Power: ’Focus on a calling, not a career’

Samantha Power speaks at Commencement - Samantha Power urges graduates to 'focus on a calling, not a career' In Commencement address, USAID administrator encourages Class of 2022 to embrace uncertainty to discover 'life's most rewarding gifts' Commencement speaker Samantha Power challenged to the Johns Hopkins University Class of 2022 to be open to embracing new directions in life even if that means diverging from their intended career plans. Ron Daniels speaks at Commencement - In remarks to graduates at Homewood Field on Monday morning, Power-administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author-offered up her own backstory as an example, sharing that she aspired to be a professional athlete and then pivoted to sports broadcasting before seeing news coverage of college students her age protesting the Chinese government in Tiananmen Square in 1989. "I saw raw footage coming from Beijing that stopped me in my tracks and changed the trajectory of my life," Power said. "The plan I had to be a sportscaster suddenly felt inadequate to the challenges facing the world. I no longer had a career, but for the first time, I had something that I hadn't actually known I was missing-not a career path, but a real-world calling. I wanted to stand, if not literally in front of tanks, on the side of those fighting for their dignity and freedom." While we all crave certainty, Power said, it's an illusion.