As the school year winds down, I have come to have a unique perspective on things that comes from being a senior who will (god willing) be graduating this May. As with any experience, it is only natural to sit back and reflect on what type of legacy you are as an individual going to leave this campus.
Are people going to talk about you or the things you have done during your tenure at Guilford? Probably not, but that’s okay.
The fact of the matter is that as the years go by, people are leaving, graduating, going insane or many other options that involve finding oneself. Good work is forgotten, memorable nights trickle away from the memories and people in general are not remembered.
One of my first real vivid memories at Guilford was during CHAOS and there was some event going on the lawn outside of New Garden Hall; from a distance I saw something that would change my future at Guilford forever. Far off on the lawn, I saw a rather large man wearing a yarmulke and being Jewish. I felt a desire to introduce myself. That man’s name was Mike Zarkin and he asked the magic question, “Do you want to be involved in Hillel.” I said yes, and the rest, as they say, is history.
But the point of my article is not so much reflection; it is change and understanding change. Over the course of the past four years I have changed, hopefully for the better. I do not want to speak for the rest of my classmates, but it is probably a fair assumption to make that most of them have changed too
The message I want to send out to all of you today is that as soon as I and my classmates graduate, Hillel, The Guilfordian, and all the other organizations we have been active with on campus, stay on campus. What we take with us is ourselves. When we first came to college we had changed throughout high school and now as we leave, we are changed college students.
We take that change with us, we take whom we are and what we will become in the future into the real world and that my friends, is a very scary thought.
I want to close this by saying that when I look back at the kind of person I was starting Guilford, I am amazed that I have, quite frankly, lasted this long. I feel that by being open to changes and understanding that improvement and alterations to myself can almost always be helpful, being modestly successful at Guilford like I have, was a little bit easier.
Change however is not just limited to our own person. We will go out into this world and see changes that we feel need to be made so that our world can be a better place to live in. I say this: work towards change, fight for progress. We need to change as the earth changes around us, and by doing so chances for success are high.
Right or wrong, history judges by what we do and what we choose not to do. Hopefully, when we sit back and reflect upon our life experiences, what will remain of us are love and all the good we have done to the world around us.