August 20, 2026
Good morning, everyone—and welcome to USC!
Now, it’s a bit of a cliché to tell an incoming class that it is the most remarkable class in USC’s history. But sometimes it’s true, right?
After all, it’s not every class that has among its members the recipient of India’s highest young civilian honor for their work founding mental health and anti-bullying initiatives.
And no other university in the country has among its first-year students the youngest American woman to summit Mount Everest—breaking a record previously held by Lucy Westlake who, guess what, graduated from USC last year.
Now, others here this morning may not have climbed Mount Everest. But you’ve scaled other mountains to get here, perhaps as the first member of your family to attend college, or by leaving your home state for the first time.
Many of you crossed oceans, in some cases coming to this wonderful country for the very first time.
Even if the most difficult part of your journey to USC this morning was simply crossing the 405 freeway, everyone here has so many people to thank. Students, I’d like you to give it up right now for your parents, families, teachers, friends, and mentors who helped you reach this moment. This is their celebration too.
Now, some of you may still be pinching yourselves, wondering how you made it to the university of your dreams. And a big part of the answer is simple: you worked really hard to get here. You took challenging classes, you took a ton of tests, and you answered a lot of questions correctly.
In fact, one-third of you—more than 1200 students—had a perfect GPA in high school. Forty percent of you who took the SAT or ACT scored in the 99th percentile, many of you with perfect scores. That may be a higher percentage than how many of you passed your driver’s tests the first time around.
But now that you’re here, I want to suggest that all the skills that got you into USC aren’t necessarily the same skills that will make you look back at your time here as a success.
Don’t get me wrong. At USC, you’ll still spend a lot of time working on assignments, taking tests, and demonstrating your proficiency in all of the different subjects you’ll be studying.
But during a time like the one we’re living in, when answers are easier to get than ever, something I hope you’ll discover at USC is that, even more important than getting the right answers is asking the right questions.
Most of you have heard of Pixar, the studio that brought us Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Inside Out, to name just a few. It’s amazing how consistently great their movies are—but guess what? They didn’t all start that way. In fact, what you saw in the theaters or on TV bears little resemblance to the earliest cuts of these movies. So how did they go from mediocre or even terrible to great?
One of Pixar’s founders, Ed Catmull, came to USC to talk about this with students a few years ago. At Pixar, he explained, directors take their early cuts to an internal group of artists, writers and filmmakers that Pixar calls the Braintrust. The Braintrust’s job isn’t to tell the director what to do or change. Its job is simply to ask questions—a lot of them.
Catmull calls these “catalytic questions” because, by challenging assumptions, they open up new ways of thinking and creating.
“What would make this character more compelling?”
“Is there a different way to start the movie?”
“What could make the ending more powerful?”
No one knows where the questions will lead. And that is part of what makes them so potent.
As Catmull later wrote, “When we see the point of our work as all about arriving at smart answers, too often we mistake an answer for the end of an effort…[W]hat if, instead of seeing questions as the keys that unlock answers, we saw answers as stepping stones to the next questions?”
Now if you’re a director, probably the last thing you really want to do after you’ve poured your heart into a film is to show it to a room of people who are going to question all your choices. But as Ed Catmull explained, it’s the willingness of directors to engage those questions, and rework their films based on where the questions lead, that has made Pixar movies so consistently successful.
So if questions are that powerful and helpful, why don’t people ask them more often?
I think part of the reason is that asking questions can be embarrassing. You’re basically confessing to everyone around you: “I don’t understand this.” What if everyone else knows the answer but you?
Raising your hand when you know the answer to a question takes some courage. But asking a challenging question when you don’t know the answer? That takes more courage.
Many decades ago, there was a woman who worked at NASA. She was part of a pool of women who performed mathematical calculations for engineers. She was extraordinarily good at her work. But for her to do her job well, she needed to understand the context of the projects she was working on by attending the project meetings. There was only one problem. Only men ever attended those meetings.
So she asked a brave question: “Is there a law against it?” When no one could come up with a good answer, she just started attending.
And guess what she did at those meetings? She asked more questions. As she later recalled, “I asked questions” because “I wanted to know why.” And eventually, “they got used to me asking questions and being the only woman there.”
Thanks to those questions, Katherine Johnson went on to calculate the trajectory for Alan Shepard’s historic spaceflight. She performed critical work for John Glenn’s orbital mission and the Apollo program. Her work was the subject of a book and movie called Hidden Figures.
Katherine Johnson’s story demonstrates the power of asking questions, even when it’s difficult to do so. But her story also shows that, just as important as asking questions is listening to them. And listening isn’t always easy to do either.
Many years ago, back in the 1940s, there was an inventor named Edwin Land. One day, he was vacationing with his family and took a photograph of his daughter Jennifer.
Land put the film away for developing later. But Jennifer asked him a question: “Why can’t I see the picture now?”
Now there are many ways her father could have reacted. He could have gotten annoyed. He could have ignored her. Or he could have walked her through an explanation of the process of developing film back then, before iPhones—by taking the camera to a darkroom, opening up the film, exposing it to chemicals, projecting it onto paper, and waiting for it to dry. And that would have ended the conversation.
But Land didn’t end the conversation. Instead, he took her question seriously—even though his daughter was, get this, only three years old at the time.
Land went for a walk and began thinking about what would be required to place the camera, the film, and the necessary chemistry into a single system. Five years later, the first Polaroid instant camera went on sale.
Of course, his daughter’s question didn’t invent the camera. Land and his team still had to solve all sorts of problems in chemistry, optics, and design. But that work began because a three-year-old refused to accept a familiar reality—and because her father resisted the urge to dismiss her.
The remarkable thing isn’t that a three-year-old asked an unexpected question. Three-year-olds are always asking questions.
The remarkable thing is that Edwin Land listened.
Asking questions isn’t as easy as when we were three years old. In fact, the more we learn with each passing year, the more embarrassing it can be to raise our hand and confess, “I don’t understand. Can you explain that? What do you mean?”
But if we avoid those questions—whether we’re asking them, or someone else is asking us—everyone may end up missing out. Because an unexpected question may inspire you to invent something, like the Polaroid camera, that no one thought was possible. That unexpected question may spur you, like the Pixar Braintrust, to take work you already think is good and make it even better. That unexpected question, like the one Katherine Johnson asked her supervisor, may even lift you into space.
Sometimes the best questions don’t even have an answer, but they can guide you to learn more about who you are, what matters to you, and why.
Creating an environment where we value questions at least as much as answers isn’t just important in our own lives. It’s a collective responsibility that each of us carries as members of a great university like USC. That spirit of inquiry is how we advance our academic research, learning and excellence.
And it’s also how we show other members of our Trojan Family that we care about them enough to listen. That ethic of caring for one another is one of the most precious qualities of the Trojan Family community that you’re now entering.
So let me end with a question: “Are all of you ready to begin your amazing journeys at USC?”
Welcome to USC. Welcome to your Trojan Family.
And before we end in the usual way, let me pull out my Polaroid camera so I can capture this moment, as we make the victory sign and say all together: Fight On!