your life. The path, the timing, the mistakes — and there will be mistakes — those belong to the how. What you can choose is your what and your why - what you move toward, and why it matters. So hold tight to those, loosen your grip on the rest, and make your mistakes proudly. They are not evidence you weren't ready. They are evidence you went.

Hewitt's motto is By Faith and Courage. It doesn't just tell you to go: it tells you how. Faith is trusting there's a way before you can see it. And courage isn't waiting for your heart to go quiet - it's feeling it race, and going anyway. If you leave here today with nothing else, leave with this. The doors worth walking through are often the ones that scare you. You will never feel fully ready, and you don't have to. You only have to stop waiting, and go.

So, Class of 2026: oh, the places you'll go. Not just cities and campuses across the world, but versions of yourselves you haven't met yet. You never know the way in. You didn't, when you walked into Hewitt, and look what it made of you. 

So wherever you go next, go before you feel ready. You don't find the way by waiting - the way appears as you walk it.