“How to be fierce”
CPP Commencement 2025
CLASS - Session 2
May 18, 2025, 12pm
Sarah Krainin
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Theatre & New Dance
What a great day to graduate from Cal Poly Pomona!
Dear families, friends, colleague, graduates–
I am honored address you today, in celebration of your hard work and success. As our Dean said, I am the Chair of the Department of Theatre and New Dance.
Our Department is small. TND students—show them how small!
That’s pretty small!
Why are we demonstrating the small size of our department? Because the message I want to share with you today has to do with feeling small.
Today, you may feel the biggest you have EVER felt! And yet, some of us may still feel small–Wondering if we’re ever going to be important enough; if our impact will ever be big enough. I mean, some of us seem to have our stuff together, and yet others may be filled with anxiety, or even fear about what lies ahead.
And to be sure, these days some of us have true and real reasons to feel fear. There are people who would want you to feel small, like you should need to hide, or limit the potential you have to share with this world. But these people cannot defeat you. Because in every situation you find yourself, you already know how to be FIERCE.
This College, and your CPP education, have truly given you no. other. choice.
You are FIERCE because you know how to be critical and consider complex problems;
You are FIERCE because you know how to express your ideas and your identity, through writing, through speech, through art;
You are FIERCE because you understand the complexity of the world around you, what came before you, and our collective potential when we start with mutual understanding, and together, stand for what we know is right.
And this knowledge is not just yours alone. Look around you and see this knowledge brimming in every other graduate here too. See how even when you feel small or alone, you are indeed part of a community of thinkers, communicators, and doers. So even when you feel your smallest, you have no. choice. but to be FIERCE when you are part of a FIERCE community that believes in you, like you believe in them.
Look around you. Really. Look around you!
Look in the eyes of your friends and know they see you as their steadfast support;
Look in the eyes your faculty and know they will soon see you as their peers;
Look in the eyes your little sibling, your little cousin, your younger neighbor, and know that they see you as an inspiration, and evidence that they, too, can do it.
So the next time you feel small, like Theatre & New Dance, look around you and see that you really have no choice but to be FIERCE.
Turn to your friend next to you—really—turn to them and say, “Friend, I am FIERCE! I am unstoppable! I will learn from my mistakes! I will advance my purpose!”
Yes, you will.