Thank you and good afternoon Dr. Lentini, members of the Board of Trustees, family, friends, faculty, administrators, and of course, the graduating class of 2023. I want to start by thanking Molloy University for this distinct honor. It couldn’t have come as more of a shock to me. After it hit me that this honor meant I’d have to speak in front of an audience of people and not make a fool of myself, I started thinking about what it was I wanted to say.
First and foremost, I want to give the most sincere congratulations to all the undergraduates and graduates sitting before me today. Today is a day to reflect back on all of our accomplishments and incredible experiences here at Molloy.
I started my academic career as a Nursing transfer student. I loved every second of it. All of it was incredible.. When the world shut down, I had time to reassess my life and that was when I realized my heart just wasn’t in it. I made the scary decision to switch to New Media after my first year at Molloy and had absolutely no idea where that was going to take me.
You can only imagine my mother’s face when I told her I was making the huge pivot. “What can you do with that degree?” , she asked. “What even is New Media?” While I literally had no answers for her, I smiled and nodded and hoped that I was making the right decision for myself.
If you are sitting before me today, you are incredibly successful. Some of us will be going off to the Peace Corp, some of us will go save lives as nurses, and some of us may still have absolutely no idea where the road leads, but regardless of where any of us are headed, we are all opening doors to new chapters, and for that, we should all be proud.
Recently, I’ve devoted time to thinking about what success means. Who defines it? Oftentimes we allow outsiders and even society to tell us what it means to be successful. But those definitions of success, in many ways, are markers that others have set out for us, so I took the liberty of asking some of my favorite people to define what success means to them. This is what they had to say:
My 7 year old niece Ariana said success to her is showing kindness.
My 7 year old niece Sofia said success is when she passes a test with a good grade and feels really happy.
My 3 year old nephew Lucas said and I quote “Zia I’m washing my hands”
As you can see, success is different for everyone. All the twists and turns on our individual paths take us to exactly where we are meant to be. I believe that no accolades, no amount of recognition can define a person’s true success. It’s what you do with your entire heart. It’s what wakes you up in the morning and gets your blood pumping. It’s the way you push through the anxiety and stresses of everyday life. It’s the way you face rejection only to get back at it and keep moving. It happens at any age.
The point I’m trying to make is that we define our own success, it is notdefined by others. Our hearts define it for us. Our souls define it for us. So today, on this incredible day, let us reflect on our own successes and celebrate them. Let us never forget that we are the leaders of our own paths. We are the drivers of our own destiny. I want to personally thank my mother, girlfriend, my sister, my sister in law, and my nieces and nephew for being the engines that kept my vehicle moving. And again, congratulations to Molloy’s graduating class of 2023.
Know we will all end up exactly where we belong.