Commencement Speaker 2021: Joyce Chang

6/2/2021

What a glorious spring day to be with all of you! Thank you to Head of School, Catherine McGehee, and Senior class president, Julia Clark, for the invitation to speak today. Thank you as well to the Board of Trustees.

And what a pleasure to be with you all in person. This is actually the largest live event that I have spoken at since late February 2020. There is nothing that replaces the joy of celebrating together in person.

To the graduating seniors, congratulations. You should be very proud of what you have achieved. You did not let the COVID pandemic define you or dampen your spirits.

And a very heartfelt congratulations and thank you to the parents. All of you provided the support needed in an extraordinary year like no other for your daughters as they enter adulthood. Your celebration comes after a turbulent time. In a single year, together you have weathered a global pandemic, a global recession, an unprecedented policy response, volatile elections and heightened tensions on racial and social justice.

It’s a time when each of us faced personal challenges that impacted us in different ways.

Class of 2021, as you go into the world, it is important for all of you to understand the big picture legacy of this pandemic. In the history books, COVID 19 will be remembered as the event that defined and transformed the century. It has changed the way that we work, engage and assemble. I want to discuss some of the challenges that lie ahead of you but also the reasons for optimism and share a few lessons from my 30+ years of working on Wall Street.

The word “unprecedented” is not being overused. The COVID-19 pandemic has taken more American lives than World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam War combined. The cost of this crisis and the government’s response is equally as enormous with spending at $7trn over the past 2 years. That’s equivalent to spending $1 million a day for the next 19,178 years or buying 7 billion of the latest iPhones (before tax).
The pandemic has exposed and increased racial and gender inequities. It has hit women much harder than men and those with less have been disproportionately hurt by joblessness. Female participation in the US labor force has suffered historic setbacks with 2.3mn women leaving, bringing the overall U.S. female labor force participation rate to the lowest level since 1988. Strides made in poverty reduction over the past 20 years are being reversed, with 90mn people likely to fall into extreme poverty across the globe. At the same time, the George Floyd murder exposed the racial inequities and failures that have persisted for decades.

But the silver lining is that the crisis has also given rise to innovation and it has ended complacency on growing inequities. It has provided a catalyst for difficult and complex conversations. We can’t fix our problems if we don’t acknowledge them. The awareness and acknowledgment of inequities have never been greater, sparking more candid conversations and making new alliances and coalitions possible. At the business level, it has accelerated change. We made changes in 10 months that we thought would take 10 years to achieve.

As you move to the next stage in your lives, I urge you all not to be so fixated on mapping out a precise journey and offer some of my own experiences. I won’t call it advice because I have made more than my share of mistakes, but I will share some lessons learned.

Your life is unlikely to be linear. My own career on Wall Street was totally unplanned. I was a terrible math student in high school, forever scarred by my experience with math at my own boarding school, Phillips Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire. I thought that I would be a diplomat, a policymaker or in the Foreign Service. My first job out of college was actually teaching writing at a boarding school, conducting class discussions around a roundtable known for facilitating student-led discussions and debate. I still look back on prep school as the place where I took hold of owning my own narrative, a skill for life, but not necessarily a career roadmap.
Nothing substitutes for hard work, preparation and knowing your material. Hard work still prevails. I entered Wall Street with a non-traditional graduate degree and felt unprepared but very curious. I found that I loved the fast pace of markets and the way that you had to develop a narrative to come up with an integrated view of the world to understand markets. Self-study is important; you have to keep learning and making the time and space to learn. As a research analyst, I probably spend more than half of my time reading. The teaching experience in a classroom setting was also powerful as it is where all the gaps in your knowledge are tested and questioned, even of the field that you think you know best.
Speak up and be a voice for your group. Before I arrived in Middleburg yesterday, I finished my last speaking event for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage month. We cannot afford to be complacent. This is truly a moment where the Asian American community cannot afford to let a crisis go to waste. I have lived through and researched 6-7 financial crises over the last 30 years but this is the first pan-Asian collective moment that I have seen during my time working on Wall Street. We have to get organized. It is a time for Asian Americans to end the silence, self-advocate and call out racism for what it is. Be the person in the room who connects the dots. As Martin Luther King put it, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Learn how to build alliances and coalitions.
Get comfortable being uncomfortable. It isn’t going to be comfortable a lot of the time to be an effective leader. And it is still harder for women to make their way into “the room where it happens.” “We get the work done but we are never in the room where it happens.” Be gutsy, not just in your thoughts but in your actions. Lean in and understand who the disruptor is for your specialty. I tell young women that they need to make themselves speak up twice so that people do not think that the first time is a fluke.
Turn a disadvantage into an advantage. Just as you managed this past year to put a positive spin on the negativity that came from this pandemic, you can use that same resolve to turn a disadvantage into an advantage. Throughout my career, I was often the youngest only female or only Asian at a meeting. If you are the only person in the room who is female or Asian or somehow in the minority, this means that people will remember you. You will be singled out. This can be turned to your advantage or be a big disadvantage. I realized early on that if I said something careless, I would be overly penalized and labeled negatively. Similarly, if I made a smart comment, I would be the one who would be remembered. Speak up and don’t be afraid to ask an intelligent question.
Don’t take it personally or as Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously said, “Be a little deaf.” Women and minorities tend to take feedback very personally. I remember a meeting that I was at once where everything went wrong. Everyone talked over me, I was about to make a point and someone else got to it first, and I replayed over and over what I should have done differently. I ran into my key nemesis at the meeting later in the day and he didn’t have a care in the world, hands in his pocket and whistling away, turning to me and saying, “Hey Chang-er, good meeting, huh, tough but good!” I realized that for a lot of men on Wall Street, it’s just a game.
Take control of your finances. A final word on this is that it is an important part of owning your own narrative -- and the smartest women and most creative thinkers often get this part wrong. I am on the board of directors of Girls Inc and several years ago JPMorgan started a program to train 30,000 high school girls in financial literacy. Managing your finances is a lifelong skill that you need to start early as it requires intentional behavior and efforts. To execute your boldest and most creative ideas and to effect change, this usually requires long-term financial commitment.

At a personal level, for many of you, it was likely a year filled with valid sadness and frustration for your final year of high school. My own children are at similar transition points, like all of you, they went to boarding school -- one finished high school and one graduated from college during this pandemic. All of those plans to travel and be with friends before the next chapter were not to be. But it did give me treasured moments with my children at a critical time as their thinking evolved in response to this crisis.

I admired their resolve, and what I have come to learn and respect most about the Class of 2021 is the way that you similarly did not let a crisis go to waste. You were at your most creative and resilient this past year (I know many of you probably have a TikTok or Instagram and maybe even one of you have gone “viral”).And you took it upon yourself to create your own opportunities. I had a moment of real connectivity with Foxcroft seniors when I learned about your Courageous Conversations series. We have a series at JPMorgan with exactly the same name to discuss the rise in discrimination against the Asian American & Pacific Islander community and how we can move forward together to drive sustainable and positive change. I reflect back on a comment made by Ginni Rometty, former IBM chairman and now a member of JPMorgan’s board, “Diversity is a number, inclusivity is a choice.” You seniors made the choice with Courageous Conversations to include others in a personal and intimate way. And you took ownership of discussing tough issues related to mental health, to discuss issues around race, class, LGBTQ+ topics and more.

Most important of all, you made it a priority to take care of each other and to bring the younger students under your wing. In the school's most valued and long-standing tradition, Fox/Hound, you reimagined the tradition to fit COVID restrictions and kept the magic of the Fox/Hound experience alive for younger students. And you transformed the Senior Porch into the center of an inclusive community — one that welcomed underclassmen to learn from you as they started their own Foxcroft journeys at such an uncertain time.

You owe enormous gratitude to the faculty and staff at Foxcroft who are your second family and kept the campus open and safe and cared for all of you.

I cannot emphasize how important your Foxcroft experience will be as the foundation for what lies ahead. I look back at my own time at boarding school as the most important and transformational educational experience I had - much more important than college or grad school. It is where I learned to express my opinions, had my assumptions challenged, experienced more than my share of academic failures and learned how to recover and come out stronger. It was an experience that made me aware of my flaws but also what I was capable of achieving.

It is also the place where I developed some of the strongest relationships that I have kept throughout my life. It is a lifelong prep school friendship and appreciation for my own experience in boarding school that brings me here to speak today. The boarding school bonds are special and yes, they are unique– even if you have not seen each other for a decade and live on the other side of the world -- the connectivity is back instantly. These will be the teachers you remember most. The stories you recount to your own children. The moments when you discovered yourself that you will play over and over in your life. Foxcroft will be your “go to” support network for life, “your friends until the end.”

Senior class, you have emerged from this pandemic stronger, more resilient and more determined. Foxcroft has prepared you to own your narrative and you embraced that challenge to the maximum over the past year. You dug deep and discovered who you really are and, what you might become. You developed creative ways to bring people together and are leaving Foxcroft a better place for the next generation to come. As you reach for your dreams, you will always remember this pandemic year that was like no other. As you move graduate from Foxcroft, “Be the change that you want to see in the world,” in the words of Mathatma Gandhi.

Thank you for having me to share this special day. Good luck, stay positive and take care of yourselves, your families and each other.

Congratulations to the amazing Class of 2021!

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