Leah Truitt, Class of 2008, has been announced as this year’s commencement speaker for the Galax High School Class of 2023’s graduation speaker.
Graduation will be held May 25 at 9 a.m. on the GHS football field.
Truitt, the daughter of Tony and Sonia Truitt, took time to speak with The Gazette about life after leaving Galax for the wider world, and how growing up local helped prepare her for it.
A client growth lead on Meta’s Reality Lab business — yes, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta — Truitt said, “I never considered myself a person who would work on virtual reality. I don’t play games, I don’t code, but everything we do and engage in is shaped by technology.”
Ensconced in her Connecticut home, which is under renovation, Truitt said she’s “living in a work in progress — I have a baby on the way in August. We’re in the rush to get everything in the house ready before the baby gets here.”
Truitt got her first taste of ambition in 10th grade when an advisor at a conference recommended her for a state officer position in the Family Community and Career Leaders of America (FCCLA).
“There were always people who believed in me more than I believed in myself, and I believe that was really important to me and I am incredibly grateful for that,” she said.
After graduating, she attended UVa for four years as an American studies and media studies major, graduating in 2012. Before she graduated — and despite the boost that being in FCCLA gave her — she remained unsure of her next steps.
“I wasn’t entirely sure, but I thought I might want to go to law school,” Truitt said. “I liked to read, I liked to write, and I thought that might be a good career path, but I was pretty open.”
Acting as a UVa student tour guide one day, she was questioned about her future by a professional who was part of her group. “They asked what I wanted to do,” she said, and mentioned her interest in law.
“This person was like, ‘I have a friend who has a really good communications firm,’ and I was like ‘Great!’ and it turns out his friend was Richard Edelman, who runs the Edelman Agency [a legendary public relations firm] and was connected directly with him.” This led to a stint for her in Edelman’s Washington, D.C. office.
“At that point I was a 19-year-old intern, doing a lot of media monitoring,” she said. “Every time our clients got mentioned in the newspaper, we put together documents for briefing for interviews. It was a career where I didn’t know anyone who did this, I didn’t even know this was a field. We were helping people and brands figure out how to interact with the world and so it really just opened my eyes.”
After graduating, she went on to work at a parent company for Philip Morris, Avon and Weight Watchers, doing communications work that most people might not have heard of.
And at Meta, she developed the ability to use and explain the necessity for evolving technology and how it increasingly shapes the world. Some find it scary, she said, but it’s really there to create connection.
“I think when people hear the word ‘Metaverse,’ it can sound a bit scary or intimidating or sci-fi, but what we’re trying to do is bring together your physical world and online world so they’re combined,” she said. “In the not-too-distant future, we’ll be able to take virtual things and render them into this world.”
As in projecting a hologram into a room when you have to do business with someone in a distant city — which is certainly a step up from a Zoom call.
She added, “I wear glasses, you wear glasses; your hologram is here, it feels like you’re really here with me and I’m in there with you, feeling like we’re together.
“That’s what makes me excited about the technology. The technology will make us feel so much more connected with each other, and it’s not that far away. There’s a lot of access I think new technology can bring.”
Without giving away too much, Truitt said part of her advice to this year’s grads is simply to keep their eyes and ears open for opportunity, because it might take forms they’ve never anticipated.
“One of the big ‘a-ha’s!’ for me — the jobs that I have done, I never knew that these jobs existed,” she said. “There are things you may not even know are on the radar, and these jobs that will exist in 10 years are things I’ve never even heard about now. The things me and my friends do now are things I didn’t even know existed when I was 18.”
She continued, “That’s advice that I would give to anyone at any stage in their career, just ask as many questions and talk to as many people as you can; be curious.”
And, of course, many possibilities started here, simply because Galax offered her many opportunities that people at larger high schools in bigger communities may have missed.
“When I was at college and I talked to people about what they did in high school, maybe they had the opportunity to belong to one club or play one sport,” she said, “and I think what I appreciate now was the opportunity to do so much” at GHS.
“I played lots of sports — I wasn’t very good at any of them — but I got to join so many clubs and try so many activities, and you don’t get that if you go to a high school of 4,000 students.”
The small Southwest Virginia city itself gave her people skills that have served her well, Truitt said.
“Growing up in a place where community is so important, and in a place where people genuinely care about one another,” she said. “When I moved to New York, I knew how to find that community and feel like you’re part of something. It’s important to me, and I know how to do that now, because of growing up in Galax.”
Finally, she noted, home is a lot closer than it sounds.
In New York, “You kind of find all the Galax people, even if they’re way younger or way older than you.” For instance, she knows Lisa Goins, another Big Apple resident who was the GHS graduation speaker 10 years ago.
“There’s seven or eight people I’ve gotten connected to,” she said. “I don’t have much in common with them other than Galax, but you always have that shared foundation. You always have that in common.”