@fabiocarrera tweets @ #wpicommencement

Yes, I admit I tweeted all the way through commencement and I enjoyed it.  It made me focus on some of the key passages and forced me to distill my feelings about the event.  As it turned out, I was not the only one, since WPI had set up a hashtag for it, which I wasn't aware of until after the fact (#wpicommencement).  

In a nutshell, the Father Guido Sarducci's 5-minute university version of the ceremony is as follows:

1. Success = derivative of life = rise/run (but see what happens if the lifeline bifurcates)...
2. Never do a job a robot can do (until your roomba breaks, like mine did)
3. Embrace change (it's paradoxically and stereotypically constant)
4. Have fun (duh!)
5. Be authentic (true to your nature)
6. Leave the earth better than you found it (as we do in Venice)
7. Cherish relationships (it's the arcs not the nodes! as they teach at SFI)
   
8. Stay naive! By the sixth degree you will connect us to all of humanity
9. Be impeccable with your word, don't make assumptions, don't take things personally
10. Be well, do good work and keep in touch!
    

Maxims 1-7 are straight from my tweets which in turn are paraphrased from the keynotes, #8 is my own incantation (very Santa Fe).  I also added the last two entries, whereby three of Don Miguel's four agreements are listed at #9  since the fourth ("always do your best") is sort of already embedded inside Garrison Keillor's canonical exhortation, which I squeezed into number 10.  The grand total is something of the order of 14 aphorisms, which proves that you can make just about anything fit into a list from 1 to 10.  

Maybe that's all our students really need to learn to commence on their path through "real life"?

Master the 10 commandments above, plus a card trick or two and you get a free halo and a guarantee that Italians will forever take a day off every year to commemorate your martyrdom...  Sounds a lot better than getting a diploma as a "token" of your degree, no?

May Monsignor Sarducci bestow his blessings upon the class of 2009.  

Bless them good -- real good.  Amen!