Graduation Speech: My First Day At Tarleton State University

We did it. Good morning. President Dottavio, Provost Murray, faculty, staff, family, friends, loved ones and fellow graduates. I am honored for the opportunity to address you because without your continued love and sacrifice we would not be here today. Today is not just about walking across a stage but demonstrating the fruition of all your support.

We all decided to pursue the road of higher education for different reasons. For some of us it was the next logical step towards a goal locked upon years before. Some of us came to here to continue playing the sports that drove our dreams. Some of us, let’s face it, accepted coming towards higher education because our parents told us we had to.

For me, however, there was another reason in which I am not alone. When I first came to Tarleton State University I was freshly home from a tour in Afghanistan. I was raw, angry, hurting, and lost. I had lost my vision for my future. My intention when I enrolled at Tarleton was not to pursue the next step or even to find the next step, but instead it was an effort to drown out what I had seen, done, and lost. I expected the classes to allow me to focus on something else for a little while, but I found something so much more. Tarleton gave me direction, and revived my passion
and drive to succeed. This place makes strangers into family, and dreams that in the beginning seem impossible to achieve, a reality. My first day of class at Tarleton I was the first person in the classroom.
I sat in the furthest corner in the back and prayed that no one would sit by me, talk to me, or even look at me. I was so afraid, as I sat there watching all of these happy, laughing people filling the room around me, that they would see that I didn’t belong there. I wasn’t there to strive towards a goal, or even to simply please those around me. Instead I was there to hide from pain that wouldn’t leave me alone. Yet someone did sit beside me and smiled. I remember that smile, even if I don’t remember the person attached to it. It was that moment that I felt that I might have made the right choice in coming to
Tarleton. Every professor and friend I made over the next two years gave me a little more of myself back. I began to be able laugh easier, smile more brightly, and allow myself to give into the hope of a promising future. I was starting to let go of the pain that had clung to me for so long. It wasn’t gone, nor do I think it I will ever be truly gone, but piece-by-piece Tarleton life gave me something to keep it from drowning me all the time.

However it wasn’t until I was sitting in my British Literature class, with Paradise lost in hand my junior year, that it dawned on me. I had gone from being the student that didn’t express her views or talk in class, to the student that couldn’t stop talking in class, with permission of course. I was no longer hiding. I wasn’t using my classes and my friends as a shield from feeling. I was transitioning from trying to survive day to day to finally striving towards a dream that I had left behind me years before. I had given up on my dream but somehow it never gave up on me. It was just waiting for me to be ready to pursue it again.

My experiences here at Tarleton while being inherently unique to me also have parallels felt by every student that has stepped through those gates. We have been blindsided by monstrous papers, devilish professors, and faced with an overwhelming sense of being a complete failures. We have felt doubt, apprehension, and even terror that the path we have chosen may not have been meant for us. Well fellow graduates, we have persevered with long sleepless nights of studying, stressing, challenging through those moments of complete doubt if the hardship of the degree actually being worth all the pain, sacrifice and of course the coffee addiction. This is our moment, our time, and our right to bask in the happiness of our triumph over the challenges these past four years have placed in front of us. So as you leave here today and face your future remember the words of Donovan Bailey, “Follow your passion, be prepared to work hard and sacrifice, and, above all, and don’t let anyone limit your dreams”.