Column Chronicles: The 2016 Fairchild U commencement address

The 2016 Fairchild U commencement address

Frank Cotolo
June 8, 2017

For the first time in all of my speaking engagements, I was invited to give a Commencement Address. Honored and bewildered, I put on my graduation gown and stood before the Class of 2016 at Fairchild University in New Mexico. Here is the transcript of that address.

Thank you President Flautatious, the board of directors and today's honorary degree recipients, all of them bored of directors.

I graduated college in nineteen seventy-two with a Bachelor of Deferment degree, making my four years in college a protest of the Vietnam War. Today I wonder if going to war instead of college would have taught me more but I don't think like that for long because having a college degree - even one in cowardice - is better than not having one at all.

Whatever degree you earned in the last four years is something to make you proud, even if you passed every subject by using 'For Dummies' books.

Now that you have reached the status of graduate, you are a freshman again. You start a career from the bottom. Everyone else is a boss of you.

Your parents expect you to rise quickly to the top of your profession. Your friends wish you luck but are actually hoping they do better than you do and perhaps that you fail miserably. Those of you who were members of fraternities and sororities will find all of your brothers and sisters have become moral enemies, some carrying weapons that can injure or even kill you. Their loyalty to you is dead in the outside world.

And, as well, there's a bad side to it all.

However, the test is challenging and that may make it all worth the lonely days of despair ahead. Because if you can make it through the gauntlet of the first twenty or so years after college you will know that success is just a short decade away. It will still be ten years but it will seem like four or five years, maybe just six or six and a half but not like all ten in a decade.

Then, you will be in the small percentage of people on this planet that have made it in a world where a large percentage of people do not make it. These years of school will suddenly begin to pay off and you will wonder what you would have done had you not gone to college and a cold chill will run down your spine.

I know were it not for college I would have become an expert in nothing more than friendly fire. Take it from me, graduating class, you have not wasted your time in the halls of higher education. Now you can be sure, as my father used to say to me, that something will happen.

Thank you and now throw your hats into the air.

Frank Cotolo can be found hosting the talk and interview programme Cotolo Chronicles. You can send him an e-mail at this address: frank@148.ca.