Long before Abdul El-Sayed was delivering speeches on the campaign trail, he was selected to give one of the biggest speeches of his life: a student commencement address at the University of Michigan in 2007. And it ended up even impressing former President Bill Clinton.
Standing before thousands of graduates, their families, and faculty, the then-22-year-old Michigan native tried to put into words what made the university experience so meaningful. But his answer wasn’t the knowledge accumulated in lecture halls or the job qualifications that came with graduating from one of the country’s top public universities. Instead, he focused on something much harder to quantify.
“The Michigan difference is us. It’s the students,” El-Sayed said.
“It’s in the diversity of names, faces, stories, and experiences with which we decorate this great place. It’s in the time that we’ve spent in self-assessment, self-improvement, and thought. It’s the questions that we’ve asked and those that we’ve answered. It’s the care we’ve shown, the people we’ve helped, and the passion that we have, that defines us.”
El-Sayed went on to argue that the world needed the ambition and willingness to help others that students had cultivated during their time at Michigan.
“Most of all, it needs us to spread that contagious Michigan passion that has come to define us,” he concluded. “It’s that we have the audacity to believe that we can change this world and that each of us will.”
Bill Clinton wished ‘every person in the world’ could have heard El-Sayed in 2007
El-Sayed’s message—that the value of a college education extends beyond a diploma to the people, experiences, and perspectives students gain along the way—resonated beyond the graduates sitting before him. The ceremony’s main commencement speaker, former President Clinton, was moved by the five-minute address, too.
“I don’t want to embarrass your senior speaker,” Clinton said following El-Sayed’s message in a clip that’s recirculated online. “But I wish every person in the world who believes that we are fated to have a clash of civilizations, and cannot reach across the religious divides, could have heard you speak today.”
The 42nd president later asked El-Sayed, who was graduating with a degree in biology and political science, why he was planning to pursue a career in medicine—and that he should instead consider running for office one day.
“After the speech, President Clinton comes up to me,” El-Sayed recalled on Jon Stewart’s The Weekly Show podcast. “He’s like, ‘Son, why are you going to medical school?’ ”
El-Sayed took Clinton’s advice a decade later and went into politics—but says success comes down to change
El-Sayed was born in southeast Michigan and raised by his father, an Egyptian immigrant, and his stepmom.
After earning his bachelor degree from the University of Michigan, El-Sayed began a combined MD-PhD program at the university. He later received a Rhodes Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford, where he earned a doctorate in public health in 2011, before completing his medical degree at Columbia University. But rather than pursuing a traditional medical career, El-Sayed turned toward public service and politics.
From 2015 to 2017, he directed Detroit’s health department, and in 2018 launched his first campaign, running in the democratic primary for governor. He ultimately lost to now two-term governor Gretchen Whitmer, but he marked another attempt at politics this cycle.
This time, El-Sayed made it through the primary, defeating U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens to secure the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate. After a contentious general election campaign against former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, El-Sayed ultimately prevailed by more than 300,000 votes, becoming the first Muslim elected to the Senate.
But for 42-year-old El-Sayed, winning the six-year term is only the beginning.
“The success is what you’re able to do with the seat,” he told the Associated Press.
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