My graduation speech

Each year the graduating seniors of James Madison University are asked to submit commencement speeches. They narrow the selections down to 10 finalists, then after having them read aloud, select one to speak. Though I was a top 10 finalist this year, the commencement speaker was Amrou Kotb, one of my greatest friends. Everyone thought he did a great job during graduation, and he absolutely deserved it.

Since I wrote my speech a while back and the decision was made months ago, I wasn't sure whether I should post it or not. Though my narrative voice holds strong, there is something different about the speech when its read aloud. Read alone, it can be interpreted as overly satirical. Maybe I would use the term bitey? Ah, but I digress.

So here it is, how I truly feel about my depature from JMU and how my experiences here will help me distinguish myself. I'm removing the comment feature for this one, so just read it and take it for what it is.

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Good morning fellow classmates, faculty, family, and friends. I am very proud to be here to share this extraordinary moment of our lives together. I will begin with a story.

It is late August of 2005. A young man wakes up from his bed. He yawns and peeks through the blinds. It is the first day of college! His feet slide perfectly into his slippers, as the sun shines upon his chiseled features. He puts his pre-ordered textbooks in his backpack and departs on the purple-and-gold-bricked road of education. Like a Brady Bunch musical, students wave to him as the birds sing. He picks up a dropped book for a complete stranger and the doors open automatically for his first class.

This young man… was not me. He wasn’t anything like me on my first day. Who was I? I was the stranger who dropped the book. And it wasn’t a book at all. It was a map. Of JMU. This was my first day of college, and it wasn’t exactly what I had hoped for. There I was, sweating profusely, waddling across the quad with my Nalgene bottle, massive eyebrows, and the posture of a faucet.

What was I doing? If I had any hope of being successful, I had better become more like the first guy, the one who has a permanent inspirational movie soundtrack playing in his head. In a very over-simplified and exaggerated sense, this basic perception seems to be commonly shared by many students during their years at college. We want to be the best that we can. But there is always that guy who does the job twice as well and who’s breath is one tic-tac fresher than yours.

Let me pitch another scenario that may sound familiar. You are at a winter holiday party with your family. After having your name confused with your cousins a few dozen times by some distant relatives, you struggle to define yourself by the universal type-distinguisher: your major. Suddenly a relative chimes in and mentions someone around your age who is also studying the same thing, and spouts how successful they have been and go on to list their accomplishments. Another person adds that their son or daughter also got an internship with so-and-so. As you stand, listening to the distant successes of your peers and revel in your unfound opulence, words can’t describe your feelings at that moment. It’s like seeing the cool kids playing in the big in-ground pool on a summer day, and you are sitting in the small blow-up one that is slightly deflated and has dead grass in it.

These situations are what lead many college students to get the wrong idea. To be the person that people praise. To live life like you have something to prove. You will enter the workforce and apply for jobs while your entire professional life is encapsulated on one resume sheet in a single .PDF file.

But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all; because you are graduating from James Madison University.

I don’t mean to state the obvious here, but we have received an education from one of the most active and well-rounded schools in our country. We don’t just think, we do. We don’t sit around and read Immanuel Kant in the rain while pondering our existence. We apply our skills and philosophies to make lives better and to innovate. We are graduating from a school that builds people, and shapes character, and has supplies vision. We are part of a university that inspires us be broad, flexible, dynamic citizens who take initiative and make new discoveries.

Sure, but isn’t that college? Well if it were, do you think our nation would be where it is now? With Ponzi schemes and the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, it doesn’t seem like many of our ‘leaders’ had real educations. The fact is other schools don’t educate. They train. They train students by looking at the rules, researching the facts, and memorizing the answer. Well, I think training is for dogs. We need real educations in this country.

While other schools are thinking, we are re-thinking. While they predict, we explore. And while they use common sense we use our imaginations.

Right now isn’t that family holiday party from two years ago. This is our graduation from James Madison University. It’s where the innovators are, and I truly, truly believe that.

Today we will receive a hard earned diploma. But the most important accomplishment is our development as individuals that this place has helped us become. As we leave our JMU homes to be a bigger part of our world, don’t let the resume define you. We have to remember what we are made of.

Congratulations Class of 2009. Lets do this.