Assumption College Class of 2012

In just 6 days, I will be graduating from Assumption College. It's scary to think about how fast these last few years have gone by and how much has changed. Tonight after Mass, I was one of the readers at Senior Candlelight, and I wanted to share the talk I wrote:

I didn’t think college was going to change me. I believed that the person who would be graduating in May 2012 was merely going to be an older version of the girl who was moving into Nault in August of 2008. I thought I knew exactly what my college experience was going to be: I would study to become an Accountant, my boyfriend and I would continue to date throughout college and we would get married a few years after graduating, and I would be a collegiate athlete all four years. However, Assumption did change me. I’m not the person I was four years ago, not even close. Over the last few years, I’ve rediscovered my faith through Campus Ministry, I’ve formed friendships that have showed me that I’m not alone, I’ve learned to trust myself, and most importantly I’ve learned that it’s ok not to have it all figured out.

My college experience was nothing like I imagined it would be. It turned out, I hated being an Accounting major; my boyfriend and I weren’t destined to last forever; and after just one year, I would make the choice to end my collegiate swimming career. But that’s ok because my plan didn’t allow for me to grow up and actually experience college. And some of the best things that have happened to me are the ones that were unexpected.

Amongst the studying and paper writing, I’ve stayed up all night talking with friends, laughing uncontrollably over the smallest things; had random dance parties on both weekends and weeknights, even some in the afternoon; gone to Charlie’s or ordered out simply because no one felt like cooking; drove through Worcester with my friends blaring music, singing at the top of our lungs; survived the Ice Storm, Hurricane Irene and that random October snow storm. I got involved with activities that I originally wrote off when told about them at orientation; I played intramurals, attended both the START 1 and START 2 retreats and was on team for several of them, and even traveled to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota on a SEND trip.

These are the moments that I didn’t plan, but they are the ones I’m going to remember for the rest of my life, these are the moments that shaped me and allowed me to forge friendships that are irreplaceable, that allowed for me to change and start to be the person I was meant to become.

I think we’re hardwired to always want to know what comes next. Until this point all of us have always know what we were going to be doing when the summer days came to an end, we would be going back to school. But in just a few days we’re graduating college. And for the last year whenever we were asked, “So what are you doing after graduation?” we wanted to confidently answer with “I’m going to grad school” or “I have a job at this company” or “I’m doing a year of service”, anything but “Umm I really don’t know yet”. We want to say that we have a plan, that our college education is going to be put to use immediately.

Uncertainty scares us. But no matter what we do after we leave this campus, I can tell you this: Throughout our lives we are going to continue to change, we are going to succeed and we are going to fail, we are going to have moments of happiness and moments of sadness, people are going to come in and out of our lives, but we have to remember to everything we experience is for a reason, whether we know that reason or not. Learn from failures, have faith during times of hardship, learn something from every person you interact with, don’t take a single thing for granted, cherish the ones you love.

Just because we are physically leaving Assumption College, doesn’t mean that all the moments from the last four years are going to vanish; view graduation as the start of a new chapter, not an ending. We’re going to look back and smile at the memories and friendships that this place has given us, and nothing can take that away. We don’t have to have our lives figured out. God has a plan for us, bigger than anything we could have planned ourselves, and part of that plan was Assumption College.

Following each talk a song was played. I chose Sooner or Later by Michael Tolcher