Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard University and bravely pursued his dreams. 30 years later, Harvard granted Gates the honorary law degree, in recognition of his outstanding accomplishments.

Thursday must have been a memorable day for Bill Gates as Harvard University handed him the honorary law degree, 30 years after he dropped out. “We recognize the most illustrious member of the Harvard College class of 1977 never to have graduated from Harvard,” said Harvard University Provost Steven Hyman. As he received the degree, gates said: “I did the best of everyone who failed.”

Indeed, Gates has managed to become the richest man in the world and he is still going strong. He did confess though Thursday that his true regret was leaving university “with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world - the appalling disparities of health and wealth and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.”

Gates, who is 51 and a billionaire, founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, the largest charitable foundation in the world, with assets worth about $60 billion. Gates took the opportunity of being face to face with Harvard’s graduating class to urge them to help fight poverty around the world. “When you consider what those of us here ... have been given - in talent, privilege, and opportunity - there is almost no limit to what the world has a right to expect from us,” he said.

”I want to exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue - a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world's deepest inequities, on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.”