Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jodi Kantor CC'96 delivered the following keynote address at the Class Day exercises celebrating the Columbia College Class of 2025.

But, members of the Class of 2025, I came here for you. Like many alumni, I’ve been thinking about you, seeing you through the eyes of the student I was, more carefree than events have allowed you to be, and through the eyes of the mom I am now, protective and concerned.

To find the right words for this joyous, but still delicate, occasion, I proceeded the only way I know: by reporting, asking some of you what’s on your mind as you finish your education here. In those conversations, you asked me a hard question: In this environment, how are we supposed to find or start our life’s work?

You said: The story of your education has been one crisis after another. Though this period should be about dreaming and reaching, you feel exhausted and like you have little control. You fear that nearly every professional field is a bad bet right now, and besides, AI may be about to upend employment altogether. Just as it’s time to look for bosses and mentors, you said, your faith in authority figures is weak. Some members of the class who had planned to work next year in scientific labs, or start graduate school, have had those offers canceled. Businesses that said they would be hiring decided not to. Many international students are unsure whether they can or should stay.

In other words, you asked: How can you stop feeling endlessly tossed around by storm waves, build fulfilling, empowering careers, and re-establish yourselves as authors of your own lives?

This morning, I’m bringing you everything I’ve learned that might help.

My first piece of advice is to allow this week to truly be an ending. Take your most fabulous Columbia memories, of bolts of insight in the classroom and peals of laughter beyond, and seal them to last your whole lives. But when it comes to the hard parts of your time here, let’s drop the assumption that your experience in college will dictate what becomes of you afterward.

To prove this, I have a personal admission. When I was a senior here, I was kicked off the student newspaper. My journalism career was over before it had begun.

I had a fledgling little column in the Spectator. To say it wasn’t good is generous. One day I opened the paper to discover a student I had never met attacking me in print for something I had written. Lest you assume that everything at Columbia was better in the old days [gestures, no], the paper was not the outstanding, vital Spectator we know today; the 1996 version not only printed this insult, they played it up. The front page said hey, read the attack on a student on page 3.

And what this student wrote about me was so ugly that soon the land line in my dorm room rang. It was George Rupp, the president of the University, calling to check on me. You know you’re having a really bad day when the president calls to ask, “Are you ok?”

I felt humiliated, but also kind of curious: What could have motivated that student? I left the author a polite phone message or two with that question. He didn’t respond. So I walked up to him and asked. He ignored me. A few days later, the Spec’s editor reached out. The author of the attack was accusing me of harassing him, and the Spec’s response was to kick us both off the paper.

As my work partner, Megan Twohey, puts it, I was fired from a newspaper for asking too many questions.

She thinks that’s hilarious. But I felt such shame, like everyone on campus was watching. And it made me hate journalism. I wanted no part of such a bruising, unfair, unprofessional system. Besides, everybody, even back then, said that journalism was a terrible career bet.

What I didn’t understand then was that being young, in 1996 or 2025, just comes with some chaos and mortification. I love and feel indebted to this campus down to every tree and bench. Yet my own experience is that life outside these gates is better-ordered, and easier, and kinder. You don’t yet know which parts of your college years are portents of your future and which were just Morningside Heights noise. Don’t let the hard things at Columbia dictate what’s to come.

I say that because it’s a mistake I made. I graduated a few months after that Spectator incident and, two years later, I went to law school, sincerely thinking I’d enjoy life as an attorney. During my first fall semester, one night literally at 3 a.m., I had an epiphany. I really did want to be a journalist.

I had zero evidence that I could succeed. In fact, as you now know, I had evidence to the contrary. I had done no journalism internships. The few clips I had were terrible.

But what I began to figure out that night is that the way to think about a career is hour by hour and minute by minute. It’s 11:30 a.m. on a Thursday — do you feel connected to the task before you? I knew that being in the text of a document, flipping the words around, is my flow. That’s where I feel at home. I knew I was curious about the world, that as I was growing up in pre-Internet Staten Island and New Jersey, the delivery of periodicals to my house felt like an event.

For those of you who don’t yet know what you want to do with your lives, I have a suggestion: buy a cheap, thin notebook. Keep it on you. Every day, make a practice of writing down which actions you enjoy, and which you hate, and whose company you like, and who you can’t stand being around. Do that for a few months and you may come to know yourself more quickly than I did.

I dropped out of law school. This was also kind of mortifying in its way. It was Harvard, which I’m mentioning not to sound like a jerk, but to help you imagine how bad it all looked to my parents, and a lot of others as well.

But that was the moment I became the author of my own life.

Class of 2025, if any of the trains you get on turn out to be heading in the wrong direction, get off the train. Don’t be overly afraid of risk, and especially right now, be wary of predicting what fields are most promising. Those predictions can eliminate all sorts of magic and meaning. Don’t go into public service, you’ll get death threats. Medicine leads to burnout, we’ve been told. Academia, now? Really? Follow this logic to the end, and we’ll have no public servants, or doctors, or professors.

I’ve been a journalist for a quarter-century now. Not a day has passed when my field hasn’t been in existential and business crisis — and I’m happy.

Instead of trying to game some careers futures market, focus on two things: need and craft.

By need, I mean: What is your own independent assessment of what society will need most during your working years, the next four or five decades? What kind of care, what kind of products, what kind of information. Do not be the people who fail to understand the opportunities this moment presents. And they are massive opportunities, precisely because everything is in question. What is a university? What is a law firm? What is the relationship between humans and machines? I don’t know, but the people who can answer will be your generation’s most valuable leaders.

And rather than guessing about the career markets, think about remaking them. I’ll give you one example, about one need.

The truth is in trouble. Facts, knowledge, our shared sense of reality — all endangered. And there is not yet a plan for saving the truth. For comparison, if you look at the climate crisis, here’s where we are: Thanks to scientists all over the globe, including at this great University, we have a roadmap for saving the planet, starting with lowering CO2 emissions, even if we don’t yet have the political cohesion and will to do it.

But when it comes to our information environment — also vital to our well being, also a basis for everything we do, and yet also polluted and rapidly decaying — I don't even see a strategy yet for how we get to a new and more stable place. The search for those answers seems very daunting, but what a high calling. What a need to fulfill.

And then there’s craft. Most people who are successful and fulfilled in their working lives are practicing a craft, some combination of expertise and skill. They have mastered how to heal a patient with a complex surgery or write a gripping episode of television. All those tasks that you’ll be so engaged with at 11:30 a.m. on that random Thursday — ideally they add up to performance of a craft.

What I didn’t understand as an undergraduate, and I don’t think those Spec editors knew either, was that good journalism involves immense craft. What to cover. How to scrutinize power, manage intricate source relationships, handle confrontation and captivate readers. Which information, ultimately, to publish.

This is the craft I’ve immersed myself in for many busy, challenging, thrilling years. In 2017, to break the story of how Harvey Weinstein — titan of Hollywood, pillar of Democratic politics — had victimized women, Megan and I, and our editors, summoned all the craft we had collectively mastered over the years. How do you confront a giant bully? With technique and strict professional standards.

What will your crafts be, Class of 2025, and even if you have to be very creative and persistent, how will you learn them?

I need to pause here and apply a standard but crucial commencement message. Don’t just do the most lucrative thing. Do not blur the distinction between needing financial stability and craving enormous wealth. Please understand that pursuing only material gain can actually mean selling yourself short. The pursuit of sheer opulence does not lead to happiness or even necessarily success. Do not waste 20 years figuring this out from scratch.

Class of 2025 — your lives are your move. The best people in life and history are the ones who take negative, even devastating, stimuli and formulate powerful, productive responses.

If you find your craft and your need, you will experience growth — professional and personal — that feels at once like transcending your boundaries and returning to your truest self. This is how you will become powerful. This is how you will assume control.

And we will help you. This project is not yours to figure out alone. My last piece of advice today is not to the graduates, but to my fellow alumni: If you have a half hour for a career talk with a member of this class, or a job to offer, please do it. The graduates need our help and they deserve to know that older people are their advocates and protectors.

Congratulations, Columbia College Class of 2025. I am sorry that things have been so hard. But you’ve made it to this day. You are not statistics and you are not props in anyone’s political play. Many years from now, when you look back at the work, and lives, you have authored, perhaps you’ll find that the hard things that happened here didn’t matter much. Or maybe the story will say that with the insight you gained here at great cost, you became uniquely positioned to contribute, grow and thrive.

Thank you.