Graduation Address

Your Honour, Mr. Chancellor, Madam President, faculty, families, and friends — thank you. It’s a genuine honour to be here, and to be recognized by this university in this way.

To the graduates: congratulations. Forestry, nursing, science — you’ve chosen fields that deal with real things. Managing living systems. Caring for people. Asking hard questions about how the world works. Not easy work, and you’ve already shown you can do it.

But I suspect a lot of you are carrying something else today, underneath the gown and the smiles. Pressure, uncertainty. Maybe some fear. About what comes next. Whether you chose the right path. Whether you’re actually ready.

I graduated in 1983, straight into a recession. Nobody was hiring. I sent out resume after resume and rarely heard back. It made me anxious. It made me feel like a failure. I questioned my degree and whether I’d made the right choices — which is probably exactly what some of you may be quietly thinking today.

So, I took whatever work I could find. I sold timeshare — and failed spectacularly. I worked in a bridal registry, where I discovered that I hate brides and I especially hate brides’ mothers.

I went back to school to become a teacher, then figured out that I wasn’t the right person for it — not because the work wasn’t important, but because I didn’t feel I could do it as well as the students deserved.

None of it was the plan. There was no plan.

Eventually my husband Ugo and I came to New Brunswick — from Montreal to UNB — each pursuing our own master’s degree. We had the chance to work with some of the leading researchers in forestry, and through that work, we formed a company. It was completely serendipitous. We had never set out to be founders. We never imagined building a software company in the forestry sector. But the work was interesting, the problems were real, and the next step was obvious even if the destination wasn’t.

That journey  -  from graduation in 1983 to forming a company – took nine years. And by the time the company was running, we had two toddlers. The pressure was real. But it wasn’t a dramatic leap — it was a long, slow process of building a product, developing a market, and learning how things actually worked. And it took another ten years of running the company before I genuinely thought: maybe we can make this work.

The uncertainty doesn’t go away when you succeed. It just moves to a new address.

Then 2008 hit. The financial crisis tore through the forestry sector, and much of our original customer base disappeared — not one by one, but all at once. We didn’t just lose revenue, we lost our customers. We had to start over: new clients, new problems to solve, new reasons for people to buy from us. It took two years to figure it out properly. But we got there.

Years later I found myself in boardrooms I had no obvious right to be in. Manufacturing. Real estate. Healthcare. Back to forestry. Every new sector, the same feeling: what am I doing here? Will they figure out I don’t know this world yet? How can I add value?

What I eventually understood is that the struggle itself is the mechanism. The discomfort isn’t a problem to solve — it’s the process working. That feeling at three in the morning when something isn’t right and you don’t know how to fix it.

That’s not a warning. That’s the signal that you’re about to learn something you didn’t know before. It is in those times that I have grown the most and I’d be suspicious of myself now if it ever went quiet.

A lot of the people you assume have it all figured out — don’t. Leaders are far more human up close than they look from a distance. Almost every career that looks smooth from the outside was, inside, a series of uncertain steps and a few fortunate breaks.

The bar to start is not “feel ready.” Nobody clears that bar. The real bar is lower and more honest: be willing to begin, learn while you’re doing it, and be comfortable being a little unfinished in the process.

The fields you’re walking into already know this. Forests don’t behave the way models predict. Patients don’t follow clinical pathways cleanly. Experiments rarely confirm what you expected. Managing that gap between what you expected and what’s actually in front of you — that’s not a new skill you need to go develop. You’ve been building it here for years. You just haven’t been calling it that.

The world you’re stepping into isn’t just moving fast — it’s changing structurally, continuously, and it won’t pause for you to feel settled. The fields you’re entering, the tools you’ll rely on, the problems you’ll face — none of them will hold still. In that world, certainty is the wrong thing to chase. The advantage goes to people who’ve learned to move with change rather than wait it out — who can adapt, use judgment when there’s no clear answer, and treat uncertainty not as an obstacle, but as the environment they were trained for.

Competence follows responsibility.

So, as you head out of here — be ambitious. Be thoughtful. Be useful. Be kind. Keep learning. And yes, call your parents.

But don’t sit around waiting for the feeling that tells you everything is finally in place.

I’ll let you in on a secret: that feeling may never fully arrive. I’m still waiting on mine. 

Begin before you feel ready — and let readiness catch up. 

Congratulations, Class of 2026. Now go get started.