"Don't Trade a Job for a Life," CNN Documentary Producer Advises University of Richmond Graduates
May 15, 2006
When Peabody and Emmy award-winning documentary producer Jennifer Hyde snared a good job in California working for NBC, she found the work rewarding, but discovered she was dissatisfied with “the larger shape of my life.”
So, she tossed out the map she imagined her life would follow and looked instead for a new path. She left Los Angeles for Atlanta and what she thought would be a lesser position, finding instead success and the meaning in a more rounded life.
The 1992 summa cum laude graduate of the University of Richmond advised her alma mater’s Class of 2006 to take risks, appreciate bumps in the road, recognize that things change, and not trade their lives for their jobs.
“I didn’t know any of this when I started out,” she said, acknowledging that she felt the same mixture of excitement and bewilderment as the 756 bachelor’s degree candidates sitting in the Robins Center, when she sat there 14 years ago.
“Get out there and get on the road,” Hyde said. “You don’t know, you can’t imagine, the journey ahead. Stop looking for the map [to your life]—there isn’t one,” Hyde said. Instead, she recommended that the graduates “do, ask, strive,” and recall the lessons she learned upon departing college.
Free of mortgages and children, new college graduates should take risks at a time in their lives when other responsibilities don’t hinder freedom to change and move. Hyde and a fellow Richmond student approached what she called a legend in the media business who visited campus, boldly asking for internships. Soon after, they packed up a car, drove to the West Coast without much money and found themselves working as interns, while doing “anything else they could while learning” the industry. Their careers were launched.
Hyde said she hope the graduates would experience failure.
“I wish failure for you because it is a necessary part of learning and growth,” she explained. She recalled her own collapse as a Richmond freshman, after being an academic star in high school. Although an emotional wreck tossed out of college, she got some counseling, returned to campus, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa.
She reminded the crowd of around 7,000 students and parents that their priorities, ambitions, even friends change irrevocably as life proceeds.
“You find that your heroes are human, that your hometown has grown old, that your chosen field is not what you wanted or expected,” she said, and she suggested they learn to accept their new observations of the world.
“Whatever the path, whatever the lessons, whatever your own rules of the road, know that the journey is as invigorating, satisfying, spectacular as you choose to make it,” Hyde concluded.
Before Hyde’s address, student speaker Godfrey Plata, a Filipino-American from Gardena, Calif., asked his classmates not to accept the familiar in their lives ahead. After graduating from a high school “with only 3 or 4 white students,” Plata found himself “a country and a culture away” from where he grew up.
“My job here was to find out what I didn’t have and didn’t know. And now I am a stronger person emotionally, physically, intellectually,” he said. “Seek the unfamiliar, find friction, get lost.”
Along with academic degrees, Richmond awarded honorary degrees to: actor Ben Vereen; Dr. Benjamin S. Carson Sr., director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore; Swarthmore psychology professor Deborah G. Kemler Nelson; and Judge Frederick P. Stamp Jr. of Wheeling, W.Va., retired chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia and an alumnus of Richmond’s School of Law.
Dr. Michael A. Garbee, the last person to leave Charity Hospital in New Orleans after working round the clock five days without power, supplies or water, received the President’s Medal. presented to individuals who have rendered exceptional and meritorious service to the University, the nation or the world. Garbee is an alumnus of the university.
Leonard S. Goldberg, retiring from Richmond in June after 19 years as vice president of student development, received the Trustees’ Distinguished Service Award, presented in recognition of unselfish dedication and meritorious service to the university.