How to Write a Resume Summary that Grabs Attention

How to Write a Resume Summary that Grabs Attention How to Write a Resume Summary that Grabs Attention One of the key points I cover in my free resume writing course, is the need to stand out by writing a powerful resume summary.You only get a very short amount of time to make an impression and a well written resume summary can make all the difference.But I think the resume summary is one of the most misunderstood aspects of resume writing. Most people write summaries that are almost guaranteed never to be read.Let me show you what I mean.Here is a resume example that I recently received. I have disguised the client, but she gave me permission to share herbei original resume (which cost her $400 from another resume writer) along with the rewriteclick image to see a larger versionThis resume summary is typical of too many resumes. It may look and sound very professional but heres the truth No one will read it.Every recruiter or hiring manager faced with that big block of text will simp ly skip it to get to the professional history. The only positive thing about the resume summary as it stands right now is the headline Marketing Manager which clearly communicates to recruiters who this candidate is and what types of jobs she should be considered for. Other than that, its useless.So Im going to take this resume and rework the summary in stages so you can see exactly how to spice up your own resume introduction.First, lets deal with the fact that its just a big block of text that no one will read. Im going to try breaking it up and creating sub-headers and bolded text calling out the most important information recruiters need to know about this candidate. That way, if someone wants to skip the introduction, theyll still learn some persuasive facts about SydneyThats better but I still dont feel the chunk of text in the middle is going to be read by most recruiters. I also think its filled with fluff. Sydney may claim to be a proactive manager, team player and tactical planner who has contributed to revenue growth but who knows if thats true?Instead of making those unsubstantiated claims, Im going to prove that theyre true by replacing all those words with short bullet points highlighting some of her best successesBetter, but I wonder if I can do more? I wonder how I can use this resume summary to prove that Sydney is really something special? One possibility is to go to her LinkedIn page, look for endorsements and pull out some of the best quotes. I can then use them to provide third-party proof that Sydney is worth hiring.I tried that here, and this version is evidence that I dont always have the best ideas first time roundI like the quotes, but I think they make the introduction too long and they distract from those compelling bullet points. A busy recruiter will probably just skip this whole section looking for the professional experience. Ive just tried to do too much here.But all that work led me to the final version a resume summary that does everything I wanted.I decided that I needed to get the focus back on those key facts that prove Sydney is a high achiever, so I selected just one quote to use. This quote says it all really and by setting it off to the side, we keep the introduction from being too long and too busy.I have also redesigned the resume. Sydney is a marketing manager for the tech industry in 2011 so her resume shouldnt look like something from 1986.The redesigned resume summary may not be to everyones taste, but I would bet good money on its being more effective during a job search than the resume Sydney was using previously.One last time here is the original resumeAnd here is the new versionnotenzeichen that this exact approach may not be right for you. You may not have LinkedIn testimonials. A different approach to conveying value might be appropriate. (For example, highlighting awards you have won or starting your resume with a personal statement) The key to success is not to copy any one approac h but to think of your resume summary as the place to grab attention and prove your value and to do it in as concise a way as possible.Good luckPS If youre interested in professional resume help, just ask us for a quote here. Well take a look at your current resume, provide our ideas and feedback, and give you a firm, no-obligation price quote. And well do it by either email or phone your choice. Just click here to ask for your feedback and quote.Other articles you might find helpfulShould You Use a Resume Template?3 Easy Ways to Disguise Resume GapsThe Simple Resume Hack That Will Transform Your Job Search

Something to Prove

Something to Prove Something to Prove Something to ProveRobots have emerged as a force in infrastructure inspection.That is especially true in the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries, which are not an obvious test bed for new technology. Because their assets sortiment into the billions of dollars, their managers are very cautious about entrusting their facilities to any new technology. Yet even something as simple as inspecting storage tanks for corrosion and leaks shows why robots are increasingly popular.Tanks are exposed to weather outside and aggressive chemicals inside. Users must periodically look for damage on their walls, roofs, and especially floors, where water under the tank can cause invisible corrosion.To inspect a tank, operators must empty it, vent any toxic gases, and erect scaffolds to get to high structures. Depending on the intensity of the inspection, this takes weeks or even months. It also exposes workers to heights and confined spaces, two of the industrys m ost common causes of accidents and death.Enter the robots. Magnetic robots crawl walls, traverse roofs, and search floors for flaws. Quadcopters do visual inspections inside. They are potentially faster and cheaper than humans, since they eliminate the need for scaffolds and confined space work.Recommended for You A Special Report on RoboticsOn offshore oil platforms, drones check equipment and remote operated vehicles to search for problems in submerged pipelines. On land, they scan gases flaring from tall stacks for equipment leaks and overheating. Underground, their pan-and-tilt cameras illuminate the sides of pipes too small for humans to enter.At Waukesha-Pearce Industries, a 100-year-old oilfield services company, Terry Nelson uses crawlers to check fire tubes, 20-foot-high chimneys that regenerate desiccants used to remove water and contaminants from natural gas.We used to shut the well, cool the tube, and pull it out and lay it on its side with a large crane, said Nelson, th e companys production equipment services manager. Now we leave it in place until it cools below 200 F and send in a robot to map the erosion, corrosion, dents, and fissures. It takes six-to-eight hurs.Robots cannot do everything yet, said Brad Tomer, vice president of operations at Avitas Systems, which applies Big Data techniques and robots for Waukesha-Pearce. Yet they do some things really well.In a given plant, they might do 40 percent of what welches done manually before, he said.And robotic inspectors are getting smarter and faster. Using advanced analytics and machine learning, Tomer slashed the time it took to survey 20 different wells to seven days, from 40.Industry loves those numbers. It loves the improved safety and lower workers compensation costs. The efficiency of robots reduces the need for people, and it likes the reduction in workforce.Yet, given the size, cost, and complexity of their facilities, the industry remain cautious. So, why did refiners let in the robots ? And how did they learn to trust them to conduct tests as well as human beings? The answer is complex, and it says a lot about how the next wave of robots might penetrate other industries.DriversSafety played an important role in bringing robots to Dow Chemical, said Twain Pigott, Dows lead robot architecture specialist. His group wanted to use technology to reduce confined space, elevated fall, and equipment cleaning accidents.Dow Chemical uses drones to inspect the inside of storage tanks. It is safer than using workers and eliminates the need for scaffolds. Image Dow ChemicalThose three account for largest number of injuries and fatalities in our industry, he explained.Economics were also powerful. Because robots do not require scaffolds or ropes, they deploy faster and can reduce inspection costs by up to two-thirds, said Waukesha-Pearces director of drilling and production services Fred Stow.In the old days, you would drive out to the middle of nowhere and spend all day runnin g 100 different diagnostic tests, he said. Now, I can fly there, map the assets, and take visual and infrared readings on the site. If we measure the assets mora than once, we can see how they change and do predictive maintenance and root cause analysis of problems.Oil and gas were ready for those arguments. Since the 1980s, many had used remotely operated vehiclestethered underwater robotsto inspect offshore pipelines at depths where humans could not dive safely.They were also converting cylindrical pigs used to clean oil, gas, and chemical pipelines into smart pigs outfitted with sensors to measure leakage and pipeline integrity.Yet the industry never took robots seriously until late 2010, said Adam Serblowski, who heads Shells robotics program. Thats when drones opened peoples eyes. They were fully commercial, and we didnt have to put in time to make sure the platform worked.Serblowski first used drones to inspect the tall towers that flare off excess natural gas. Drones equipped with an infrared camera could inspect the flare while it was running and identify hot spots and uneven heating that were invisible to workers who mounted the tower only after it had cooled down.Today, Serblowski describes his use of drones as a list a mile long. For example, he now uses an Elios quadcopter encased in a pliant cage to inspect the interior storage tank walls and roofs. If it bumps into a protruding pipe or support, the cage absorbs the impact and the drone keeps flying rather than crashing to the ground.We still have to drain and vent the tank to make sure there is no explosive atmosphere present, Serblowski said. Still, its a gain because we dont have to put a person inside and we can inspect the roof without any scaffolding.The downside is that battery life is not great, since the drone has to carry the added weight of the cage and the sensors, he said.As a result, a full inspection takes two days. Still, that is much faster than the time needed to build and remove an interior scaffold.Drones awoke a new interest in crawlers. Dow uses miniature robots outfitted with pan-tilt-zoom high-definition cameras to crawl through smaller pipes that run between parts of its chemical plants. Shell uses crawlers with ultrasonic sensors to test its tank floors.And the more industry invested in robots, the more companies launched new and better ordnungsprinzips.New ModelsThe result is a growing profusion of ever-more capable robots. One example is Inuktun InCommand Robotics modular crawlers, which let users outfit one of several different fahrgestell with an assortment of tracks, controllers, manipulators, cameras, and sensors.Instead of having one robot for a pipeline, one for the vertical walls of a tank, and one for railcar, users can buy our kit and configure it for whatever task you need, said Wes Kirkland, Inuktuns vice president of operations. And the kit is not any more expensive than its competitors.The kit includes magnetic tracks that let the rob ot crawl up a wall, through a pipe, or under a roof. Because the system is waterproofInuktuns first robots inspected water pipesmagnetic robots can inspect offshore production risers as they come out of the water and ship hulls below the water line in lieu of bringing the vessel into a dry dock.Another robot developer, Diakont, is building a crawler that will inspect gasoline and petrochemical storage tank floorswithout draining the tank first. Diakont has proven its Stingray robot in 12 fire water tanks, and plans to inspect its first petrochemical tank this fall.Naturally, the robot is rated for an explosive environment. Its umbilical conduit, which also acts as a winch, delivers electricity and pressurizes the robot with nitrogen to 50 bar.If any rubber seals or gaskets fail, instead of fuel going inside the robot you have nitrogen going out, said Steve Trevino, Diakonts business development and strategy manager. It has 3-D sonar to avoid floating pipes, columns, or cathodic prot ection supports inside the tank. It uses magnetic flux leakage sensors and eddy current sensors to find and characterize any tank floor anomalies.New tanks are usually not inspected until they are 10 or 15 years old, Trevino explained. A lot can happen in that interval. Because operators dont have to drain their tanks, our robot makes it affordable to do more frequent inspections. That lets them plan in advance when they need to drain the tank to replace some plate on the floor.New sensors have added to robot capabilities.In fact, Kraken Robotics started out making synthetic aperture sonar, which builds images from multiple sonar transducers. By using video game chips, which excel at building images, to process the information, it slashed system costs dramatically.Krakens sensors provide enough range and resolution to image 3cm gas bubbles leaking from a pipeline hundreds of meters away.Resolution is important for trusting data, David Shea, Krakens vice president of engineering, sai d. Our system produces almost optical quality images. Theres no doubt about whats out there.Kraken decided to get into the robot business when users had trouble integrating the new sensor into existing ROVs. The business jumped when oil prices started to decline.Offshore oil and gas companies, which inspect thousands of miles of underwater pipelines, were already using ROVs tethered to large ships. Switching to Krakens ROVs increased their scanning range significantly, helping operators complete inspections faster and reducing the cost of operating expensive survey ships.A methane sensor developed by Lance Christensen, a scientist at NASAs Jet Propulsion Lab, could have a similar impact on drones. His laser spectrometer, developed to search for signs of life on the Mars Curiosity rover, samples methane down to the parts per billion level. That is three orders of magnitude more sensitive than existing devices.Chevron and the Pipeline Research Council helped repurpose the sensor to le t drones search for gas leaks while flying along a pipeline. Drones can also measure methane and wind velocity downwind from a petrochemical plant and use the data to pinpoint any gas leaks.NASA licensed the technology for commercialization.TrustAs noted, managers running billion-dollar-plus refineries and petrochemical plants are cautious about new technology. So how did they learn to trust robots? The answer depends on whom you ask.For many, the answer is simple Youre not necessarily trusting the robot, Inuktuns Kirkland said. Youre trusting the sensor. If it works in your hand, then it should work on your robot. All the robot does is put it there.Besides, humans are always in the loop. This usually includes one person guiding the robot and another carrying out the inspection. At Dow, for example, certified inspectors deploy robots only after putting together a detailed inspection plan. Even when a robot autonomously executes a plan, the inspector is responsible for the quality of the data.Its no different than having the inspector in the process, Pigott said.Yet operators remain cautious. If they follow a standard, it is, Trust, but verify.Before Waukesha-Pearce began inspecting fire tubes, for example, Nelson attacked a perfectly good unit with drills and grinders to simulate different defects.When we ran the robot through the pipe and it found every anomaly, then we knew we had something, he said.Verification can take time, added Avitas Tomer. This is especially true for Avitas, which analyzes data from multiple sensors to predict maintenance problems.One client gave us 30 years of maintenance data but held back the last five years to see how well we could predict what would happen, he recalled. We were very accurate, but even then, they spent one year doing normal inspections and running our system together to see how they compared.If todays robots already reduce human risk and cut inspection costs and time, the next generation of increasingly autonomous robots promises even more benefits. Once a human has selected where to inspect a facility, the robot will fly to those spots, take measurements, and leave. Large facilities and offshore oil platforms may even have resident robots that do those tasks daily.In order to do analytics well, we need to detect changes in the condition of equipment, and that is facilitated by taking the same measurements over and over again, Tomer said.Repeated observations under different conditions also improves the abilityand speedof machine learning tools to recognize and analyze the data they receive. When assigned to create 3-D models of 20 wells, Avitas took four hours to survey the first one and 48 hours to process the data. After learning to integrate data from several sensors and account for changing light and shadows, the last well took less than 15 minutes to survey and six hours to crunch the numbers.The more you use machine learning, the more accurate it gets, Tomer said. It becomes more econ omical and causes fewer problems.Tomers goal is to combine autonomous flights and sensor data with digital plant models and operational plant data to do more sophisticated types of predictive maintenance. When you combine data, thats really where you get insights, he said.Others are more cautious. That includes Patrick Saracco, vice president of technology solutions at Cyberhawk Innovations, a company that began inspecting North Sea oil platforms 10 years ago. While Cyberhawk is investigating machine-based image analysis and embraces drone autonomy, Saracco believes humans will remain in the loop for a long time.There is always the risk of missing 1 or 2 percent of existing defects, he said. And the oil and gas industry is so diverse, its hard to automate. Each offshore platform is different, and their materials differ in color, refractivity, and temperature. Furthermore, the risk factors are so high, you want to have a pilot there to take over should something happens.Also, platfor m owners want pilots to have training and competencenot just in flying, but in risk assessment. They have to know what to do when there is electromagnetic interference or strong wind gusts when flying under the deck, Saracco said. Autonomous flights will get there, but certainly the technology and competence of those systems is not there yet.Serblowski agrees Today, the human is absolutely doing the inspection. Someone is processing and signing off on the data.Yet he, too, is drawn by promise of data analytics to improve robotic inspection efficiency. Companies like Shell already use digital control systems with remote sensors and actuators to run their plants.It is not much of a stretch to envision digital robotic systems inspecting their plants as well.Alan s. brown is a senior editor at Mechanical Engineering magazine.Readthe latest issue of theMechanical Engineering Magazine.

J.K. Rowling Failure gave me an inner security

J.K. Rowling Failure gave me an inner securityJ.K. Rowling Failure gave me an inner securityIts graduation season, and we here at Ladders have decided to take a look back and showcase some past commencement addresses that stand the test of time. Below is the full transcript of J.K. Rowlings commencement address to Harvards Class of 2008President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.The first thing I would like to say is thank you. Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honor, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the worlds largest Gryffindor reunion.Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. Th e commencement speaker that day welches the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I cant remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.You see? If all you remember in years to come is the gay wizard joke, Ive come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals the first step to self-improvement.Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called real life, I want to extol the crucial importance of einbildungskraft.Itscommencement seasonFollow Ladders Commencement Addresses magazine on Flipboard to watch and read all of the most inspiring speeches from this year and years past.These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.Looking back at the 21-year-old that I welches at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I welches striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.I welches convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.I canbedrngnis remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsib ility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbr eak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average persons idea of success, so high have you already flown.Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that m y parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all in which case, you fail by default.Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyones total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my brde gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably mo st transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty Internationals headquarters in London.There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trial s and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing , from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his countrys regime, his mother had been seized and executed.Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.Amnesty mobilizes thousands of people who have never been tortured or imp risoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other peoples places.Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathize.And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not etwas them personally they can refuse to know.I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.What is more, those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, i n part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other peoples lives simply by existing.But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other peoples lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the worlds only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrat e your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already we have the power to imagine better.I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my childrens godparents, the people to whom Ive been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you rem ember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdomAs is a tale, so is life not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.I wish you all very good lives.Thank you very much.