In the most personal section of her speech, Terry Gross described her own college experience as a series of failed experiments in identity. Starting college in 1968, she dropped out for a semester to hitchhike cross-country, tried becoming a hippie, briefly joined a wannabe rural commune where they slept in tents and attempted to dig their own well — before realizing she couldn't function without flushed toilets and restaurants within walking distance. Gross shared these stories with characteristic self-deprecating humor, but the insight they led to was profound. Each failed attempt at reinvention wasn't wasted — it was data. And the person she had tried hardest to leave behind, the studious girl from high school, eventually reasserted herself. 'It turns out the studious person I was in high school, the person I thought I bid farewell on leaving home, took her place beside all the people I tried to remake myself into in college.' Who you are, she told the graduates, is still evolving.