Welcome back to the Year 2000 and the Spring semester.
Many of you have completed your first semester of college, some, naturally, more successfully than others! As I spend my time talking with many of you as I see you pass my office, when I ask, "How did you do last semester?" many of you simply tell me "Good." And I ask, "What does good mean?"
What does good mean? Does it mean you are on the Dean's List and soaring through your classes? Does it mean that after a rocky start, you finally buckled down to your studies and scored somewhere in the 2.5 area? Or, does it mean that you managed to finish all your classes without an Incomplete grade? Or does it mean you found a warm place to nap or maybe you discovered how many good-looking boys and girls wander around campus every day and maybe even sit in front of you in your American History class?
This semester I am working with many of you who are on Academic Notice. For the rest of you that means these students scored under a 2.0. For one moment I'd like all of us to think about what that means. It means that a lot of very basic human effort was expended for nothing! Listen - they got up every day, washed, brushed their teeth, eat breakfast, fought the traffic crossing town, searched for a parking space, hiked to class, and sat thorough class. They probably left all their work for the last minute. I did the work, they'll tell me. But did they? It comes down to a very basic denominator: money. If you or your parents or the Federal Government paid for the last semester and you got nothing out of it, I wished you had just given the check to me and stayed at home!
If you are hovering just above or below 2.0 it is a symptom of another problem. Just like a fever can be the first sign of pneumonia, mediocre scores like this mean something else. You don't want to be in school. You're going through the motions. You've not discovered what your long-term goal is. You may be afraid to succeed, to really do and be who you want to be! Or, you are afraid to leave behind your homeboys and girls who may be the night manager of the Home Depot or a Starbucks, and who say college is a joke. You look at them now. The guys may have their own swinging bachelor pad with a velvet painting of a naked woman on the wall. And Ladies, your friends may be dressing fine and living in their own apartments as well, both driving new cars. And you may think: what am I doing wrong?
What I believe you are doing wrong is that you have yet to discover what you want to do. And I DO NOT MEAN SIMPLY DECLARED A MAJOR! If you really wanted to be a Chemical Engineer you would be ace-ing your Calculus. If your desire were to teach school, you'd be eating Psychology alive! Because you'd understand how fundamental those courses are to your field of choice. Many of you need to know this one thing: if you start now you can make career of anything you really love. You don't believe me? If you were totally gaga about sports there are a million and one ways to make a career from that. Develop a computer sports game or a fan home site on the Internet, be a TV commentator, sportscaster, maybe even a sports agent. If you loved fashion, there are a million careers in that field other than folding sweaters at The Gap over Christmas. All you have to do is look through the Want Ads of Women's Wear Daily and see how many jobs there are.
This is what all this means: ten years from now no one is going to really care about your poor grades your first semester of college. What will be important however is that you discovered what you had a basic human passion to do or be and then followed that dream. If you'd like to discuss this with me, please come visit me. MWF 8-Noon; TTH 8-5p.m. And my final word is this. There is an old expression: if you do what you love, the money will follow. And I think we all know what that means. Now is the time to give some thought to these issues.
Be Here, Be Clear,
Reverend Bob