2007 Graduation - Doctoral Convocation

C. Michael Nina, Student Speaker

Members of the Administration, Faculty, Staff, invited family and friends, good evening!

To my fellow graduates, Congratulations! Isn’t it a wonderful feeling to be done?!

I am honored to have been chosen to speak to you tonight as the representative of the recipients of the doctoral degree from New York University's School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

In thinking about what I wanted to say tonight, I remembered that Senator Clinton has stated that raising a child takes a village, meaning that many supportive individuals are needed.

Well, writing a dissertation and completing a doctoral degree also requires a large number of supportive individuals.

I and my fellow graduates would not be here today without the wonderful education and support that we received from the faculty of this school.

We especially benefited from the knowledge, guidance, and encouragement of our dissertation or final project committees, particularly our chairs.

By publicly hooding us today, you are announcing our status as peers and declaring your confidence in our ability to carry on independently.

For this and for all that you have done for us, I and my fellow graduates are most grateful and we would like to say to you: "Thank you!"

Of course, I can’t promise you won’t receive a few last-minute phone calls or emails from us as we attempt to condense our dissertations into publishable articles!

In addition to thanking the faculty, I and my fellow graduates are grateful to the wonderfully caring and dedicated administrators and staff in this School and in the larger University, who work tirelessly behind the scenes, in keeping this institution running as smoothly as possible.

Special thank-you’s must go out to Dean’s Carey and Halkitis and Doctoral Studies Coordinator Nancy Hall and her assistant Joe for making the doctoral and dissertation experiences as pleasant as possible, which surprisingly, is not such an easy task.

For this and for all that you have done for us, I and my fellow graduates are most grateful and we would like to say to you: "Thank you!"

Of course, there is one office that I and my fellow graduates have not yet used: the Alumni Association. But don’t worry fellow graduates, for the rest of our lives, they will be mailing us newsletters with glad tidings from our school. Oh, and if you’d like to make a donation to NYU, I’m pretty sure they’d be happy to help with that too.

Finally, and most importantly, on behalf of my fellow graduates, I would like to thank all the parents, spouses, families, and friends who encouraged, supported, and even sacrificed for us as we worked towards our doctoral degrees. Mercifully, we will never again have to miss another family function in order to re-run a regression analysis in SPSS.

Without your love and support, our hopes and dreams would probably never have been realized. For this and for all that you have done for us, I and my fellow graduates are most grateful to you: "Thank you!"

On a personal note, I am very happy that my wonderful family is here tonight, especially my mom, who just turned 80 on Sunday. There were times that she didn’t think she would make 80, and there were times that I didn’t think I would finish the dissertation. Happily, we were both wrong.

I’m sure my father is watching from up above. He was a poor farmer from Sicily, with only a sixth grade education, who came to the US to start a family, in hopes of a better life. And he believed that education was the ticket to that better life. He constantly extolled the virtues of an education to me; in other words, I was grounded if I didn’t get an "A" on an exam.

If he were here today to see his son graduate with a doctoral degree from one of the most prestigious universities in the country, I’m sure he would exclaim: "Only in America." Of course, he might also ask, "So, now are you going to get a real job?"

I believe that I and my fellow graduates are very lucky; lucky to be able to go out and do what we love, to be able to turn our interests and passions into fulfilling and satisfying careers.

I also feel that we have an obligation to assist others in attaining their dreams, just as we have been assisted in attaining our dreams. Our studies at NYU have equipped us to counsel, treat, lead, teach, inspire, enlighten or entertain others. Regardless of the specific methods we each may use, I and my fellow graduates share a dedication to nurturing the human spirit of others, just as our spirits have been nurtured by all of you.

Our studies at NYU have also equipped us to face the future; and it is now up to us to create that future. And no one could summarize this point in time in our lives more eloquently than the writer Theodore S. Geisel, who you probably know better as Dr. Seuss.

So in closing, I would like to leave you with these profound and inspiring words from Dr. Seuss:

"The more you read, the more things you will know.
The more you learn, the more places you will go.
You have brains in your head; you have feet in your shoes.
And now you can go, in any direction you choose."

Fellow Graduates, Congratulations and Best of Luck!