'Get Woke,' Grads:

Commencement Speeches, From Obama’s to Spike Lee’s 

"However you got here, you made it," President Barack Obama told the 2016 graduating class of Rutgers University, a group of exhilarated, accomplished, and almost certainly terrified soon-to-be adults.

Tasked with giving this herd of something between millennials and Generation Z good advice, commencement speakers try their best to be knowledgeable and at least somewhat entertaining without embarrassing themselves.

"You won't always get everything you want," Obama warned. Certainly not if it costs money—student debt hit $28,950 for the undergraduate class finishing school in 2014.

J.K. Simmons put it more bluntly, telling the University of Montana graduating class, “The world is full of bastards.” That’s probably why Spike Lee told Johns Hopkins University graduates to “get woke.”

Hank Azaria, better known by his many voices on The Simpsons, offered Tufts University graduates some immortal wisdom as the animated series’ beloved Comic Book Guy. “Life is like the Star Wars movies," he proposed. "Some of it is great, some of it sucks, but you have no choice but to sit through all of it.”