Good morning President Hotzler, Provost August, Chancellor Goldstein, Trustee Ruiz, dais guests, faculty, and parents. My name is Nicole Ariana Caruso and on behalf of NYC College of Technology, I welcome you all to graduation. If you will permit me, I would like to tell you a little about myself. I come from a fairly small family: there is my father, who is Italian, my mother, who is part Cuban, and my younger sister and brother, who, like me, are Cubtalians. Early on, our parents encouraged us to value education. Because of them, this is something that I have always carried with me. They always told me that I could do anything I wanted -- as long as I went to college. Knowing my parents as I do, I knew they were serious, so go to college is what I did. For me, school became very important, not because it was necessarily something I enjoyed, but because I understood that it was what I needed to do. For instilling this sense in me, to my parents I say thank you.
Now, as we are sit here all nicely dressed, excited, and prepared to graduate with degrees and move on, I agree that today is one of the biggest days of our lives. Before we leave to celebrate and map out the rest of our lives, I’d like to take a moment to share with you something that has really resonated with me this semester. And I believe this is pertinent to the next phase of our lives.
In 1854, Henry David Thoreau said, “Most men live lives of quiet desperation.” I first heard this quote in a summer school class. I realized at that moment that things have not changed much since Thoreau first said those words. It has been hard for me to forget that quotation because I have seen too many examples of lives being quietly and desperately lived. Lives lived by people who have not been encouraged to express their individuality and creativity – what they really want, what will make them happy. Instead, they are creating lives that meet someone else’s expectations and fulfill someone else’s idea of happiness.
We have all been told that if we stay away from drugs, stay out of trouble and stay in school, the world will be ours -- that if we follow these simple steps, we can have anything we want. But, isn’t the real problem in knowing what we want? The media tells us what we should want, the business section of The Timestells us how we can make money, but what if that’s not for us? What if we wanted to major in Human Services, like I did? You would not imagine the heat I got for wanting to major in Human Services. It’s not that there is anything wrong with that major and I loved it, it’s just that there is not much money in it if you don’t create your own opportunities. Everyone else felt they were doing me a favor by telling me what I should do with my life and how to make better money, never mind what I wanted. But they didn’t know me and they don’t know you, so how do we find out what we want?
Through our education, we realize that we are not powerless, that our choices will bring us to certain goals. Educated individuals are encouraged to ask: Isn’t there more? Why am I here? But, best of all, educated people know that there is so much that we don’t know. City Tech enabled me to reach my goals by providing me with a full scholarship and I’m very grateful for that. But this school has also enabled me to improve my skills of succeeding in spite of obstacles. It was here during the course of my education that I learned how to do things by the book. But, I also learned from some of my best professors that we can forget the book. I can write my own book. My own rules. My own choices. My own life.
I heard a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, a philosopher, who said “envy is ignorance [and] that imitation is suicide.” This was from his essay entitled “Self-Reliance,” showing us the importance of knowing ourselves and figuring out what we want. Emerson stressed how we all have a genius inside of us, but we choose to listen to others because we are afraid that what we have to say will not be accepted -- that it has no real value. As a result, people have to swallow the shame of watching other people say what they were thinking. One hundred and fifty years later, his argument prevails because many people -- we -- are often afraid to be different. Keep in mind, we should not be different just to get attention. We need to think outside of the box because we have to do -- we should only do -- what feels right. Now, Emerson does lay out the risk of this path: those choosing to be nonconformists may be ostracized by society because no one likes people who “rock the boat,” or think outside of the box. But the alternative is trying to find happiness defined by someone else.
Most of us have seen the movie Forrest Gump. He didn’t plan on being a leader, he intended to be happy with what he had. Every time Forrest Gump reached his goal, he looked around and realized everyone had followed him to the same goal. Those following him could not imagine that he was doing something just for the sake of doing it, like when he took off running across the country. They wanted it because he wanted it. I don’t want to be them. I want to be Forrest. Just as Emerson and Thoreau encouraged us to look inside for our own uniqueness, I encourage you and remind myself never to ignore our own inner Forrest Gump. We cannot just blindly follow someone else because there is going to come a point when that person will do what’s best for them, just like Forrest. Then what?
We are all at a crossroads right now: we can fit in the mold like everyone else or we can create our own mold. There are people – every day -- who wake up when they are older and wonder “what happened.” People get jobs on Wall Street when all they ever wanted to do was sing. People work thirty years at banks -- when all they ever wanted to do was write poetry. We cannot let this happen to us. We have to find our inner genius and use it to our advantage. We owe it to those who have helped us get where we are, but more than anyone, we owe ourselves. We must go traveling, see other places, other cultures and broaden our view of how things are done. We do not have to live our lives out “of quiet desperation” as Thoreau said, because we have a choice -- this is what our educations, our degrees, should provide us. We owe ourselves and we deserve it. Today, as we come to the end of this brief journey, I want to leave you with something else Thoreau said: “Things do not change; we change.”
Since this is a formal speech, I’m supposed to say: “So go ahead, the world is waiting.” But, this is me, so, come on: LET’S GET OUT OF HERE!