Cady Baltz

Hello everyone! I am so honored to be a part of this day as we celebrate the Class of 2023. I also would like to extend a warm welcome to all of the family, friends, faculty and staff here whose support has made this journey possible for all of us.

When I first started writing my graduation speech, I struggled. How could I sufficiently celebrate the accomplishments of my amazing peers? After all, as a STEM major, I am not exactly the most eloquent speaker. But luckily for me, a new tool was recently released that could potentially help me out with this. As computer science majors, I’m sure most of you here today have had the chance to test out ChatGPT. So, I decided to ask ChatGPT to write my graduation speech. And this is that speech … just kidding!

But ChatGPT’s speech was pretty inspirational. Here’s an excerpt: “Now, as you prepare to embark on your own unique journeys, I urge you to embrace the spirit of exploration, experimentation and discovery that is at the heart of computer science.” Isn’t that beautiful? So my next thought was, “How can I possibly write my own speech better than that?”

But that led me to think more broadly — how can we, future computer scientists who might soon build these revolutionary emerging technologies, benefit from them without becoming overly dependent on them? Now that AI can even write its own computer code, what unique skills do we possess that make our new college degrees valuable in today’s world?

After all, there has been a lot of talk lately about whether ChatGPT will steal all of our jobs. However, I am not too worried about this being the case for the room full of graduates here today, and I have three reasons why.

The first would be the creativity I witnessed UTD students exhibit every day. I had the chance to be a judge at WEHack here a few months ago, and I was amazed by the unique projects that students could produce in just 24 hours, from artistic video games to intense machine-learning algorithms. Throughout my time in coding classes, I observed how even with the most straightforward assignment, there would always be students who went above and beyond the requirements in the most inventive ways. So, I feel confident that students from this school will always be able to approach problems with solutions that are more innovative than anything ChatGPT could write itself.

The second biggest strength I believe we have is our ability to connect with each other. Computer science is often thought of as one of the more “antisocial” majors, but my experience has proven that assumption to be incorrect. I will forever be grateful for the friendship, support and mentorship I have received from my peers. Whether through my classmates seemingly being online 24/7 to answer questions in the class Discord, or through the dedication of student leaders in planning career and social events, I have found the Jonsson School to be an incredibly welcoming community. This spirit of collaboration and supporting the success of one other are traits that I believe give us the advantage over AI.

The final reason is the boundless ambition demonstrated by UT Dallas students. One of my favorite parts of our culture is that the students here put in the work necessary to be successful. UTD students don’t mess around when it comes to academics — there’s a reason they had to start keeping the library open 24 hours a day. Even beyond academics, I have been inspired by how much time students here will dedicate to their extracurricular pursuits. I honestly believe that Jonsson School student organizations and their events run more smoothly than a lot of companies, and that is all thanks to countless unpaid hours of work put in by student leaders every semester. Overall, I believe that this level of grit and dedication is another factor that ensures we are ready to succeed in a world that innovates more and more rapidly every day.

As computer science and software engineering graduates, we are fortunate to be at the forefront of a field that impacts every single industry. As we have seen just this year, a single program like ChatGPT has the potential to completely change how we search the internet, learn new topics and maybe even write our graduation speeches. While these rapid changes can be scary at times, we must remember that our creativity, ability to connect with each other and individual passions will guide us in successfully shaping the technologies that define our world. As we all move forward into the next stage of our lives, whether that is graduate school, the professional world or any other adventure, we can take comfort in the fact that our human nature is our strength and not a weakness.

Congratulations again to the Class of 2023. I cannot wait to see what you accomplish!

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From Germantown, Tennessee, Cady Baltz is graduating summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. She has served as the vice president of the Society of Women Engineers and as the logistics director of WEHack, UT Dallas’ first gender-inclusive hackathon. She was also a project manager for the Association for Computing Machinery and has performed in Theatre UTD productions. Passionate about learning languages, she spent a semester abroad studying French in Paris and took Chinese courses at UTD. She was named a Grace Hopper Scholar, a Tapia Scholar and a member of the Society of Women Engineers Collegiate Leadership Institute. She has helped mentor younger women in tech through the Ladies in Tech Mentorship Program and the Rewriting the Code Rising Leaders Institute. She is a member of the Eugene McDermott Scholars Program, the CS2 Computing Scholars program and Phi Kappa Phi. To prepare for the professional world, she interned with Meta, Apple and State Farm. After graduation, she plans to work as a software engineer at Netflix in California.