To Graduation and Never Driving People to the Airport

Congratulations, graduates. I sit here today, not addressing you from the podium of the Marriott Center, but from the comfort of my kitchen table. Apparently the fact that your greatest feat from college was that you stayed awake during the entirety of a Statistics lecture one Friday morning does not get you the right to speak during your own college commencement. Of course, I’ve never let that stop me anyway.

Coming to college is very similar to having amazing retinas. I would know, just ask my eye doctor. For a person under the age of 80, I spend a tremendous time getting my eyes checked. Every time I go in, my doctor raves about how great my retinas look. “Rachel, your retinas are incredible,” he says.  “Rachel, your retinas look fantastic.” And every time I leave the eye doctor I feel extra special inside. Not everyone is as lucky to have retinas as ravishing as mine. I make sure to share the good news with my siblings, along with the cashier at the local grocery store and the pizza man, because I am under the impression that yes, my retinas really are that great. It is always a surprise to me when someone rolls their eyes (probably destroying their own chance of having retinas like mine) and tells me, “Nobody cares.”

College is the same. Your freshman year you show up to college, straight from your mother’s SUV with a brand new comforter and matching dorm decorations, ready to tell the world how great you are. Did you mention you were part of the National Honor Society? And the debate team? And on cheer? And Prom Queen? And valedictorian? And you singlehandedly got rid of ebola? Frantically you try to let the whole campus know exactly how incredible you are. But, just like the news about your retinas, people don’t care. Suddenly you’re part of a crowded campus where everyone is the same. Everyone was part of the National Honor Society. Everyone was the valedictorian. Everyone played a cello suite that brought Barack Obama to tears during his 2013 inauguration ball. And you don’t ask around, but probably everyone has extraordinary retinas as well.

However, being at BYU taught me a lot. It taught me responsibility. This includes but is not limited to the many times I accidentally made pasta for 8,000 people and ate all of it anyway, stayed up in the early hours of the morning with an 8am class on the horizon, telling myself that this is what “real” college students do, and the time I hit off my side mirror from the car my dad lets me borrow. (For the record: I had to go a small time without my mirror before getting it replaced, during which I found other great uses for it. If this has happened to you before, you know that people will see your car and try to lecture you on the dangers of driving like that. I highly recommend making quips such as, “Yeah, I never used that thing anyway. What a waste of space.” The bad news is you have to endure people trying to sentence you back to driver’s ed, but the good news is that people will stop asking you for rides to the airport.)

     Being at BYU taught me about communication. Upon one of my failed attempts to make the world’s best quesadilla, I went to my bedroom to let my roommate know there was something wrong with the stove. I told her the stove could erupt into flames any minute for all I knew. Her eyes flickered up just for a millisecond before they returned to her studies as she said, “Okay, cool.” I shook my head. “No. Not cool. You. Me. Our Apartment. FLAMES. FIRE!” It then dawned on me that she thought I was being sarcastic. Since then I have adapted a few strategies to make sure people know I am being serious, which include standing on my kitchen chair and talking with the kitchen lamp under my face, talking loudly, and ending conversations with “I AM BEING COMPLETELY SERIOUS.” With communication skills like mine, it is still unknown why the dean consistently thought I was joking when I suggested that they make me the dean instead with the explanation that I would be a great dean if I just googled how.

     A commencement speech isn’t a speech without thanking people like you’ve just won the Nobel Peace Prize, so thank you to those who support me. Thank you to those who helped fund my education. Thank you to my mom for consistently sending me freezer meals so I could eat like a sultan instead of a college student. Thank you dad, for reminding me it’s okay to be different and to laugh at myself. Thank you siblings, whether you were at BYU helping me connect to the best WiFi or setting an alarm on my phone that rings every day during the middle of class reminding me that I have the best siblings ever. Thank you grandparents for your sage advice and always caring about me. Thank you roommates for always putting up with my insane amount of tortillas in the fridge: 6 or 7 bags wouldn’t seem too much if I were a sumo wrestler. Thank you to my friends, thank you to my family, and thank you if you’re reading this. Thanks for being you.
     

Thanks to Aubrey Jo Young for her incredible photography.

And finally, thank you BYU. Thank you for your sometimes self-righteous yet incredibly kind students, thank you for your absurd belief that there is no demand for caffeine on campus, and thank you for planting those trees that bloom beautifully on campus in the spring but have a stench of a stink bomb. I couldn’t have thought of a more hilarious plan myself. Thank you for being built next to what my freshman-self proclaimed the ugliest mountain I had ever seen, and thank you for being built next to the mountain that I now walk out to every morning and smile because my perspective has changed. And lastly, thank you for helping me see beyond myself. Thank you for helping me see the good and the bad in the world. Thank you for showing me that there are people in this world that need our help. Thank you for providing ways to give that help. Thank you for helping me to see that there is more to life than excellent retinas. Thank you, Brigham Young University.