HOW TO START

The expansion on a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist’s commencement address to her alma mater.

In May 2025, Kantor addressed the graduating class of Columbia University. Despite all their much-lauded potential, ambition, and newly conferred prestigious degrees, these seniors were transitioning to working adulthood with much fear, doubt, and existential hand-wringing. Having navigated the Covid-19 pandemic, consuming campus protests sparked by the most recent Israel-Palestine conflict, and the ire of President Trump, they were emerging into a landscape of AI interviews, increased skepticism of authority, and much hemming and hawing about their economic and professional fragility. Dismayed by the ominous aura encircling this generation, the author offers a short, graduation-gift-ready text as an encouraging “letter from an older ally.” Her initial chapters discuss the importance of honing a craft, identifying and addressing larger needs, and challenging the money-passion dichotomy, with examples drawn from both her personal experience and colleagues, recent graduates, and business owners in her orbit. But most of the nuggets in the “series of notes” that round out her text, while gracious and worthwhile, lack the teeth and flesh to give heft to the guidance that the title promises. Sparse bits tease topics like the possibility of nonlinear career paths and healthy employee-employer relationships, about which someone with Kantor’s experience, clout, and investigative chops could certainly offer much more substantial insight. Given that her topic sits adjacent to questions (which the author herself identifies) about the point of higher education itself and the strumming inevitability of turbulence and doom of today’s grim narratives and forecasts, her stubborn insistence on imagining boundless opportunity can feel simplified and rosy. And yet, within this same context, even the author's general exhortation to self-discovery, bravery, and, above all, optimism, also manages to feel restorative, and almost radical.

A hopeful and encouraging reframing for recent college graduates, if a little cursory and scant on actionable details.