I want to start by being one of many to congratulate this year’s class on completing this stage of their education. I hope you take today and spend time with friends and family, relax, maybe have a drink or two. Enjoy today, it is a major achievement that you accomplished. I specifically want you to enjoy today because the work starts tomorrow. Each of us is extremely lucky to be able to take the time to improve ourselves. I don’t care if we were able to come right out of high school or had to spend over a decade to earn our place here. I don’t care if you want to call it a privilege or a blessing. Each of us is extremely lucky to reach this point and to have had these experiences over the past several years.
Now I know what some of you are thinking, how is struggling with difficult classes and trying to balance everything a blessing? Because I am sure each of us can look back to who we were at the beginning of this and see the growth we have all had. If you didn’t know, blessings can be measured in the distance traveled from who you were to the person you are now.
I’m going to tell you something I haven’t told many people. About 20 minutes into my very first class, statistics, the professor was writing out an equation with symbols in it that I had never seen before and I had no clue what they meant. I said to myself, “Logan, you graduated high school with a 2.0. You failed a couple of classes. What on Earth makes you think you could get a degree from a university?” That thought process, that I wasn’t going to make it, was something I couldn’t shake for the next 40 minutes. I want to stand here and tell you that I gave myself a quick pep talk and was filled with confidence for the next class, but in all honesty, my next class was biology, so uhh yea… that didn’t happen. The truth is, it took me a while to gain any shred of confidence in myself that I was actually going to be able to do this. But I received that privilege, I was allowed to struggle, allowed to travel the distance and by the end of that year, I felt like I had hit my stride. I wasn’t perfect in my studies, but I had confidence that I could do this.
Over my sophomore and junior years, I had failures and successes. However, as my own confidence grew, I started to look around more at my peers and the experiences they were having. I saw students who were almost afraid to pick up a pipette their first year now performing procedures as if it were no different than putting on a jacket. I was amazed at the critical thinking many of y’all were using and what you learned to explain the world around you on a deeper level. From where I stood, it seemed like you were ready to conquer the world and nothing would stop you.
Then our senior year came. I’m not saying we didn’t finish strong, but, man, that senioritis hit me hard. It’s not that we necessarily lost interest in our studies, but their importance was diminished in light of the uncertainty of what is coming next. I personally have no clue how many hours I spent preparing for my life post-graduation and the possibility that those plans might fail. And I heard the same nervousness from many of you. As we stand in the door to our future, perhaps I can give you some advice.
Embrace the change. No matter how hard you try, change is going to happen. Instead, lean into the change. The skills you have learned here will help guide you through periods of uncertainty. If you get to a problem and you are not sure which way to go, choose the side that helps people, especially help those who have received a raw deal. You see, the reality of the world is that giants actually do exist. However, they are not those that stand the tallest. The real giants are those that care for the smallest amongst us. Be giants, help people. If you keep people as the end goal of your decisions, I can guarantee that you will be making good choices. And don’t get it twisted, each of you will be making decisions. Because we are so lucky, so privileged, so blessed to have been able to spend the past few years improving ourselves, we owe it to others to help society. So again, congratulations on graduation, the work starts tomorrow.