Crafting words of empowerment

Hood College alumna urges authenticity at commencement

The invitation was a staggering honor.

Why, Marietta Geckos thought, would Hood College want her to deliver its commencement speech? Why would anyone want to listen to someone who isn't famous?

Graduates around the country this month are hearing the likes of Bill Cosby, Hillary Clinton and President Bush.

And then there's Geckos, a lawyer for the Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Administration.

What do you say, she wondered, when you have 20 minutes to impart a message - when this may be the only opportunity of its kind in your life?

The 41-year-old Bethesda resident pondered that anxiously over three months before stepping up to the podium yesterday in front of 2,000 people at the Frederick school. She spent dozens of hours at a dining room laptop, working until dawn occasionally. Paragraphs that seemed perfect one day might be replaced the next. Geckos dug deeper and deeper. Writing for the graduates' journey forward became her journey back in time.

When the big moment finally arrived, there were moments she couldn't help but get choked up as her brown eyes looked out from under her black cap and gold tassel. Her parents, sister and old college adviser were there cheering her on this cold and gray morning, just as they were 19 years ago at her own Hood graduation.

Since this was her school, Geckos wanted her speech to be authentic and from the heart, filled with big-sisterly advice from one alum to another.

She wanted to make a lasting impression on the 214 seniors and 161 graduate students receiving diplomas - a daunting task, she knew, given that she doesn't even remember who the speaker was when she graduated in 1984 with a double major in political science and French.

"On the one hand, I tell myself, it is a short speech that is fleeting in the span of one's life," Geckos wrote in a daily log of her progress. "But on the other hand (and more importantly, I think) is the ever-present cognizance that this is a amazing honor - and while it is 20 minutes - it is 20 minutes on an extremely special day for students and families who have worked hard toward an impressive academic achievement. So, it IS a big deal. And I want my words to be worthy."

She started reading back issues of the student newspaper, and visited her old dorm and Ground Zero in New York City for inspiration. She interviewed 14 graduating seniors. She bought a laptop and a padded, black office chair so she would be comfortable sitting for long stretches at her dining table.

She found herself looking back at her life, as the wavy-haired granddaughter of an immigrant Greek cobbler and grocer, trying to figure out what it has meant up to this point, and what lessons in it might be valuable to pass on to others.

It was almost as if she was preparing her own eulogy.

"When you eulogize someone," she said in April, three or four drafts along, "you don't have a lot of time, and you're picking up the essence of that person to reflect on. It feels like I am doing that to myself while I'm alive. It forces me to ask, `What do you stand for?'"

She came up with two answers that would become the foundation of her speech.

Go where you can do the most good. As when she traded in a job at a private law firm for one with the U.S. Department of Justice in 1992, resulting in a pay cut of more than $20,000 a year. Or when she made another career change this winter to help protect the traveling public in the wake the 9/11 attacks. She had spent 11 years at the Justice Department investigating and prosecuting drug and money-laundering cases.

Stretch your limits and do what you are driven to do, regardless of how unconventional or impractical it may seem to others. As when in 1998 she became certified as an emergency medical technician, responding to 911 calls in Bethesda and Chevy Chase. Or when in 2001 she left the Justice Department for a year to get a master's degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, not knowing why she needed it.

Geckos knew she also wanted to get the graduates thinking about leadership. Before writing a word of the speech, she had decided that its title would be "Unleashing the Leader Within."

She never questioned her themes. But until the moment she stepped on the stage, she questioned how to best get them across.

She went around joking that the crowd was going to pelt her with mangoes after learning the names of previous Hood commencement speakers: Barbara Bush, ABC News political analyst Cokie Roberts and the late Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham.

Several students said before the ceremony that they didn't know who the speaker was, and they didn't much care. One was Myloshia Robinson, 28, getting a master's degree in marketing.

But as Geckos' low, expressive voice resonated through the white tent in the residential quadrangle, Robinson found herself mesmerized.

"I wasn't expecting to be interested in it at all," Robinson said, "but she was a really, really good speaker."