Hilary Duff tells Northeastern class of 2026 to fearlessly embrace who they are
Singer and actor Hilary Duff and student speakers encouraged Northeastern graduates to find their voice and pursue their dreams on their own terms.
For Northeastern University’s class of 2026, commencement was “what dreams are made of.”
As the sun poked out on an otherwise cloudy Boston day, Hilary Duff, the multiplatinum singer, actress and entrepreneur whose song “What Dreams Are Made Of” has become a graduation mainstay, brightened the commencement stage at Fenway Park, giving Northeastern’s undergraduate class an affirmation she wished she had heard earlier in her decades-spanning career.
“What you do might change, but who you are never has to,” Duff told the crowd of more than 5,000 undergraduate students at Fenway Park. “Remember you’re not just building a career or a resume; you’re building a life. You are the architect of your own happiness. You get to decide what belongs in your life. We only get one.”
Duff’s advice about finding agency and a voice comes hard-earned for the multihyphenate. She found success early. At 13, she starred in the Disney Channel series “Lizzie McGuire,” which catapulted her into the spotlight. At such a young age, it was easy to think that as doors opened, the answer to every question and offer was “yes.”
Having starred in shows like “Younger” and “How I Met Your Father,” she is now a mainstay of Hollywood as well as of the recording industry, thanks to hits like “Come Clean” and her most recent album, “Luck… or Something.” With all that to her name, Duff told the crowd at Fenway that it took her years to understand that “no” is a more powerful word.
“By simply accepting what the world was offering to me, I was losing my own voice,” Duff said. “I was reacting, instead of asking myself what I really wanted.”
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That realization, that she needed to retake control of her life, led Duff to take a break from music for nearly a decade. It helped her realize her agency in a constantly changing world and an industry constantly telling her to be someone else. Duff has since established herself as an entrepreneur in the fashion and cosmetics space, even becoming “chief mom officer” for children’s clothing brand Carter’s.
Looking out at the crowd of graduates waving flags from home countries that spanned the globe, from the U.S. and Canada to Brazil, Turkey and India, Duff admitted how surreal it was to be giving a commencement speech. Her formal education ended around the third grade as her Hollywood career took priority, she said. But in Northeastern and its students she saw a kindred spirit, one in a way it makes sense, because at Northeastern University, one in which “experience isn’t a substitute for education. It is the education,” she said.
Her story is proof of what she urged Northeastern’s graduates to do: fearlessly embrace who they are, no matter what the world tells them.
“The world only becomes more interesting and accommodating and marvelous when people show up as they truly are,” said Duff, a mother of four children.
“Something I tell my kids: You have to be who you are because everyone else is taken,” she added.
It was a theme that Northeastern President Joseph E. Aoun also spoke to in his remarks to the class of 2026. These lessons are even more important in a world where artificial intelligence is redefining almost every area of life, he said. “Never lose sight of what AI cannot do,” he encouraged the 2026 graduating class. Instead, he emphasized that the ingenuity, creativity and humanity of people like Duff is a superpower that technology can’t replicate.
“Remember that the future doesn’t belong to the most optimized; it belongs to the most original,” Aoun said. “In a world that will increasingly ask you to move fast, optimize and reduce everything to a metric, your humanity is what sets you fully apart.”
That humanity extends to the bonds that students have forged during their time at Northeastern, a point that Diane MacGillivray, Northeastern’s senior vice president for university advancement, emphasized.
“Maybe you see today the person you met on the first day of orientation when you didn’t know anyone or maybe it’s the person you just sat with randomly today,” MacGillivray said. “It doesn’t matter. You all share an enduring bond because these are the people who will continue to be here in the next phase of your journey, who will help you build networks, be your sounding board, support you through career ups, downs and pivots.”
Duff encouraged students she sees entering industries that “are being rewritten in real time” to define their success not by “what [they] achieve” but “what [they] choose.” It might require taking a step into the unknown, but it’s their future to navigate, their choice to make, she said.
“As you chart your path, never forget that you’re in the driver’s seat,” Duff said. “You have the power to make your own choices. … You chose Northeastern because you wanted to build something real, to make an impact. Keep making choices like that.”
The choices they will make and the skills that guide those choices, are what will carry the graduates –– and the world –– forward, Aoun told the graduates. He lauded the expertise that the graduates have cultivated in Northeastern’s classrooms, on co-ops and around the university’s global campus network.
“Class of 2026, the world you enter will not offer you a clear map,” Aoun said. “It will offer you constantly shifting terrain. But you are not map-followers. You are pathfinders. … The future does not belong to those who predict it. It belongs to those who build it. And you — class of 2026 — are builders.”
Huskies charting their own path
Graduating students Amelia Brooks, Evan Kenny, Kayla Parlato and Armaan Sarao also offered their own remarks to their graduating class. They looked back on how they found their voices through their Northeastern experiences. In their own ways, they each paved previously uncharted paths.
Entering Northeastern as a Navy veteran, Evan Kenny found his calling in mindfulness and wellness based practices through Northeastern’s yoga and meditation programs. He also found time to summit Mount Everest in 2024, a challenging climb that came to embody his willingness to pursue a path toward becoming a clinical psychiatrist. It was a radical pivot from his previous life in the military and his original plan to become an engineer.
“I realized a lot during that climb,” Kenny said. “Where we find ourselves now is where the courage that brought us here begins to matter most as we go further, the courage that you have built quietly in everyday actions and small, honest decisions, in the willingness, especially, to keep moving forward towards something that maybe you couldn’t quite fully see yet.”
For some students, that was more literal.
At Northeastern, Kayla Parlato, who graduated with a mechanical engineering degree, found a way to transform her dream of building — a passion stoked while sewing, welding and crafting as a kid — into her work designing propulsion systems and components for rocket engines at Hughes Research Labs, Blue Origin and SpaceX.
But as successful as she’s been, she told the class of 2026 that it’s her failures that informed her path more than anything. Her first rocket launch with student club Aerospace NU ended with the engine exploding. Her memory of that day provided the fuel that propelled her to a full-time job at SpaceX.
“At Northeastern, we have proven by being here today that we know how to push past uncertainty and use it to drive the boundary further, dreaming of what can be,” Parlato said.
Armaan Sarao, a graduating media, screen studies and English student, echoed Parlato’s call to embrace challenges. Between leading NUTV, Northeastern’s student media production club, and serving in student government, Sarao, who traveled from Singapore to attend Northeastern, said he faced plenty of twists and turns at Northeastern. But each one was a lesson, he said.
“What challenging moments have taught me is that the things that endure, the things that truly stand the test of time, are the stories we tell about each other, the example that we set for those who come after us and the impact that we make on generations that follow,” Sarao said.
The latter is what matters the most for Brooks, a business administration graduate who became co-president of the student-led Women’s Interdisciplinary Society of Entrepreneurship, WISE. Her time at WISE, and at Northeastern, became defined as much by her own achievements as those of the community she found and fostered.
“That’s the responsibility we leave Fenway with here today,” Brooks said. “It’s our turn to be the mentors, the role models, the people that show up — not just in student organizations, but in every room, every city, role and every stage of life ahead.”
As the words of Duff,Aoun and the student speakers rang through Fenway, the celebration kicked off in full. Fireworks exploded and student dancers and singers took to the stage for a finale that had the entire crowd on its feet.
The Nor’easters, one of Northeasterns’ a capella groups, sang a lively medley of songs, culminating in a performance of Duff’s “What Dreams Are Made Of” alongside Duff herself. No one on stage or in the crowd doubted those words for a second.
