Pouya

It was like, I think it was just like three or four or five people was the entire staff for this daily show.

And Sandy and I worked very closely together.

And I always really liked him.

He was a smart guy with immense self-confidence, which he wore lightly, charmingly, I thought.

He'd been a foreign correspondent.

He'd been a reporter for The Washington Post.

He'd been the host of All Things Considered, all before we did Dateline.

And when Dateline was canceled, he went on to a series of very fancy-sounding jobs.

He was the dean of the School of Communication at American University.

Then he was the head of Voice of America.

Then he was president of Goucher College, which is how this call happened.

I'm from Baltimore.

I have some personal connections to Goucher College.

But I did not want the job of graduation speaker for all the reasons that I've already told you.

It just seemed like a hard assignment.

But I decided to do it.

For reasons that I ended up putting into the speech and telling the audience about.

I also included in the speech one very personal story about me and Goucher College.

I remember I was not sure I should include in the speech, but I did.

And it got a response.