Sotomayor reflects on growing up poor in a Bronx housing project, where no lawyers or judges lived in her neighborhood. She knew nothing about the Supreme Court or how its work affects people's lives. She tells graduates that education is what opened her eyes to what she could become — it exposed her to possibilities she never could have imagined as a child. The message is direct: if you've never been shown what exists, you can't aspire to it. Education is the act of widening the horizon so that ambition has somewhere to reach.