Taylor Swift has Grammys galore and now she has a new title — “doctor.”
The superstar received an honorary doctorate of fine arts from New York University on Wednesday, blowing kisses as the crowd roared when she walked toward the stage at a packed Yankee Stadium.
Sporting her signature red lipstick and newly awarded honorary robe, Swift joked to the thousands of graduates assembled: “I’m 90 per cent sure the main reason I’m here is because I have a song called 22.”
“I never got to have a normal college experience per se. I went to public high school until 10th grade and then finished my education doing home school work on the floor of airport terminals,” Swift said in her commencement speech.
The singer-songwriter, producer and director said she began her music career at 15, touring different radio stations across the country.
She went on to sell more than 100 million albums and won album of the year at the 2021 Grammys for her album Folklore, making her the first woman to win the category three times. Her previous wins came in 2010 for Fearless and 2016 for 1989.
She winked at the crowd when Jason King of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music mentioned her newly rerecorded albums, including Fearless.
Swift shared advice with the class of 2022 but offered the warning that, “I in no way feel qualified to tell you what to do. You’ve worked and struggled and sacrificed and studied and dreamed your way here today. I won’t tell you what to do because nobody likes that, but I will however give you life hacks for when I was starting out my dreams as a career.
“Never be ashamed of trying. Effortlessness is a myth,” she said.
Swift concluded her speech by telling graduates that making mistakes is inevitable but “when hard things happen to us, we will recover, we will learn from it, we will grow more resilient because of it. As long as we are fortunate enough to be breathing, we will breathe in, breathe through, breathe deep and breathe out. I am a doctor now so I know how breathing works.
“I hope you know how proud I am to share this day with you,” she said. “We’re doing this together so let’s just keep on dancing like we’re the class of 22.”