What’s an FNG, you ask? Freshman New Guy. Welcome, FNGs to NEIU, and may your stay here be an enjoyable one. It probably will be a long one!
While this is your first semester here at Northeastern, this is my last. I will be graduating come December, and I must say although it took a while, the time passed quickly. The last four (or is that forty?) years for me have been an unusual educational experience. I learned more outside of class than in.
You missed an interesting four years. Campus personalities who graduated last semester, or who will be graduating with me in December, shaped and formed a unique atmosphere in the classrooms and halls of NEIU. Student organization leaders and members who left their mark and now pass the torch to a new generation of students -you.
As I look back over the past four years, I remember the sit-ins, protests, demonstrations, pleadings with professors, power failures, floods, mercury spills, making out in the library, all night cramming, fire evacuations, teacher strike, and a montage of other experiences far and beyond the normal classroom antics.
In four, five, six years or more, you also will look back on your NEIU experience and say, “What was I thinking!” But for now, you will be adapting, getting your feet wet, in a manner of speaking. Unless the food court floods again; then it’s literal.
Those of us who have been through the system could give you advice, and we sometimes do, but it is seldom heeded. For the most part, we find things out through our own experience. That is part of the learning process, and that is how you will grow in wisdom.
The most difficult part of college is getting through the gen-ed stuff that is required. It’s kind of an assembly line process. Instructors have the subjects down pat and repeat it semester after semester with very little alteration in presentation. If you can get through the basics, the electives and your area of concentration will be more interesting and fun.
On the social end of things, we are a smorgasbord of ethnic and cultural differences. What is noticeable is that we tend to huddle together in cliques, to socialize with our own “kind,” rather than take advantage of the diversity on campus. This is unfortunate because we have a wonderful opportunity to learn from one another but we do not take advantage of it, thereby missing one of the major learning experiences this university has to offer.
Now, about that degree you are seeking. Let me make a few observations. It is not as important as you think, and it doesn’t help much in getting you get that dream career.
What is important is you as an individual. Your personality and well-rounded life experience is what makes for success. Unless you have a positive attitude and a certain charisma, along with what we call “people skills,” your degree is no better than the thousands of others being printed and handed out semester after semester.
Elbert Hubbard, businessman, philosopher and founder of an art colony known as the Roycrofters, wrote that all degrees should be honorary. That is, degrees should be bestowed to recognize someone for what he has already done for mankind, society, or culture. The degrees we get are more like affirmations of potential, for what we could possibly accomplish, and are therefore meaningless unless acted upon.
The degree you will receive is a confirmation of your own personal achievement. You did it! You graduated! Yep, it’s something to work for. That’s why I returned to school after forty years: to realize a personal ambition, a goal. But what does it contribute to others? Nothing. And that is what I want to impress upon you.
Follow your dream, achieve your goals, but remember that there must be a purpose for what you do. You have at least four years to figure out what that purpose is.
Good luck and remember that all you need to learn is more than just in textbooks.