Cristina Cifuentes

I would also like to pay my respects to the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. I would like to acknowledge and pay tribute to their contribution to the traditions of learning, leadership, responsibility and community which have continued through time and have been embodied in the values of this university. I pay my respects to their Elders past and present, and especially welcome any members of the Indigenous community who may be attending this ceremony. Now, being invited to give the occasional address is a double-edged sword. It’s undeniably a great privilege and I think the university for the opportunity, but it’s also one of the hardest things that one can actually be asked to do. Here is the brief: it should be around 8 minutes and 1000 words long. Does that sound familiar?

It should be light-hearted and memorable, but you should avoid clichés and platitudes. Try and be relevant and insightful but avoid offering useless advice. It keeps getting better: keep it short and entertaining, but remember, it might find its way onto YouTube and then will haunt you for the rest of your career. 

As you’ve head, I’m a lawyer and an economist by training, and as rewarding as both of those professions are, they’re generally not being known for being light-hearted, and I think even memorable might be a bit of a stretch. Relevant and insightful – I’m yet to come across a lawyer who doesn’t think they’re relevant and insightful.

And as to giving useless advice, some would actually say that that’s our stock in trade, but they’re generally on the losing side, so we can ignore them. So, given those limitations, my best prospects of satisfying this brief is to keep my address short and hopefully inspirational. 

So, with that challenge in mind, let me start by reprising my own graduation ceremony in this very hall. I’d like to say, graduates, that sitting where you are now, my attention was very, very clearly focused on the occasional speaker, and I was dreaming of myself standing at this very podium delivering an inspiring speech. The sad truth, though, is that at that time, I was thinking about avoiding having a Jennifer Lawrence moment and stumbling on stage as I went up to get my degree in my very high heels. And yet, here I am. 

So, what have I actually learned from that experience? As the founder of Disneyland once said, ‘If you can dream it, you can do it.’ My take on that is by all means, dream, and you should dream big and dream often. But focusing on more immediate challenges doesn’t need to be a barrier to achieving those dreams. And while we’re on the subject of challenges, I actually did some research with the whole pool of graduates in my various positions and those that I know personally, and I asked them what was it that they found to be the most challenging aspects of transitioning from being a graduate to full-time employment? Now, almost everyone mentioned finding a job, their first job. Now, I sympathise. It felt as if I had applied for over a thousand jobs before I actually landed my first interview, and I didn’t get the job. 

So, some of you will be lucky and find that first job without too much trouble. For others, it’ll be a matter of staying focused and persevering. In my own experience, throughout life and my career, perseverance always trumps luck. And to prove a point, you’re here today not because of luck or who you know, but through commitment and perseverance. And so, I encourage you to be guided by those principles from here on. Now, having got that first job, it appears that the next challenge was having to turn up for work every day. Seriously. Now, I’m sorry, but there is absolutely nothing inspiring that I can weave around having to turn up for work every day. It seems pretty obvious that if you do want to be successful in that job, it does help to turn up every day. So, enough said about that one. 

Then there’s the challenge of avoiding embarrassing yourself in front of the boss. Now, one of my most embarrassing moments was in my first week of work at the State Treasury, and one of my colleagues had just thrown a paper airplane at me, and of course, my immediate reaction was to, as you would, throw it back. Unfortunately, just as I launched it through the air, the Secretary of the Treasury, who was feared universally throughout the public service, and you didn’t want to get on his bad side, just as I launched it he walked into the room, straight into the path of my perfectly executed aeroplane trajectory. Boom. And from the look on his face, clearly, I was the instigator. So, what was the lesson that I learned form that? Well, apart from the value of very good timing, I learned that mistakes, as the Chancellor said, are not necessarily career limiting. Everyone does make them. And not only will you survive, you’ll learn lots of valuable tricks, like how you talk yourself out of embarrassing situations and then use them in speeches 20 years later on. 

Now, the flipside of not embarrassing yourself in front of the boss is having the courage to disagree, and holding firm in the face of that pressure. Now, one of the recent graduates, one of my mentees, in his first job said to me, ‘Companies sometimes think that a good lawyer can find a way to do something, although sometimes the answer is just no.’ I found this difficult, because when you’re starting out, you always want to impress your bosses. Can I say that the challenge of acting with integrity applies to every person and profession, not just graduate lawyers. 

And in case you think the Chancellor and I had actually colluded in our speeches, we hadn’t – but it does demonstrate the universal application about this principle. Personal and personal integrity may seem old fashioned concepts, but I think more than anything this defines who you are and how you will face the challenges that life presents. It applies every day, to every aspect of your life and to every stage of your career. Now, acting with integrity means more than just considering yourself an honest person. It lies at the heart of our choices. It lies at our actions, or reactions, our relationships and ultimately our success and happiness. In my own view, personal and professional integrity should be the cardinal principle guiding your life. Finally, that brings me to the most common challenge raised by the grads that I mentor, the students I’ve lectured, my own children and, in fact, many of the people I’ve worked with over these past 30 years. Now, you know it by the term ‘group assignment’, and this is where I get to give you a bit of gratuitous advice – hopefully it won’t be useful, but it’s advice about perspective. The group assignment is the most valuable experience that you’ll have had in your time at university, even if you don’t rate it among your top 10 moments. 

You’ll quickly learn, if you haven’t already, that life is a series of group assignments, each of them with different topics, different teams, different timeframes, degrees of difficulty and almost certainly different degrees of success. What you’ll also learn in your working life, just as in university, there is no such thing as the A-Team, where everyone is fast, smart and committed. Throughout your career, you’ll find that it’s largely beyond your control who you’re assigned to work with. You won’t always get the A-Team. 

What’s more, you won’t always be the team leader, but every assignment is an opportunity to show leadership. And in fact, true leadership and teamwork is figuring out how to best work together with what you’ve got for a mutually beneficial outcome. Now, what I also came to realise throughout my career is that quite often, I was the B-player, and sometimes even the C-player. 

Now, that didn’t mean that I was mediocre or that I was incompetent. Far from it. It meant that my bosses and I thought that it was time for me to take on a new challenge – that there were opportunities for me to learn from others with greater skills and experience. They were the A-players, and they were passing on their skills and experience to me, the B-player. So long as you’re intellectually curious and you keep challenging yourself, you should be comfortable with the fact that you’re not always going to be the best and the brightest. Turn it to your advantage and take every opportunity to learn from the A-players around you, and in turn, it’s your responsibility to pass on your skills and experience to the B-Team players. 

Now, in case anyone is actually counting that 1000-word limit, I think I might have just gone past it if I don’t include footnotes and the greeting. So, I’ll finish up by pointing out that the very fact that you’re all sitting here is testament to the success of group assignments. You, your family, partners, friends, real and virtual, your fellow students, lecturers, tutors, possibly even your cat and dog, collectively you are all part of the group assignment called getting through university, sane happy and with a piece of paper that can barely touch on the wonderful experiences you’ve had over the past three, four, even five years, and that hopefully will help you to develop that career that you dream of. And that’s a very long assignment topic heading but it’s commensurate with the time and effort that it took to complete the assignment. Well done. On the assessment rubric, I’d say that it’s been an outstanding success. Congratulations graduates. 

You should be immensely proud of what you’ve achieved. Few things will be more useful to your future success than the discipline, the perseverance and collegiality that you’ve demonstrated in meeting the challenges of the past few years. Few things will leave as lasting an impact on you as the support you’ve received and the support that you’ve given to others during this time. So, I invite everyone to join me one more in expressing our pride in our graduates and welcoming them to the start of their new journey. And, to all you graduates, look around and let your deep gratitude to your family, your partners and friends, and the university body, be expressed one last time. Thank you.