Purdue University Northwest graduated its largest class Saturday morning, and while its graduates may not be unique, they carry the forever skills to move the world forward.
Alejandra Y. Castillo, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce who’s now a Senior Fellow for Economic Development with the school, acknowledged in her keynote address that right now, it feels like technology is going to swallow everything whole and people will be needed less and less.
But these events have happened every generation, and the only constant is people who lead the way.
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“Every generation has stood where you are standing; every generation has been wrong,” Castillo said to the 1,100 matriculators who walked at the Hammond campus. “Let me show you what I mean: In 1440, Johannes Gutenberg invents the printing press, and the monks, God bless them, absolutely lose their minds. An abbot named Johannes Trithemius wrote an entire book warning that the printing press would make monks lazy, corrupt their souls, and destroy civilization as they knew it. He was so worried about the printing press … that he had the book printed.
“What actually happened? The printing press sparked the Renaissance, ignited the Reformation, put ideas into the hands of ordinary people. The monks were not erased; they were elevated because the world suddenly needed more teachers, more thinkers, more interpreters of meaning. The technology changed everything. The need for human wisdom changed nothing.”
When Castillo graduated in the 1990s, she was at the edge of two major technological shifts: Gopher, the precursor to the World Wide Web, and the Human Genome project. Ethicists warned that designer babies were going to become a thing, she said.
“Scientists were decoding human life itself: three billion base pairs of DNA, the full instruction manual of who we are, being laid open for the first time in history,” she said. “Some headlines read as if scientists had just handed humanity a death knell. We were scared. We were excited. We were completely, thoroughly confused.”
So Castillo, instead of hiding, earned her graduate degree in public policy and wrote her master’s thesis on the ethics of biotechnology because she wanted to “try to understand the questions it was forcing us to ask.”
What she learned was that the panic was all for naught.
“The internet did not erase us. It connected the world and put the entire library of human knowledge in your pocket. Yes, it also gave us comment sections and some truly unfortunate dance trends, I’m not going to pretend otherwise,” she said.
“And the genome? It did not give us designer babies and dystopia. It gave us the ability to detect cancer earlier. To develop vaccines fast enough that when a pandemic came, we had an answer in months instead of decades. The code of life wasn’t the end of humanity. It was an invitation to understand what makes us irreplaceable.”
Therefore, the graduates are the most adventurous people we have right now, she said.
“The world right now is loud with anxiety. Do not let the fear of the people around you shrink that in you. Some of them mean well. Some of them are selling something. Most of them have simply forgotten what it feels like to stand where you are standing,” she said. “Your job is not to inherit their fear. Your job is to help them see the possibility.”
Sasha Robinson of Calgary, Alberta, giddily chatted with fellow families as she waited for commencement to start. Robinson’s daughter, Shelby Robinson, came to PNW to play on its women’s golf team.
“I’m super-happy, super-proud and super-anxious, lots of emotions,” Sasha Robinson said. “She’s coming back to Canada, but then she might come back here for med school.”
Shelby Robinson’s former teammate, Sarah Aurelio of St. John, was just as happy as Shelby’s mom was to be there. Aurelio graduated two years ago from PNW.
“It’s very reminiscent of old times, so I’m happy to be here, but mostly, I’m keeping Sasha calm,” Aurelio said, laughing.
Of the 1,612 candidates graduating in 2026, 1,278 of them earned bachelor’s degrees and 331 completed master’s degrees, according to a school fact sheet. Additionally, four students finished their doctorates.
Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.