Cornell College held commencement exercises for the Class of 2022 Sunday, May 8, at Van Metre Field. A total of 213 graduates received degrees at the event.
Lauren Williams was the speaker for the college. Williams, a Brandon, Miss., native, was also named the young trustee for the college for the class of 2022.
Williams acknowledged the difficulties the Class of 2022 faced in their four years of college, including the racial and civil unrest seen in our country, the COVID-19 pandemic and weathering a derecho that saw the delay of the school year.
In her speech, Williams compared the four years of their time in the college to the traditional 18 day class semesters people know and love.
“Your first year is like that first week in a new class,” Williams said. “You keep up with all the readings and buy all the textbooks from the bookstore. Your relaxation was running to different dorm buildings on campus to hang with classmates.”
Williams said the sophomore year was when many students had developed a routine, they knew what they were doing. The sophomore year is also the year while they were on spring break many students at Cornell had to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic, as it hit at the tail end of their school year.
“Because we were Cornell and already doing classes one subject at a time for 18 days, it was easy for us to pivot to different learning environments,” Williams said.
Junior year was when students felt relaxed, but it was also the year they adapted to many challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the needs to abide by COVID-19 distancing protocols to help control spread of the virus.
Senior year, she noted was crunch time, when there like the last week in many courses, was so much to do in a short amount of time to complete it all.
Williams encouraged students, regardless of their GPA, to celebrate the fact they had made it to graduation and earned that degree, as it was an accomplishment with all the challenges the class had faced.
Craig Tepper, professor of biology, was tasked with speaking on behalf of the college by students.
Tepper outlined, mathematically, the days and hours students had completed in their time at Cornell College. A total of 576 class days for four years, with an estimated four hours per class was roughly 2304 hours of time they spent in college. Those hours did not account for extra-curricular activities or events they took part in.
His advice to college graduates was to remember life flies by, and to make the most out of every moment.
His other advice was advice he had received years ago – to be ignorant, but to do so in the right way. The lesson amounted to students recognizing what they don’t know and avoid the Dunning Krueger effect, instead focusing on what they don’t know as an area they can always learn and improve.
Cornell College president Jonathan Brand shared a story of a colleague at a different college who got a job at a workplace, and on his second day in the office laid out a number of deficiencies that he saw at the workplace visiting with the CEO. He lost his job hat day, and over the course of five weeks, came to realize his mistakes.
Brand made that analogy to highlight to students that he knows they want to go out and change the world, but part of what they have learned is that the ability to make those changes come forward with other attributes students at the college have learned – persistence, grit, stick-tuitiveness among them.
“I know we say a lot at Cornell ‘I can do anything in 18 days,’ but the importance is taking that time to better acquaint ourselves and build connections to make the changes we want to see,” Brand said. “The most important lesson we all need to know is to have productive patience. The ability to learn, listen and gather the legitimacy we want to be able to fight for the changes we’re proposing get made.”
Cornell graduate Lauren Williams addresses her classmates at Cornell College’s commencement exercises Sunday, May 8.