Speech
Back from the summer! Kind of. I was in Olympia all summer. But now I am about to start classes which is exciting. Last week was O-Week or Orientation week which is the week when just Freshman are on campus and they have some time to get “oriented”. During O-Week I worked as a geoduck guide and answered people questions and helped people move in and stuff. At the end of the week was the all student convocation which I actually got to speak at. I thought it might be nice to post what I said on here. Let me know what you think!
Hey everybody, my name is Steven. I may have given you a tour when you were looking at colleges or you may have seen me this week as I sat out in that big tent in red square, but I am here for these few minutes as a fellow student. You have all been to a lot of talks and presentations and been told a lot of things about what you should expect to experience during your time here. I am not trying to down play those speeches but I think it is important to hear this from someone whose profession is not to sell this school but from someone like you who likes this place enough to pay to be here everyday. I honestly don’t think there is a better institution to be going in debt to. None of you applied to this school because of flashy credentials or a prestigious history full of presidential alumn. You have all chosen to come here because you were enticed by the unique structure. Evergreen is not just one of those schools you apply to because it’s what everyone does. You made the conscious decision to come here and do something out of the ordinary. You realized that your education should have a higher priority than a football team. You wanted a say in what and how you learned. I came here because I no longer wanted to memorize answers for tests that would “prepare” me for more tests. I was tired of learning how to get the grade. I wanted to be free to learn my way and be rewarded for doing my best. At Evergreen you will learn for the sake of learning. This was one of the hardest things for me to get used to when I first got here. This was the part that took me several quarters to fully understand. Two people in the same program could end up with 2 completely different educations. One could end up with an Ivy League education and the other could end up no further than when they started. If you do the bare minimum, if all you do is try to just get the credits, you will end up like the latter. However, if you start to really think about what you are doing, you are passionate and actually do your best, you will end up with an education unmatchable by any other institution. You will get out of Evergreen what you put into it. If you come to seminar with an open mind ready to try new things and you apply what you learn to your everyday life it will be so much more beneficial than if you just try to skim by. If you spend enough time here you will eventually end up with a degree. You decide how you get that degree. Be passionate about what you’re doing and truly learn.
Another thing that is amazing about Evergreen is that you are allowed to make mistakes. It is ok to fail. As long as you come out a better person when you recover. Last Spring I was in a program called Mediaworks. I was working on an individual project and doing a partial internship on top of trying to work 20 hours a week. Halfway through the quarter I started to freak out because I hadn’t completed as much of my internship as I had expected and parts of my individual project were not coming along as planned. While speaking to my faculty I realized that I was learning more from dealing with and recovering from things going wrong, my failures and the experience of having everything go to shit than I was from the topics of my research. This realization was not only something that I grew from personally, it would also end up in my transcript. I received an excellent evaluation because my faculty acknowledged this and saw me learning and growing.
This is the only place in the world and probably the only time in your life where you have complete freedom and control of what you do and learn, so make the best of it.
Leave a Reply