Julianna Margulies, best known for her roles as Nurse Carol Hathaway on ER and Alicia Florrick on The Good Wife, returned to her alma mater Sarah Lawrence College to address the 2010 graduates. She pushed back against the traditional commencement framing of education as a finish line, arguing that the real value of their degrees would only reveal itself over time. Margulies illustrated this with the story of Rachel, a graduating student whose father asked what she had learned in four years. Rachel's answer: 'Dad, I can't tell you what I have learned because it's inherent in who I am now.' This response, Margulies said, 'perfectly illustrates the difference between our school and other colleges and universities.' The metaphor of a gift that keeps being unwrapped captured Sarah Lawrence's distinctive educational philosophy — one-on-one conferences with professors, cross-disciplinary exploration, the mandate to 'question it, challenge it, debate it, think about it' rather than memorize textbooks. Margulies herself was living proof: her film professor taught her to dissect scripts in a way she still used decades later.