研究生英语 课文翻译 第一三五单元.docVIP

Unit 1 Stay hungry, stay foolish! Thank you.Im honored to be with you today for your commencement [k?mensm?nt] from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, this is the closest Ive ever gotten to a college graduation. Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life. The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? At the age of 17, I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldnt see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didnt interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting. It wasnt all romantic. I didnt have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends rooms. I returned coke bottles for the five cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna [hɑ:rekri?n?] temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy [k?liɡr?fi] instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed [k?liɡrɑ:f]. I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif [serif] and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about