Daily Homeroom: Congratulations Class of 2020!

Hi everyone! Welcome to Khan Academy's daily homeroom live stream. For those of you all who do not know what this is, this is something that we thought of when we started seeing mass school closures. We know that people are going to be at home, socially distanced, and obviously Khan Academy, we saw ourselves as, you know, it’s our duty to step up in this time of closures. A lot of our resources are the way that many of y'all might be able to keep learning or have your children or your students keep learning.

But we've also been trying to do other supports. We thought it'd be just fun to have a synchronous way to have interesting conversations between ourselves, to bring on interesting guests from all over the world on all sorts of topics. I am doing an interesting experiment today that we should all have a growth mindset about things. I have my phone leaned against my computer right over here so that I can simultaneously do this on Instagram.

So normally we do—we have some technology that Felipe has found that allows us to do this on Facebook and YouTube simultaneously, but now we have added Instagram. So I'm saying hi to all of the folks on Instagram as well! So today's topic is going to be really interesting. It's going to be graduation and life advice, and you can almost view this as like an interactive graduation address, which is frankly better than, you know, just me sitting at a podium and giving you something that you might not remember for the next 20 minutes.

But before we break into the Q&A, but start thinking of those life advice questions that you would like. We have team members; I'm going to be looking at the Instagram, and then our team members are going to be helping me out with YouTube and Facebook. I do want to give a special thanks to several corporations that have stepped up over the last several weeks, especially with the COVID crisis. Khan Academy is a not-for-profit; we can only exist because of philanthropic donations from folks like yourself and from corporations and foundations, like Bank of America, Google.org, and AT&T.

Fastlane of Artists have stepped up just in the last few months when they realized that our costs were going even higher because our usage, our server costs—our usage is about two and a half to three times of what it typically is. We're trying to accelerate all sorts of programs forward, so thank you to all of them. And once again, if you're in a position to donate, every dollar matters. It helps us; it shows a show of confidence. It helps us reach that many more folks who otherwise would not be able to have access to some form of a free, world-class education or teachers who would not have access to tools like this.

So with that, I would love to take any questions that you have. I already see a couple of questions. Oh actually, it looks like my team is also scanning Instagram, so this is super helpful for me. From Instagram, @srg_19 asks, "What is your favorite memory from high school?" You're taking me back! Alright, let me see. I don't know if it's my favorite memory, but I could probably think of some memories.

I remember there was a day I was in student council, and we were, you know, in student council in high school, you paint those pep rally-type banners and stuff. Someone had forgotten to close the yellow paint, and I kind of wanted to make a point that like when you don’t close the yellow paint, the yellow paint all dries up. So I was like, "Look, this is all dry," and I did this, and I was like "Look how dry it is!" and then it wasn’t dry! So the yellow paint, that was a good memory; it helped me to take myself a little less seriously. The universe was conspiring to keep me from being too self-righteous.

Let’s see, other great memories from high school—I mean, you know, there’s great memories. I remember we went on a camping trip my senior year, and that was great! We kind of got lost, so it’s always those memories where it’s a little bit of an adventure that’s nice. There are some things I cringe at; some of you all may or may not know that I did give the graduation address at my high school graduation.

I was a little bit angsty. By my senior year, I was not in a band, but my sophomore year, I was a lead singer in a heavy metal band, and so I had that little angst in me. At graduation, I felt the need, and I cringe a little bit about it now, but I guess it is a memory to kind of make a statement. So the morning of graduation, a friend and myself, we actually snuck into the auditorium where the graduation was going to happen, and we put a guitar under the diploma table.

And so when I went up to give a speech, I said, "I think it would be better if I sang this." So I took the guitar out from underneath the diploma table. I still remember the look on my principal's face; it was just like horror—frankly half the crowd! But I sang! I cringe on it now; I wouldn't do that today, and I wouldn't recommend it today, but it was novel.

So I’ll think I’ll try to think of more and more memories as we go through this session, but that’s a good question! So from Instagram, Marvellous asks, "How old were you when you realized that helping others to learn was a passion of yours?" A great question, Marvellous! If you see me looking back and forth, I'm looking at my computer screen and I'm looking at the Instagram screen so that I'm, you know, making eye contact with everyone.

I realized I really enjoyed tutoring folks; it was actually around that same time in high school. And actually, you know, that even jogged some other really great memories, but it might not surprise folks that I was the captain or the president of the math club in high school—it was called Mu Alpha Theta. I don’t know if that’s a thing where you go to high school, but as part of it, we wanted to do service, and we figured a valuable service would be to tutor our peers.

So we used to do this after-school tutoring thing for, you know, our peers, and a lot of kids actually showed up for it, and it was then that I realized that if you give students, if you give anyone one-on-one attention, give them a chance to fill in their gaps, that they’re really capable of learning almost anything. And I saw before my eyes a lot of my friends, or even people I didn’t know who were C students, who thought they weren’t good at math. When they just got a little bit of attention, they were able to catch up and do whatever they needed to do.

So that was the first time I realized I really enjoyed it. Then when I was in college, I did a little bit of that as well. There was a local school that had budget cuts, and so they needed some more, I guess you could say, volunteer teachers or teacher assistants. Myself and my roommate, we went and volunteered; this was in Brookline, Massachusetts, and really enjoyed it.

I realized that I had no classroom management skills; a lot of you teachers can appreciate how important that is. I didn’t at the time, and there were moments where I had some fifth-graders standing on top of a table and I had to spend a little bit more time than I’d like telling them to get off. But you know, I realized that that was intriguing to me.

I think it was after my junior year I got a fellowship to work on software. I had applied to work on educational software for students with attention deficit disorder; it was called an Elerant fellowship at my undergrad, and that was the first time I started writing some software and seeing if this could be of help to folks.

Then you know, life took over, pragmatism took over, and graduating from college, I had a reasonable amount of debt, and I said I need to make some money, maybe help out the family a little bit. So I went into tech, which I also enjoy; my background, my undergraduate degrees were in math and computer science.

And many of y'all know the story; I then went to business school, I became a hedge fund analyst. But then while that was happening, my cousins needed help, so it kind of kindled that same joy for the subject matter and for being able to help folks, especially family members. So that’s what got me on the track, and, you know, the more I did it, the more that I saw gains in my cousins and other folks that I knew.

Frankly, the more that I got letters from random people on the internet saying that it was helping them, the more I think, you know, I don’t think there’s anything special about me. I think anyone would find that incredibly rewarding, and it was a little bit addictive! You really start to realize how much more joyful that is when you get a letter from someone in Indonesia saying that you helped them, you know, get back to going to college versus, you know, you get a slightly larger bonus at your hedge fund job.

You realize that maybe this is what you could do for a living. It was just, I guess you could say, signs that were showing up in my life throughout, and at some point you just have to pay attention to those signs; they keep trying to make themselves a little bit more visible.

So let’s see, from Instagram—lots of questions from Instagram; we should do this more regularly. Andy Chavez, oh it disappeared, said, "How did you learn from failure?" So I think the first step is to just recognize that the failure is not a judgment on you. I think so many times we confuse ourselves with our thoughts, with our labels that society is putting on and things like grades or "you failed" or "you didn’t," that’s kind of a label or some extrinsic thing that happens to you.

And to realize it’s not yourself, and to realize that those are the moments of growth—the very fact that you're failing is a good sign. It’s not—it’s a sign that you’re pushing yourself out of your comfort zone; you’re not just kind of resting on your laurels. If you reflect on that failure—and I recently met a teacher who likes to use the phrase "fail forward." So if you reflect on that failure and you say, "Okay, what can I learn from it so that maybe next time I try, I have a little bit lower chance of at least failing in that way?" then I’m making progress.

That’s how you grow as a human being, and you know, this mystery that we all live in called life—it is really a mystery. You know, all I can think of the best thing to do is just keep on going, keep on growing, keep on failing, and keep on learning from that.

And when you do that—and actually when you learn, when you see that you can get onto the other side of failure, even once— you know, I think it was we had Alberto Carvalho, who’s the superintendent of Miami-Dade, he said something about that. The first time that you do something a little bit scary, and even if you fail a little bit, but then you power through it and you realize that you can get to the other side of it, that’s when you realize that’s a muscle.

And then next time when you see an obstacle, and you see the failure, you’re like, "Well, it’s just going to be like last time." Sure, I might try a little bit; I might fail a little bit, but I just have to keep chipping away at that thing, and before I know it, I’m going to be able to get through it. So that’s the best advice, and actually there’s a ton of research on that—that those who are willing to embrace failure, those who are willing to step out of their comfort zone and learn from it, who define themselves not by the outcome, by success or failure, but who define themselves by, "Hey, I’m someone who’s always willing to try; I’m always someone who’s always willing to do the hard thing," those are the people who do really well in life, without fail—not to overuse the word.

So let’s see. From Instagram, It’s Me Shreyash asks, "How was your graduation day?" So actually, you know, I’ve had several graduation days—high school, and then undergrad, and then from business school. I would say, you know, I’ve already described my high school graduation a little bit. I have to say, graduation days have been unusually eventful for me.

When I was in college, I was my senior class president at MIT, and so I was on the commencement committee. At the time, the President of the United States was Bill Clinton. And so you can imagine when we used to have our meetings for the commencement committee—this was in November of my senior year, this was in 1997—we had these meetings like, "Who should we invite for commencement?"

The previous year, Al Gore had spoken, and so, you know, I was just like, "Why don’t we invite the President of the United States?" Just thinking, "Why not? See if the president will show up." And you know, the vice president showed up the year before, and I remember President Vest, who was the president of MIT at the time said, "Sal, first of all, there’s no way the president's going to show up. Second of all, it’s a bit of a pain with the security and all the logistics."

And even though the vice president was pretty tough, the president would be even harder. So anyway, I’m like, "Alright, you know." So we actually did invite, and that year’s Time Man of the Year was someone by the name of David Ho, who helped develop some of the antivirals that helped kind of cure AIDS. So it was a big deal; Time Man of the Year was our commencement speaker!

I was excited about that, and so you fast forward to about, I think it was like three days before commencement, and I get an email from President Vest saying, "Sal, are you okay with this?" And it was a forward from the White House, and it said, "President Clinton would like to give a major speech or whatever on the digital divide at MIT's commencement, and he would like—he’s inviting himself to be the commencement speaker."

And so I just responded back, "I was like, yeah, I'm cool with this!" He ended up being our commencement speaker with, like, a few days' notice! Then it was literally, oh no, it was more than that—it was, it was now that I remember, that email was actually probably a few—about a month before commencement, because obviously all the logistics.

And then the night before commencement was actually when I got the other email from President Vest saying, "Are you okay with this?" And it said that President Clinton would have some time and might be coming an hour early and would like to meet with a few student leaders. And so this was just one of these random things where it was like me and six other student leaders, we got to spend, you know, an hour with the President of the United States!

And, you know, regardless of your political affiliation, regardless of anything, it’s a pretty heady experience if you’re 21 years old, it’s your graduation day, and the President of the United States wants to hang out with you before graduation for an hour. And it really was kind of like hanging out; it was really weird—in a good way!

You know, because you normally think these people are, you know, some kind of—you know, you don’t realize they’re people too. So it was a fascinating conversation. And then, you know, right when we were all getting out of the door ready to go line up for commencement, President Clinton says, "You know, I think I have a little bit of time after my speech. I would like to give a couple of student leaders their diplomas."

And so he kind of—he gave my little, you know, two-minute speech as class president; then President Clinton gave his digital device speech, and then David Ho gave his. So we had two commencement speakers! And then President Clinton gave me and three other people our diplomas, and then he got on his helicopter and left!

So that was— I was like, "Wow, how did that happen?" You know, it was definitely a powerful experience for me, and you know, once again, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, regardless of anything, when you’re young and you realize that, you know, there are these people who have done—who are very influential in the world, that they are still human beings and that you can connect with them and talk to them; it did open my aperture.

It did make me think, "Okay, wow, you know, maybe this world—maybe this is a world in which I too might have something to contribute." So you can’t discount something like that! So that was a very powerful experience.

So let’s see, from Instagram, Que Ando asks, "How did you feel right after graduating from college?" So this is an interesting question. I actually, you know, there’s a little bit of excitement that you’re graduating from college; that, you know, all those problem sets and deadlines and all of those things, that kind of college academic rat race is a little bit over. But I have to, you know, in hindsight, I realized it was sad because so much of your identity, your friendships, they’re all in college.

And I was excited, you know, I was going to move out to California for a job; my first job was going to be a product manager at Oracle, and I was excited about that. But you know, I didn’t know anyone out in Northern California. So, you know, when I came out here, I have to admit it was tough.

I tell a lot of folks that first year out of college, going to a place where I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t have any really, you know, good friends; you know, I spent a lot of nights just hanging out at the Barnes and Noble, you know, reading books for free—that was kind of my social life. It wasn’t the best year for me; it was a tough year.

And slowly—and you know what happened was I had a lot of friends who we were with, and I finished my degree a little bit early, so I came out a year earlier. And so when more of my friends came out the next year, then I started to get a little bit better. But that first year out of college, I think it can be a little bit jarring because I was fortunate; I had a good job, I had a good boss, I had good coworkers. But it’s still not the same thing as what you get when you’re, you know, in the dorm room, you know, pontificating things, doing silly things that you do in college.

Still, when I get together with my college friends, we reminisce about a lot of the silliness that happened in college. So yeah, it was tough, but then slowly but surely, it got better as more friends came and I met new people, and it is all about keeping an open mind to things—new people and not just, you know, grieving for what you might have lost.

And then, you know, but I was eager to go back to business school because business school had a little bit of that element as well, you know, just a sense of community, etc., etc. And then, you know, after business school by that point I had a fiancé so I was feeling less lonely, and life felt pretty good. So then I—and then she married me!

From Instagram, Aiden Jaffarova says, "What do you wish you would have known when you graduated from high school?" I think, you know, I was a reasonably—I’m fundamentally an introverted person. Like if I go to a big dinner party, I’ll enjoy it, but then I like to come home and just decompress and have quiet time for myself; that’s when I re-energize.

And even when I went to college—and actually in high school as well—I always did have the mindset that hey, you know, I want to step out of my comfort zone. I want to try new things; I want to try to meet new people and be open to things. But I think especially in high school, and to a lesser degree in college, but especially in high school, it’s very easy to get into your head and say, "Oh well, you know, they probably wouldn’t really be interested in hanging out," or, "You know, they’re in that crowd; I’m in this crowd."

You know, we’re friendly, but we wouldn’t really get a lot from each other, and I think that’s a mistake. I think you actually have the chance to get the most from the folks in your high school and in your college that are different from you. What I now realize in hindsight— I've met many of these people now that we’re, you know, adults and everyone has those same insecurities.

I don’t care who it is; it could be the, you know, the captain of the football team or the homecoming king or queen—everyone oftentimes, some of them will have more of those insecurities because they’re afraid, you know, their identity is so defined by some of these things—these external things.

I think if you’re an open person who’s genuinely interested in other people, you can form deeper connections with anyone, and they will appreciate it. And even at first cut, they might be leaving a little bit weirded out. I mean, you know, you don’t do things that are truly scary or anything, but if you’re like, "Hey, do you need anything? Hey, I want to help you!"

"Hey, tell me about your family." At first, people are like, "Why is he interested in me?" But then people are like, "Oh, well, you want to know? I’ll tell you!" And I think those deep connections are super powerful.

I think another thing that I wish I knew better in high school is that, you know, it’s easy to treat your teachers as kind of teachers and only teachers. And I did form, I would say, friendship with a handful of teachers. You know, Mr. Hernandez, Miss Kennedy are the ones in high school that definitely come to mind that I could talk to about things, and they would talk to me about, you know, stuff—it was really powerful.

They treated me more like my peer, and obviously sometimes they had to play teacher and I was a student, but a lot of times there was a nice camaraderie between us. But I think, you know, for other times, it was very easy to say, "Oh, so-and-so, that teacher is like this—they like to fail students," and they’re like that. And in hindsight, I realize how wrong it is because 99.9999 percent of the teachers that I had—and I’m sure you have— their number one priority was to try to prepare you for the world and make you a better human being.

And I wish, and you know, I told you the story of me bringing a guitar to graduation. So you can imagine, every now and then I probably wasn’t the easiest student to have in your classroom. And so one of the things I wish I did was also for even some of the teachers that I felt weren’t aligned with my worldview, I wish that I had reached out to them more and figured out how I could support them and also tell them how much what they did meant to me and to our peers, and how much we grew from it.

I have to say, even some of those—you always have your favorites, and then you have those teachers that are like, "Oh, they’re so hard, and they’re just trying to stick it to us!" But I gotta tell you, when you’re 40, 42, 43 years old like myself, I get together with friends; I was like, "You know, we learned a lot in that class!" and so-and-so teacher really by kind of being hard on us, kind of prepared us for life. So those are some of the things that I wish.

And to just know that it all works out—it all, it really all works out. Everything that you stress about in the moment, usually a week later, a month later, for sure a year later, you won’t even remember what that thing was that you were worried about.

And I still remind myself that because every now and then, I do have something where I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m like, "Oh why? Why is that happening? And why?" And then I remind us, "Sal, you’ve gone through this like 500 times now; it’s not going to matter! It’s not going to matter in the long run! Just do what you can, be an open person, be an optimistic person, and the universe will hopefully give you back some of that optimism and openness as well, and things will resolve themselves."

So those are some of the things; some of the stress was unnecessary, and some of the anxiety and some of the insecurities—in fact, all of it was unnecessary. I wish I had meditated; I started—I picked that up about two years ago. I wish I had started even 10 minutes a day because then all the stuff that I just talked about wouldn’t have—it would have just, you know, it’s like a rain-x for your soul; things just beat up and fall off! They don’t absorb into your mind.

From Instagram, Louisa Montevani asks, "Hi Sal, what are tips to decide what you want to study in university?" So my advice is, don’t stereotype yourself too much. I think it’s very easy for us, you know, sometimes we get a little positive feedback from one teacher or another in one subject or another and saying, "Oh, I’m a writer," or "I’m a programmer," or "I’m a math person," and they say, "I’m going to be a writer," or "I’m going to be an art historian" because of that feedback.

And that might be the case, and those might all be great fields, but I think it depends—we’re going to the—where you go to school. But in the U.S., you know there’s a lot of opportunity to try things, especially your freshman year. So I would take courses in a pretty varied thing. I would, you know, the other thing I wish I knew is that a lot of professors don’t mind it; you know, I used to think, "Hey, there’s 200 kids in this room; the professor has no interest in talking to me." But I wish I had at least tried!

Sometimes I did talk to professors in smaller classes, but in those large classes, I was always like, "Oh, I’m just going to go do my thing; they don’t…" But oftentimes, you could talk to them—especially if you’re genuinely interested. You know, there are some students who are not genuinely interested, and they’re just trying to kind of suck up to the professor to maybe get an A, but there are also students who are genuinely interested.

And if you are genuinely interested in the course and the subject matter, the professor will like, will probably want to talk to you and might even have an internship for you or have advice about it for you. And so I would do that; I would talk to as many people. I would talk to as many upperclassmen as you can find. Ask them as many questions, especially the upperclassmen, the seniors who are getting jobs—ask sometimes, you know, a little bit sensitive questions: "How much are you getting paid? What is the job offer? What does the job market look like in that major?"

And then if you can find to get a hold of alums, you know, people who graduated the last few years because it’s one—you know, sometimes the major, the work that you do in the major is different than the work that you do in the job. And so talk to the alums who majored in X and say, "Okay, you got a job I don’t. Doesn’t hurt to ask them how much money do you get paid? How hard do you have to work? What’s the—you know, all of that."

But then ask, you know, "What is the actual work like? What surprised you about it? What didn’t surprise you about that work?" And you’ll learn a lot. I have to say, you know, if there’s one thing that—and I didn’t do it well early on—but by my junior and senior year in college and for sure my second year in business school, that’s what I did. I was very shameless; I would—you know, I remember I really enjoyed a capital markets class, which is all about the stock market and the bond market and how money moves through the world.

And you know, it was a pretty math-heavy class, and in business school, you know, I went to business school at HBS. You know, it wasn’t, you know, the math—a lot of students didn’t go super deep in the math. And so I oftentimes was the closer, so to speak, where the professor would say, "Sal, how do we solve this equation?" And so I used—I had a good relationship with that professor, his name was George Chocco.

And I said, "George, you know, I love this class. What can I do in life that is like this class?" And he said, "Well, you should go work at a hedge fund." And I said, "That sounds awesome! What is a hedge fund?" Then he explained, "It’s like a mutual fund, but they can do more exotic things; you know, they have more flexibility in how they invest, but they’re regulated differently." So I was like, "Okay, that’s interesting."

Then I looked at all my classmates who had worked in finance, and then I started going, I was like, "What’s a hedge fund? How much do you get paid? What’s the lifestyle like?" And I was like, "Oh, this sounds good—at least to me!" And then I started going through the job search process. So that wasn’t picking the major, but I was picking kind of the career.

But the same process is true on the major side—just ask a ton of questions! Don’t be afraid to ask about money. Sometimes on university campuses, money can kind of be viewed as a little bit of a gauche subject; "Oh, we’re academics! How dare you talk about career and money?" No, talk about money! Money for sure isn’t everything in life, but you need to be able to, you know, put food on the table, support yourself, pay off your debt.

If you’re not able to do that kind of stuff, you’re not going to be able to do the high-minded stuff. So I’m not saying you have to become a millionaire or even have to become affluent, but it’s super important to think about, "Am I picking a major that I have a decent chance of getting a job that I enjoy—not just tolerate, but I can enjoy and I can pay off my debt and have a reasonable chance of, you know, saving for a down payment on a house?"

And you know, one day, and you know, being able to go on vacations and, you know, if I choose to have a family, to send my kids to college in the future. So I don’t think it’s ever too early to think about that. Alright, so these are great questions! Maybe we’ll do another one of these, you know, whenever we don’t have a guest.

Maybe this will be graduation season because I’m, you know, I don’t know if y’all, I’m enjoying playing Uncle Sal right now! So this is—so YouTube, First Guy Gomez asks, "What would you have done differently if you could start college over again?" You know, it’s the same, and I’ll finish on this because I just realized I think I do have a call that I can’t reschedule starting like a minute ago.

If I could start college over again, it’s the same advice that I said: I would be that much more open. I would be, you know, if I’m thinking—if someone has helped me, if they mean something to me, I would have told them that. I would have stepped out of my comfort zone that much more, and I did step out of my comfort zone. You know, when I was my freshman year in college, I intentionally joined the improv comedy troupe because I was like, "There’s nothing like stepping out of your comfort zone like improv comedy!"

And we had to travel around from school to school, and you know, people would shout out a noun, a verb, a setting, and you know, context—and you’d have to kind of act it out and try to be somewhat humorous! There’s nothing like improv comedy that will teach you to be out of your comfort zone, but I would have done more of that, and I would have, you know, I would have been more open with my thoughts, my emotions, my insecurities because that’s the type of thing that forms the deeper connections, deeper friendships.

And I came out of college with great friendships, and I feel very fortunate for it—I met my wife in college, but I think there could have been even more. And even to this day, you know, I probably every once a month I probably have a dream about college where I’m in, you know, one of these circumstances— a lot of it’s like the end of the term and I forgot to drop a class and I’m like, "Oh my God!"

You know, whatever! But anyway, thanks everyone for being part of this! I think this kind of worked out doing the Instagram and the Facebook and YouTube at the same time, and I just want to thank everyone for joining this, and I’m going to go jump onto that call now. See, how do I turn this off?