World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim

Boston, Massachusetts, United States

President Joseph E. Aoun,

Distinguished faculty members and administrators,

Members of the Class of 2013,

Ladies and gentlemen

It’s a great privilege to be here today with all of you, especially the members of the Class of 2013 and your families and friends. You should be very proud. This is a day for memories, a day to savor. A day, also, to join in honoring those who two weeks ago responded so courageously in the face of tragedy—including Northeastern students and staff who provided critical care and support to victims of the attack.

It’s an honor for me to stand before you today just at the moment when you are leaving this great University and about to step into your life, the script of which is yet to be written. Throughout my years in the academy, I’ve loved commencements because they embody those rare moments in our modern culture when ritual, tradition and a bit of pageantry brighten our lives.

But I’m sure many of you are more than a little concerned about what the future will bring, and I just want to say to you today that not only is your future uncertain, but the overwhelming likelihood is that it’s far more uncertain than you think. And you know what, that’s a good thing. A recent study by a group of psychologists in the journal Science found that people are extremely poor at predicting their futures. The study showed that, for example, a typical 20-year-old woman’s predictions for life changes in the next decade of her life were not nearly as radical as the typical 30-year-old woman’s recollection of how much she had changed in her 20s. In other words, 20-year-olds had little idea of just how much they would change over the next ten years. This sort of discrepancy persisted among respondents all the way into their 60s.

This study’s findings are essentially the story of my life. In fact, even before I was born, given the obstacles my parents faced, I would never have predicted that I would, in fact, be born. My father spent his childhood in North Korea and, at the age of 17, escaped across the border into South Korea, leaving his parents, his brothers and sisters, his entire extended family -- everything he had ever known – behind. He had no money. Still, he managed to enroll in the Seoul National University Dental School and became a dentist. He told me stories about how he had so little money he often could only afford to buy lunch from the illegal noodle vendors on the street. Once when he was eating his contraband pasta next to the vendor, police came and chased after the vendors and their customers. But while he ran, my father kept eating his noodles because he knew he wouldn’t be able to afford another bowl for some time.

My mother was born in China near Shanghai among a small community of Korean expatriates. After returning to Korea, on a day she will never forget, her mother -- my grandmother -- went outside to hang the laundry and never returned, probably either kidnapped or killed by North Korean soldiers. With the war closing in around her, at the age of 15, my mother became a refugee and literally walked, with her younger brother on her back, for 200 miles to escape the fighting. Luckily, she was able to resume her schooling in a tent in the southern city of Masan. She was a good student and with great luck she received a scholarship from a secret women’s society in the United States and was able to enroll as a freshman at Scarritt College in Nashville, Tennessee.

Through almost unthinkably divergent and unlikely paths, my parents ended up meeting in New York City at a Christmas party that gathered together the few hundred Korean students who were living in the United States at that time. They fell in love, married in New York, where my older brother was born, then returned to Korea.

I was born in Seoul and when I was five, my family moved back to the United States and we eventually settled in Muscatine, Iowa. My father opened his dental practice, and my mother set to work on her PhD in philosophy at the University of Iowa. In the late 60’s, influenced by my mother’s passion for social justice, we watched the civil rights and anti-war movements unfold from our living room in Muscatine. We lived, as you can tell, the classic All-American, Korean family grows up in a small town in Iowa story. We fully embraced our lives in the heartland of this great country.