Lamb shared one of his most transformative experiences: teaching creative writing to women serving time in a maximum-security prison. When he first walked through the gates of York Correctional Institution, he expected to find people fundamentally different from himself. Instead, he found women who were funny, intelligent, wounded, and desperate to be heard — not so different from his college students. The act of teaching, he discovered, collapsed the walls between 'us' and 'them.' When his students wrote about their childhoods, their mistakes, their hopes for their children, Lamb recognized his own humanity reflected back. He told the Connecticut College graduates that this recognition — that we are more alike than different — is the most important lesson any education can offer.