CNN correspondent Soledad O'Brien urged Cornell's Class of 2007 to ignore critics and naysayers and to define themselves on their own terms during her address at Senior Convocation, May 26 at Schoellkopf Stadium.

"I don't give advice -- I don't believe in advice," O'Brien told the audience -- and then proceeded to tell engaging and personal anecdotes of life lessons from her family and career.

When she was faced early in her career with unsolicited advice about her ethnicity and her unusual name, O'Brien's Cuban-born mother told her, "Well, lovey, most people are idiots."

"It was the most useful advice I've ever gotten," O'Brien said. Much later, as President David Skorton noted in his introduction, she would be named by Newsweek as one of the 15 People Who Make America Great.

"As you are about to embark upon a stage in your life where they're all going to start weighing in on who you are and what you can do, they'll try to define you and spell out for you what they think you will never be able to accomplish. Well, it is your job, graduates, to ignore each and every one of them," she said.

O'Brien took inspiration from her parents -- a black mother and a white Australian father -- who met in 1958 at Johns Hopkins University, who could not legally marry in Maryland because of the era's miscegenation laws, and who were advised not to have children. O'Brien said she is the fifth of their six children. [All of them, incidentally, graduated from Harvard.]

"My parents taught me by how they lived their lives -- they never let anyone define them," she said. "They certainly would not allow others to set their goals or flesh out their dreams or map out their ambitions. They listened to their hearts and mapped out their lives, the lives they wanted to live."

The graduates, too, will hear from those who want to define them, she said.

"The key, the hard part -- and the best part, truly -- is to learn to listen to your own heart and follow your own dreams."

"Don't worry about finding your job, worry about finding your passion," she said. "Know that there are a zillion paths to success, if not more, and that defining success on your own terms is far more important in the long haul than how much money you make."

O'Brien also drew examples from "ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances" from some of her award-winning coverage of such stories as Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Asian tsunami. "One of the upsides of my job is I get to learn from people I interview," she said. "Every day, I get to see examples of true perseverance, of challenges that were faced and overcome."

She related the story of the 6-year-old boy she encountered in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, who assumed responsibility for a group of younger children, including his 5-month-old brother, when they were airlifted to safety and separated from their parents.

O'Brien began her career in local news in Boston and went on to report for NBC's "Today," and anchor "Weekend Today" and "Weekend Nightly News" on NBC and "American Morning" on CNN. "The respect Ms. O'Brien commands largely flows from professional and personal qualities such as professionalism, idealism and empathy," Skorton said in his introduction, calling her "not just an inspiration to our graduating seniors but to all who want to better the world."

Melanie Tu '07, an Industrial and Labor Relations graduate, said she was impressed with O'Brien's speech. "I thought it was in a very casual style that worked very well, but had a lot of messages behind it," she said. "Her observations were very dead-on."

Class of 2007 alumni co-president Elizabeth (Scottie) McQuilkin '07 presented the class gift to the university -- a check for $82,702 to fund an annual scholarship for a rising senior, a record-breaking class campaign goal aided by matching funds from Cornell trustee Martha Coultrap.