Is Natalie Portman giving anyone else pregnant vibes in these photos? I think it may be the print on the dress, plus the way she’s standing in some of these photos. Natalie was the keynote speaker at Harvard’s Class Day ceremony yesterday. Harvard is her alma mater (she’s a 2003 graduate), and this is the first time she’s been invited back to speak at Class Day. In case you’re wondering, this is just a fancy way of saying Natalie was the commencement speaker for the graduating class of 2015. Update: Okay, so commencement is something different, but the Class Day speech is still about the graduating class. Here’s her speech.

She comes across pretty well here. It looks like a nice graduation ceremony, right? Mine was chaos. It was unseasonably hot and humid and of course my graduation took place outside in the sunniest field on campus. I walked the wrong way off the podium too and it was SO embarrassing. Ugh. Anyway, in case you don’t feel like watching the video, here are some highlighted quotes:

Worrying about being accepted at Harvard: “I went to a public high school on Long Island. The girls I went to school with had Prada bags and flat-ironed hair. People didn’t pay much attention to the fact that I was an actress. I was known for having a backpack bigger than I was, and always having whiteout on my hands… When I got to Harvard just after the release of Star Wars: Episode 1, I feared people would assume I had gotten in just for being famous, and not worthy of the intellectual rigor here…”

The challenges: “It’s easy to romanticize my time here, but I had some difficult times here. Being 19, dealing with my first heartbreak, taking birth control that’s now off the market due to its depressive side effects….”

She says she was “woefully unprepared” for Black Swan: “The point is, if I had known my own limitations, I never would have taken the risk. And the risk led to one of my greatest personal and professional achievements….Make use of the fact that you don’t doubt yourself too much right now because, as we get older, we get more realistic. Accept your lack of knowledge and use it as your asset.”

[From People & E! News]

I know what she’s trying to say about being “woefully unprepared” for Black Swan, like she’s using it as an example of throwing yourself into a challenge without thinking about how you could fail in a big way, but all she did was remind me of how she took credit for other dancers’ work and built her Oscar campaign around the idea that she had become a prima ballerina-level dancer in less than a year. Woefully unprepared indeed.

Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet.