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 towards the stage at a packed Yankee Stadium on Wednesday.
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 that she began her music career at 15.
She went on to sell more than 100 million albums and won album of the year at the 2021 Grammys for her album Folkore, making her the first woman to win the category three times.
Swift shared advice with the class of 2022 but warned 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 … 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.”
Swift concluded by telling graduates that making mistakes was 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.”
