My grandmother was born in 1927 in a small town of a few thousand people called Hernando. At only 14 years old, she left Mississippi with her 14 brothers and sisters to escape the horrors of the Jim Crow South and lay the foundation for a better life. She ran in the dark of the night with eight dollars in the pocket of her hand sewn cotton dress.

My grandmother had no job and no college education, but an abundance of faith. 

Though she only gave birth to nine kids in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she eventually settled, everyone she met called her Mother.

On the other hand, she wasn’t very good with names.

Sometimes she called me “Chicken,” sometimes she called me Shelby, but she always called me on time to go to the early church service on Sunday. Mother’s church call came through every week and she always told me to walk by faith and not by sight. We sat through hundreds of sermons together, singing hymns and holding hands. By the time I graduated from high school, she was 84. 

“Go on out to California,” she told me. “Run! I have faith in you.”

I did just that.

In September of 2011 when many of us were packing our bags and preparing to make the move to Stanford, I said my final goodbye to Mother, christening my brand new laptop as I typed her obituary. I got on a Boeing 747 in Milwaukee’s tiny airport, trying to calm the uneasiness in my legs. I told myself to walk by faith and not by sight, that if Mother could dare to be something bigger than the condition in which she was born, then so could I. And like so many of us here today, celebrating with loved ones (and without), I have.

At Stanford we’ve been given the freedom, the flexibility, and the encouragement to take leaps of faith and see where it would lead us. If you told me that day on the plane that I’d spend three months in Chile, climbing the Andes mountains or that I would dance for 24 consecutive hours to raise money for health clinics in Africa or that I’d take a class taught by Angela Davis, I would’ve laughed in your face.

All the unfamiliar faces and kids who were once complete strangers standing next to me at crossing the line have become my best friends. You all are some of the most incredibly motivated, brilliant, compassionate people I’ve ever met.

We are immersed in a culture that lets us take risks, discover new ways of thinking, redefine what is authentically “us.” We are collaborative, we are diverse, we have entrepreneurial spirit, we have school spirit, but most of all we have faith in something better. 

Whether parts of your Stanford experience were as familiar as playing pick up soccer on Wilbur Field or as foreign as bungee jumping off a bridge in Capetown, South Africa, none of us could have imagined the journey any other way. Call it the Stanford experience, the magic of The Farm, or the perks of the bubble: it’s been incredible. 

As our time on campus comes to a close, I am reminded that at one point many of us ran, just like my grandmother fled in the stifling heat of the Mississippi summer. We came here with no guarantees, but holding on to the belief that this four years would be everything we’d dreamed.

Even more importantly, ’15, we are running toward something else, something better, something new that we can’t quite predict. Embrace that something, 2015! 

Run! I have faith in you.