Taylor Swift Tells NYU Graduates, ‘My Mistakes Led to the Best Things in My Life’

The morning of Wednesday, May 18 bloomed bright and warm over New York City. All across town, New York University’s graduating class of 2022 donned their deep purple gowns and packed themselves onto the uptown 4 train to Yankee Stadium for the annual All-University Commencement Ceremony.

In some ways, it was the same as it ever was: giddy parents brandishing outdated digital cameras, girls tottering in completely impractical pink platform heels, cap-wearing boys oozing too-cool-for-it-all vibes. But this was also no normal year: this is NYU’s first in-person commencement ceremony since 2019, a byproduct of the decimating pandemic.

Plus, Taylor Swift was coming.

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In a wild twist, the university announced earlier in March that departing students would be hearing a speech from the pop mega-star as they bid farewell to their undergraduate careers, as NYU had decided to award Swift with an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts. When news broke that Swift would be appearing in-person at the ceremony as the Respondent on Behalf of the Honorary Degree Recipients, her rabid super-fans, known as Swifties, didn’t hesitate to do what they do best: attack.

Swift devotees descended upon the social media accounts of NYU seniors, offering as much as $500 for the free tickets students are awarded to give to their family members, the New York Post reported in April.

“Some messages are to the point, like ‘Are you giving your tickets away?’” NYU senior Sean Nesmith said. “A girl said she would be my ‘biggest fan’ with a megaphone and cheering me on during the ceremony if I gave her a ticket.”

“I can’t say I’ve heard of anyone actually doing it,” Trace Miller, a rising junior at NYU in attendance at the ceremony, told The Daily Beast. “I just know people that got offers on Reddit for like $400. And I saw screenshots of people’s DMs on Twitter where people have reached out being like, I will pay you hundreds of dollars for this ticket.”

When Swift finally took the stage clad in NYU violet, draped in regalia signifying her doctorate, the crowd uniformly lost their minds.

“Hi, I’m Taylor,” she began. “Last time I was in a stadium this size, I was dancing in heels and wearing a glittery leotard. This outfit is much more comfortable.”

After cycling through bestowing predictable, yet heartfelt, thanks to the university and to her support system, Swift's speech shifted into gear.

“As a kid, I always thought I would go away to college, imagining the posters I’d hang on the wall of my freshmen dorm,” she said. “I even set the ending of my music video for my song ‘Love Story’ at my fantasy imaginary college, where I meet a male model reading a book on the grass and with one single glance, we realize we had been in love in our past lives. Which is exactly what you guys all experienced at some point in the last 4 years, right?”

Swift acknowledged the difficulties students experienced attending NYU during a pandemic, where all dreams of normalcy were eradicated. Then, she doled out some advice.

“I won’t tell you what to do because no one likes that,” she said. “I will, however, give you some life hacks I wish I knew when I was starting out my dreams of a career, and navigating life, love, pressure, choices, shame, hope, and friendship.”

“Life can be heavy, especially if you try to carry it all at once. Part of growing up and moving into new chapters of your life is about catch and release. What I mean by that is, knowing what things to keep, and what things to release. You can’t carry all things, all grudges, all updates on your ex, all enviable promotions your school bully got at the hedge fund his uncle started. Decide what is yours to hold and let the rest go.”

“Learn to live alongside cringe,” she continued. “No matter how hard you try to avoid being cringe, you will look back on your life and cringe retrospectively.

“As a person who started my very public career at the age of 15, it came with a price,” Swift said. “And that price was years of unsolicited advice. Being the youngest person in every room for over a decade meant that I was constantly being issued warnings from older members of the music industry, the media, interviewers, executives. This advice often presented itself as thinly veiled warnings.”

“See, I was a teenager in the public eye at a time when our society was absolutely obsessed with the idea of having perfect young female role models. It felt like every interview I did included slight barbs by the interviewer about me one day ‘running off the rails.’ That meant a different thing to every person who said it to me. So I became a young adult while being fed the message that if I didn’t make any mistakes, all the children of America would grow up to be perfect angels.”

“However, if I did slip up, the entire earth would fall off its axis and it would be entirely my fault and I would go to pop star jail forever and ever. It was all centered around the idea that mistakes equal failure and ultimately, the loss of any chance at a happy or rewarding life. This has not been my experience. My experience has been that my mistakes led to the best things in my life.”

“I leave you with this: We are led by our gut instincts, our intuition, our desires and fears, our scars and our dreams. And you will screw it up sometimes,” Swift concluded. “As long as we are fortunate enough to be breathing, we will breathe in, breathe through, breathe deep, breathe out. And I’m a doctor now, so I know how breathing works.”

“I hope you know how proud I am to share this day with you. We’re doing this together. So let’s just keep dancing like we’re……the class of 22.”

Later on Wednesday, NYU is holding a second commencement ceremony to honor 2020 and 2021 graduates who were cheated out of an in-person commencement due to the pandemic. Swift will not be in attendance at the latter event, leaving some NYU Swifties bereft.

Judith Heumann, a celebrated diversity rights activist, is receiving an honorary doctorate of humane letters from NYU this year and will be addressing the classes of 2020 and 2021.

“Long story short, you called up the Class of 2020 and 2021 just to break us like a promise,” a Taylor Swift for NYU 2020/2021 Commencement Change.org petition reads (it has 656 signatures). “The Class of 2020 and 2021 would like to emphasize that this has nothing to do with Judith Heumann. Judith is a renowned activist and inspiration to us all.”

The petition writer requests that both Swift and Heumann speak later in the day, to make things fair. “It is ‘casually cruel’ to put Judith and Taylor in this situation. No speaker could compete with Taylor Swift. She is the voice of our generation.”

Indeed, I was expecting way more Swifties loitering outside the stadium looking to sneak in last-minute or even just tailgate, but it was a pretty typical college crowd. Nonetheless, excited conversations rippled through the security lines; some of the most heightened anticipation came from girls with flower garlands affixed to their graduation caps.

“We’re tremendously proud of all six honorary degree recipients, very much including Ms. Swift, and are thrilled they will be participating in our first in-person Commencement since 2019,” NYU spokesman John Beckman said in a statement.

“The nomination process and the consideration of candidates are confidential,” Beckman added, but NYU selects “honorees whose talents, achievements, and actions will serve as examples for our graduates.”

“Honestly, a lot of people are excited to see her, but everyone’s kind of scratching their head about the Doctor of Fine Arts thing,” Miller said.

Brittany Spanos, a Rolling Stone senior writer and NYU alum, taught a class on Swift this year at the NYU's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music.

“It’s nice to see a younger artist get celebrated in this way,” Spanos told The Daily Beast. “When we think of honorary doctorates, they usually go to older artists. And I think Taylor’s connections to New York are a big part of this. Her 1989 era was very steeped in her move to New York and her love of New York City, and I think she’s created a lot of ties to New York in her music.”

Swift famously grew up on a Christmas Tree Farm in Pennsylvania before making the move to Nashville, where she cut her teeth in country lyricism in after-school writing sessions. Swift’s transition from country to pop to diehard advocate for the rights of musicians was gradual, but the skill with which she’s executed each shift made her evolution feel as natural as growing up, which many devotees in her core audience have done alongside her.

“When Taylor first debuted, we were still listening to music on CDs and album sales were hitting a million,” Spanos said. “She was a MySpace artist, and she’s also coming from country and moving into streaming and developing her own relationship with that. She provides a really strong picture of what success in the music industry looks like, which is interesting for students who are studying to become recording artists.”

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