AMHERST — Wayne Chang, who dropped out of the University of Massachusetts Amherst while launching his career as a high-tech entrepreneur, will by the featured speaker at the school’s undergraduate commencement ceremony May 6.
During the ceremony, Chang, who is director of product strategy at Twitter, will be awarded an honorary doctorate, according to a statement from the university.
“I never graduated. This was really, really hard on me,” Chang wrote in a tweet announcing his invitation to speak. “When I received this … the emotions I felt … Indescribable.”
Chang joined Twitter after it bought Crashlytics, a mobile crash-reporting service Chang co-founded in 2011, for a reported price of more than $100 million in 2013, according to the university statement.
Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Chang wrote his first software program on an Apple IIe at age 7. While attending high school in Haverhill, he was part of the team at Napster, the first peer-to-peer, file-sharing system.
As an undergraduate at UMass Amherst, Chang created i2hub to provide what was then something unique: a platform through which college students could interact with one another. Launched in February 2003, within a month it had to shut down, unable to handle the traffic coming its way.
Chang retooled the site and reopened it in March 2004. It went on to provide stiff competition for the newly introduced Facebook, but was shut down in November 2005 due to legal pressure, according to the university statement.
“Wayne Chang epitomizes the can-do spirit so many immigrants bring to our country as well as the entrepreneurial nature of his generation,” UMass Amherst Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy said in the statement.
“His inventions and investments are transforming how the world connects, communicates and conducts business. I’m sure his words will inspire our graduates as we bid them farewell.”
UMass Amherst will also award an honorary doctorate to Sheila C. Bair, who chaired the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. through the economically challenging period of June 2006 to July 2011. Her work at the FDIC brought her recognition by Time magazine as one of the world’s most influential people.
Bair’s career has included stints as a Senate aide, senior vice president for government relations at the New York Stock Exchange, assistant secretary for financial institutions at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and as a faculty member at UMass Amherst’s Isenberg School of Management from 2002-06. In 2015, she was appointed president of Washington College in Maryland.
The UMass Amherst commencement ceremony will begin at 4:30 p.m. at McGuirk Alumni Stadium. Full details can be found at www.umass.edu/commencement.
Dave Eisenstadter can be reached at deisen@gazettenet.com.