Ominous gray clouds loomed overhead as nearly 1,200 community residents and fraternity and sorority members formed two parallel lines to create a man-made human walkway that led from the main entrance of Matthew Knight Arena to the intersection of Franklin Boulevard and Villard Street.
As nearly 2,500 freshmen students and University staff passed through the sea of smiles, cheers and resounding claps, people on both sides of the walkway greeted the newcomers with high fives, salutations and enthusiastic chants like, “Go Ducks!” Even as rain began to fall, the crowd members remained in their places and donned windbreakers, hoodies and umbrellas as they continued to greet the newest members of the campus: the University’s class of 2015.
This year’s annual Convocation ceremony was held for the first time in the University’s brand-new Matthew Knight Arena. It was not only an opportunity for students to preview the new college atmosphere where they may eventually watch future basketball and volleyball games, but also provided them with a new perspective on college as they received encouraging words from seasoned members of the University community.
“As you wander this campus, learning, meeting new people, and discovering yourselves, remember that this is your education and your University,” ASUO President Ben Eckstein said. “I have no doubt that these years will shape you, but do not forget that you will have the opportunity to shape these years.”
In his welcome speech, Eckstein admitted that the first part of his college experience was a humbling one, because it taught him that “a college education is just as much a process of un-learning, as it is a process of learning.”
“The real learning of a college education takes place when we question what we are told, not when we blindly accept it,” Eckstein said. “I challenge you to open your minds at every moment to experiences outside your own and to question the perspectives, the prejudices and the fears you bring with you to this campus. This is a difficult process but an inevitable one, and the benefits it will reap have no bounds.”
For many students, Cora Bennett, the director of the University’s student orientation program, said the ceremony serves as the formal segue into a student’s collegiate career.
“It’s the official beginning of the new year to not only start to celebrate all of our accomplishments, but it provides a bookend to a student’s experience here at the University,” Bennett said. “They experience convocation right before their freshman year and then they experience commencement when they graduate, so both ceremonies are meant to be bookends of a student’s experience.”
However, Eckstein said students should consider themselves to be fortunate enough to attend college, because many others do not have same privilege. In his speech, Eckstein quoted a variety of statistics and studies that supported his claim, including one from the Federal Reserve which noted that American consumers combined owe nearly $850 billion in outstanding student loan debt — an amount that exceeded credit card debt for the first time last year.
“Let us also remember that, even for many of us here today, this opportunity is a burden as well as a gift,” Eckstein said. “I bring up these issues not to take meaning away from this moment, but rather to add meaning to it. This opportunity is too important, too costly and too exclusive to be used for anything less than everything you want of it.”
“A lot of the activities that they have put together to initiate social integration and stuff like that have been very helpful in meeting people, and it kind of opened my eyes to how diverse and big this community is,” said Heidi Rangel, a freshman psychology major, as she enjoyed the food from the free picnic on the Humpy-Lumpy Lawn. “I’m just very excited about being in college, because it’s so different from high school, which is much more socially condensed than this University.”@@names CC’d@@