Madeleine Albright, the first female Secretary of State and a proud Wellesley alumna, returned to her alma mater to deliver a commencement address that was at once personal and geopolitical. She anchored her speech in the story of Tom Burnett, a passenger on United Flight 93 who called his wife from the hijacked plane and said, 'I know we're going to die. But some of us are going to do something about it.' Albright unpacked the statement with characteristic precision. 'I know we're going to die' is 'a wholly unremarkable statement,' she noted — every person in the audience could say the same thing. The remarkable part was what followed: the decision to act. She then posed a provocative thought experiment: scientists had discovered that human DNA is 95 percent identical to a mouse's. 'Perhaps each night, we should ask ourselves — what have we done to prove there is a difference?' For Wellesley graduates — women who would be expected to lead — the frame was clarifying. The question was not whether you would die but what you would do with the time between now and then. Would you be a drifter or a leader? Would you use your time-saving devices to save time for meaningful action, or would you run out of 'untils' and discover that your plane had crashed and you hadn't done anything about it?