Commencement Speech
SATURDAY, JULY 07, 2012
Some advice to graduating high schoolers. Think of this as my Paul Harvey speech…
Video Games – Go find your PS3, XBOX, Wii, etc. and carry it to a concrete sidewalk. Now, lift it as high as you can above your head and slam it into the ground. Not kidding. Nobody gives a **** if you won the national championship with K-State on Heisman level. You won’t even care two weeks later.
There are few things you can do to increase your level of success that are more effective than completely and totally eliminating video games from your life. Keep in mind that 90% OF MY INCOME FOR THE PAST DECADE HAS COME FROM MAKING ONLINE GAMES. I’m Walter White telling Pinkman not to use my product. Listen to me or you’re going to wake up next to a dead girlfriend.
Grades – Unless you are going on for a higher level degree, who cares? Your freshman year people will talk about their high school class rank or their SAT/ACT scores. That’s because you’re immature brats that don’t realize none of that matters in the real world a tenth as much as work ethic, passion, and determination. Long term, getting a 2.0 at a school people respect in a legitimate major will be more valuable than a 3.9 at Tec a school they don’t.
Speaking of High School – Nothing you did matters any more, unless you were a state 4-H/FFA officer (at least in Texas). That’s the one thing I’ve heard mentioned about people long after they graduated. If you just missed making state office, stop trying to fool yourself to make the failure hurt less. It IS as bad as you think.
Alcohol – Don’t listen to your parents, get drunk. Just don’t drive, because that will for dang sure stick with you.
Picking a Major – There’s a thread on Steerplanet about this but for the record, this post has been sitting in the folder for a while now. You can get just about any ag job with a non-ag degree. You cannot get many non-ag jobs with an ag degree.
But Jeff!!!!! I believe in the future of agricul…blah blah blah.
I believe in a future where I can support my family with a career that can’t be described with “Any Major Accepted”.
Speaking of Majors – They say that within a few years your socioeconomic status will normalize to the approximate average of your friends and acquaintances. That is doubly true in academic discipline.
One of the bigger mistakes I made in college as an ag engineering major was having an ag development roommate and friends. For those that don’t know, ag development at A&M is one small step above majoring in FFA. Of course, you already knew that because you’ve seen A&M play football games and noticed that there were an awful lot of guys who never set foot on a farm majoring in it.
Long story short, they’re allowed to party a LOT more than you are as an engineering major and it impacts your grades.
Student Organizations – The one major regret I have from college is not taking part in any student organizations. It was due to primarily to two things. After high school I went cold turkey on getting involved in them due to the way FFA at our school consumed kids. The second was I was a lazy, drunk, dumb ass that was just hanging on to my engineering major by the skin of my teeth.
If I had it all to do over again, I’d get involved in every single organization I could possibly fit into my schedule. It’s a cliché but true, the people you meet and get to know in college are by far and away more important than the things you’re going to learn in class.
Especially in that waste of time ag major you’re choosing.