APA gradumacation speech

After four years of college, everything's finally done. Over. Ending. It's a bittersweet emotion we all have rising to the tops of our throats now, knowing this. We've each absorbed different lessons from our classes, our family and friends, our mentors. Our experiences and our mistakes. For me, from these past four years, the most valuable lesson I've learned is this: I know absolutely nothing about everything.

College has taught me that I know nothing about life, love, or all the things that fall in between. I thought that at the end of receiving a world-class education, I would know without a doubt what friendship, love and life really are. Turns out, though, I really don't. I don't even know what this ambiguous thing we call the future is.

It has been a whirlwind of late nights, long weeks and lazy days, and now, four years later, I don't know that I'm anywhere closer to being a full-fledged "grown-up" than I was four years ago when I first set foot on USC's campus.

These are terrifying realizations to come upon at the end of a four-year journey, I know, but there's an explanation for all this nothingness that I now know so well. Really. I hope (and secretly know) that I'm not the only one who is doubtful about how the knowledge and skills I've acquired at USC will play out in the "real world." Four years, umpteen all-nighters, countless papers, a few strands of sanity and several tens of thousands - scratch that, hundreds of thousands - of dollars later, how much will my ability to properly write a lede or a lab report translate into success in my career?

A whole lot, the way I see it - though not necessarily how you might think.

******

The truth of the matter is, is that college teaches you to embrace your ignorance, and more than that, to use it to your advantage. I'm a sucker for quotes - the cheesier the better - and the one that I have tacked on my wall across from my desk is the one that's stuck with me all these years.

“If you wait to do everything until you're sure it's right, you'll probably never do much of anything.”

Let me say this again, as the Win Borden quote does, in my opinion, bear repeating.

"If you wait to do everything until you're sure it's right, you'll probably never do much of anything."

In other words, acknowledging that you know nothing is the start of a beautiful journey to discovering everything. You have to break down a little bit to build yourself back up. You have to jump into things uncertain, or you'll never really jump at all.

******

Let's go back four years. Imagine: it's the beginning of freshman year, and we were adjusting to a lot of new experiences. We were meeting people from all corners of the country and from a wide range of different backgrounds. You shake a lot of people's hands those first few weeks. Name? Major? City? It felt like a never-ending parade of "hi's" and "how are you's." In those first few weeks, you feel like you know a lot, that you're very sure about where you came from and what you want to experience in college.

You define yourself by your major (or lack thereof), because somehow in the gap between high school and college, you were told that you had to be a certain way and a certain type of person in order to succeed. You have to be sure of things before getting started. I know for a fact that for my first few papers for Writing 140, I would research everything, map out my outline and write draft after draft, convinced that what I knew worked in high school would translate into college.

Wrong.

My first paper back was drowned in a sea of red marks, scratches, and that ominous grade at the top of the paper. Didn't I do everything right? Hadn't I gone by-the-books, followed the step-by-step formula of Writing 140 paper success? I had just finished stacks upon stacks of college application essays. I knew myself. I knew how to plug in the parts of an equation to get the answer I was looking for. I knew.

And here I thought I knew how to write! I thought I was going into journalism. I thought I knew. I thought, I thought, I thought.

You learn, jumping from high school to college, that a lot of the things you thought you knew - don't apply. College isn't a new chapter of your life - it's a whole other book. And more than that, a lot of the things I discovered I didn't know, I didn't know I didn't know prior to USC anyway.

Confusing? Case in point:

******

That first semester, I was still under the impression that I was going to be expanding upon my activities from high school. I'm from Cerritos, California, which has a whole lot of Asian Americans, so when I heard about APASS, I thought, "Here's a good way for me to start college with some semblance of familiarity. These are my people." And I didn't think there would be very much the department or the programs or the organizations could teach me that I didn't know already.

This couldn't have been further from the truth. The only thing that I had been right in guessing was that being around Asian Americans would be a form of familiarity. After being involved with Connections!, through which I found two lifelong mentors; PEER Mentoring, through which I was able to act as a mentor; APA Student Welcome, where I was able to engage new students with the USC campus; and Bamboo Offshoot, my pet project of sorts, bringing APA issues to light through writing and reporting - after being involved with so many programs under APASS, I discovered that I really didn't know there was so much I didn't know before.

But just because I didn't know everything didn't mean that I couldn't take action and start to do something.

"If you wait to do everything until you're sure it's right, you'll probably never do much of anything."

Having APASS as a home base has meant that I gained the foundation and the confidence I needed to venture out and put words into action.

Serving on the APASA board showed me that communication was key to getting programs, events and progress on the roll. It wasn't enough to learn about how the APA community is notoriously silent on campus. I wanted to strengthen my writing skills, my voice, to bolster it.

Speaking with younger students as a PEER mentor made me reflect on my own struggles to balance home life just 20 minutes away and college life here. It wasn't enough to learn about the difficulties of being Asian American and balancing Asian conservatism with American values of individuality. I wanted to help the next incoming classes know more about it.

More than that, I was learning about my own collegiate career as a journalism major. This showed me that it definitely wasn't enough to learn about glass - er, bamboo - ceilings and being a model minority. I wanted to turn that frustration into motivation to do unconventional things, to push boundaries and to succeed in uncommon fields.

So even though I wasn't entirely sure that it was the right step to take - especially after that first paper left me questioning - I knew that the best way I could service my community and myself would be through writing. And these last four years have allowed me to do so.

******

As I look out over the graduating seniors tonight, I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about when I say, too, that we've all spent a lot of long hours in activities and organizations and practices and meetings for things outside the classroom, for things we didn't know would pay off in the end. There is no guarantee that any of the steps we've taken during our four years will lead us to where we want to be. But remember:

"If you wait to do everything until you're sure it's right, you'll probably never do much of anything."

A part of the quote that I didn't explain earlier is that, in addition to having to know nothing to learn something, you have to trust that regardless of what comes next, you'll never know completely that what you're doing is right. And that's the beauty of uncertainty. Graduating at this point in history, at any point of history, means not knowing exactly what you're getting into. Looked at more positively, that means that the world is just full of possibilities. How's that for glass half full?

It's been a long journey, to say the least, to try to figure out what you know, what you knew, what you will discover in the coming years after graduation. It's going to be an amazing adventure, one in which we all learn so much about ourselves and the world we're about to jump into.

USC didn't teach me absolutely nothing, just that I need to recognize that, stepping into the real world, I'll need to embrace that lack of knowledge. It's okay to be unsure. Take risks, ask questions, and enjoy the view when you take that leap of faith.

“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.”

Congratulations, class of 2009, and thanks for listening. It's been an honor to speak before you, and I wish you the best in everything life has to offer.

After four years of college, everything's finally done. But it isn't over, ending, el fin. It's just beginning.