Sarah Tao

Fellow Comets, faculty, friends and family,

We heartfully welcome and sincerely thank you. Thank you for your support, patience and love. I am honored to be here today and truly grateful for the opportunity to speak. My name is Sarah Tao, and today, I am a postbaccalaureate electrical engineering graduate. What does that mean? To some, it may mean I didn’t get college right the first time. But to me, it has meant that my journey to get here today has been full of sacrifice, growth and self-discovery.

As a first-generation college student and Latina, engineering was not a path I saw as meant for me. I began as a musician, then a teacher and today, will leave you as an engineer. Music was the guiding light that led me out of poverty and abuse, but it was through teaching that I found my way to engineering. My students reignited my love for learning and inspired me to follow my dreams. At UTD, the faculty’s teaching, support and encouragement have guided me. So today, I thank my students for getting me to UTD’s doorstep, our teachers for getting me to this podium, and my friends and family for supporting who I have been, and who I will become.

Choosing the STEM route has not been easy. It has meant living in self-doubt. Are my grades good enough? Are my essays interesting enough? Is my résumé technical enough? It has required grit and perseverance. What did that professor mean? When was the due date? Will the class curve save me? And who could forget the regular reminders of a lack of representation, a constant screech of existing against the grain of conventional belonging. Do I really fit in? Can I overcome this anxiety? Should I trust my instincts? The recurring question, if I am not “from here,” if I am not “of this,” how can it be for me? There is a saying in Spanish that expresses this struggle of feeling out of place: ni de aquí, ni de allá. Not from here, not from there.

For those who resonate with my experience, I urge you to be brave, to choose resilience. Let us be brave in our vulnerability. Using it to know ourselves so well that we are willing to take the risks to go after what we know in our gut is meant for us. Knowing that however much it seems that we don’t belong, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t, and it doesn’t mean that we can’t. Being brave means saying no to what is comfortable, to what has always been done. Looking back and saying, maybe there’s a better way. As we go through life, our dreams may change. As you get to know yourself better, you may realize that the blueprint that you’ve been following wasn’t made for someone like you and that you may need to create your own. If you come to discover this, be gentle and compassionate with yourself. And as you move forward to follow your new dreams, make time to understand the dreams of others.

As hard-working, committed students, we have obsessively focused on our studies. The isolation of COVID made obsessing all too easy. Attending class virtually in pajamas, struggling to reach a deadline while praying that our professor wouldn’t require cameras to be on. But as we step through this fog, let us set aside our code that won’t compile, ENA, statics or calculus homework, and look up and look around. We cannot create a better future for a world we are unfamiliar with. We cannot celebrate our differences through innovative and purposeful design if we lose sight of the people who will use it. It is our responsibility, just as much as it is to be technically proficient, to seek what is unknown to us. We may feel uncomfortable. We will have to step outside of our comfort zone. We can begin today by simply introducing ourselves to the person next to us.

Take the power of the education you’ve earned and, in your wake, leave a trail of enriched lives, measuring success not only in dollar amount, but in positive development of your community. When we silo ourselves, we weaken the tethers that hold our society together and that connect us. Enthusiastically dive into the unfamiliar, recognizing that we are all works in progress and use your power to empower someone else.

Today we are graduates, and tomorrow we will be alumni. What kind of workplace do we want to build, and what kind of future do we want? Let’s begin by making engineering and computer science more equitable and inclusive through our actions.

I invite you to join me in this commitment. Although I cannot single-handedly change the workplace, I can take every opportunity, including this one, to tell anyone who feels like they don’t, that they can belong. That you do belong. To encourage, to do my best to change the environment around me. You can belong with me; we can belong together. We can make new places and find belonging in friendship, support, honesty and encouragement. Somos de aquí y de allá — we are from here AND from there.

Whether your ambition is to start a family, chase a promotion, disrupt an industry or all of the above, I leave you with this. Remember that our words matter. Our actions matter. And our legacy does not have to be large to be powerful. We can leave behind a legacy of thoughtfulness and careful consideration of the impact of our actions on others and through compassionate creation, we can change the world.

Congratulations and the best of luck, Class of 2022!

Thank you.

---

Sarah Tao of Houston is a former educator and musician with a bachelor’s degree in music from the University of Houston. She is graduating today with a degree in electrical engineering and a concentration in electronic devices. As a National Science Foundation undergraduate researcher and Patti Henry Pinch scholar with the UTD Center for Robust Speech Systems lab under Dr. John Hansen, she has published work at Interspeech, Acoustical Society of America and American Society for Engineering Education conferences, where she received the award for best undergraduate paper. She received the Qualcomm REU award and is an undergraduate researcher at UT Dallas’ Micro/Nano Devices and Systems Lab studying under Dr. J.B. Lee. She has held officer positions with the IEEE and the Society of Women Engineers. She is the vice president of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers at UTD and part of IEEE’s Communications Society Committee on Diversity. She is passionate about diversity, equity and inclusion in education and using engineering to support community and connection. After graduation, she plans to work as a propulsion engineer at Boeing.