The one with the commencement speech

Or, my graduation experience.

Yesterday was a big day for me: I graduated from NUS (National University of Singapore) with a bachelor’s degree in computer science.

But what made this milestone even more special was that I was the valedictorian, which means I had the honour of delivering deliver the “valedictory address” (aka commencement speech).

To give some more context on why this meant so much to me:

1. NUS School of Computing is #4 in the world for Computer Science.
2. My cohort had ~1000 students.
3. Only 1-2 students get this opportunity to be valedictorian.

Needless to say, I was simultaneously extremely excited and extremely nervous.

Nervous because although I’m pretty extroverted and like talking to people, speaking in front of ~1500 people felt like a completely different ball game ¹. And especially because I knew that this was a big moment for the audience too — professors, parents, and graduates — who would all be listening intently.

So, I had prepared my speech a few weeks in advance, got it approved by the university, and was even practising it everyday in a large (but empty) hall for a week leading up to this day.

And finally, the day arrived and the ceremony began.

They started by presenting the degree scrolls to the graduating class, consisting of Bachelor’s, Masters and PhD students.

After collecting my degree, I was guided through a separate door and was seated in the front row, where I watched the rest of the ceremony.

After ~40 mins, the last student collected their degree, and Prof. Kan Min Yen walked over to the podium to introduce me:

Then, I walked up on stage, bowed to the presiding officer and the academic procession, and delivered my speech:

Good morning. Professor Tulika Mitra, Dean (School of Computing) and Vice Provost (Special Projects); Mr. Chris Feng, President, Sea Ltd; Distinguished Guests, Fellow Graduates, Ladies and Gentlemen.

It is an incredible honor to stand before you as this year’s valedictorian… though I have to admit, I’m more nervous now than I’ve ever been before any exam. But more than anything, I feel deeply grateful. Grateful to be speaking not just for myself, but on behalf of the graduating class of 2025 – to try and put into words what this moment means, and to thank the people who helped us get here.

To our professors, thank you for teaching us with such passion, for patiently answering our endless questions, for challenging us to think deeper, and for inspiring in us that same energy and dedication.

To our families, thank you for your love, your patience, the constant emotional support, and for listening to us rant about LLMs hallucinating at the dinner table, even when it made absolutely no sense to you.

We wouldn’t be here without you and of course, your constant reminders to go outside and touch grass.

And to my fellow incredibly hard-working, probably sleep-deprived, peers: we pushed through broken code, wild deadlines, the chaos of group projects, and a lot of caffeine. We finally made it!

Today, we’re here not just to celebrate a degree, but everything it took to earn it. And more than the skills we learned, there’s one thing that carried us through it all: curiosity.

When we first arrived at NUS, we did not know much. But we wanted to. We wondered how programs worked. How websites load. Why restarting our laptops fixes half the problems. We followed that curiosity, even when it led us down rabbit holes of 3-hour long YouTube videos and 10-year-old Stack-Overflow posts – all of which made us feel more lost than before.

It was that same curiosity — obsessively excited, childlike and at times, naively optimistic – that kept us up during hackathons, kept us debugging segmentation faults at 2am, and kept convincing us that fixing that one bug would “only take 5 minutes”.

At some point or the other, many of us felt like imposters. Like everyone else knew more than us and had it all figured out. But here’s the truth: it’s not about having the answers, it’s about being willing to ask the questions. It’s about saying, “I don’t know – but tell me about it”. This readiness to admit you don’t know something combined with the curiosity to learn more can be extremely empowering.

As we graduate, we’re entering a world that is changing at an unprecedented rate. Tools that we learned might be replaced next year – or even next month. What was considered state of the art last week might already be outdated next week. AI is rewriting the rules, reshaping industries, and in an ironic turn of events, threatening to do to us what we once proudly did to others: automate jobs.

And, in a world like this, curiosity is not just a trait – it’s a survival skill. And if we can hold on to that spirit – that playful, fearless, sense of wonder – then we’ll not only adapt to the future, we’ll shape it.

So, to the class of 2025: Stay curious. Ask questions. Be bold enough to be a beginner again and again. Let yourself be optimistic, even wildly obsessed, with the things that may not make sense to anyone else, yet. Because that’s how the best ideas are born. That’s how the best lives are built.

So, go out there and stay wonderfully, stubbornly curious.

So yeah that was it.

While the whole experience of giving this speech felt surreal, a few moments stand out in my memory.

(1) When the audience broke into an applause during my speech:

(2) I felt particularly happy while delivering the last paragraph of the speech:

Some other random thoughts I had during this ceremony:

I finally realised what Barney Stinson meant when he said: “whatever you do in this life, it’s not legendary unless your friends are there to see it”. Well, in this case, family and friends, but the point still holds. It meant so much to me that the people close to me were there to celebrate this special occasion with me. Without them, I don’t think it would’ve been as meaningful to me.

I’m so happy that podiums are opaque because if they were transparent, everyone would be able to see my legs literally shaking in nervousness.

I think I did “okay” re my speech delivery, in the sense that it could’ve been a lot better (e.g. i fumbled a few times and my voice was shaking a bit especially in the beginning) but it also could’ve been a lot worse (e.g. i could’ve forgotten my speech entirely, my mind could’ve gone blank and i would be standing there speechless, literally.). So, overall, I’m okay with this outcome.

Oh, and it turns out the PhD valedictorian (Ayush Mishra) and I:

1. went to the same high school — though he graduated 7 years before me.
2. were family friends — his dad and my mum were colleagues, and his sister and my brother were in the same batch in school
3. worked with the same professor in NUS — though he worked for ~7 years and I for ~1 year.

It’s indeed a small world.

Finally, if you want to watch the video of the entire speech, you can find it on youtube here.

If you’re graduating / just graduated, happy graduation to you too!! 🎉