It’s week eight and almost time to lift a weight. Don’t give in to too much recreational bait but have your fun at a justifiable rate. “Dale.”
To answer the question on the tip of everyone’s tongue about what I’m doing after graduation, or rather what I’m not doing: no making rhymes for me, nor quoting Pitbull ever again.
To all my fellow graduates, whether you have a set post-graduation plan or not, I think we’re all in need of one last inspirational push into the real world. We’ve spent the last several years in school, listening to spiels left and right, but our commencement into the future is quickly approaching. When the day comes, there is no doubt we’ll hear speeches that are meant to give us both closure for the world we’re leaving and optimism for the one we’re about to enter, and I’m very much looking forward to it.
Over the last couple weeks, many colleges across the U.S. (that are not on the quarter system as we are) celebrated the accomplishments of thousands of graduates, and some of these ceremonies were graced with a star keynote speaker.
On May 7 at Washington D.C.’s Howard University and on May 15 at Rutgers University in New Jersey, President Barack Obama spoke to members of the class of 2016 with poise and wisdom. He had a few overlapping themes in the two speeches, but also some unique, standout points that I appreciated.
At Howard, the president was able to connect with his audience in terms of identity markers, specifically one of race. He said to the students of this historically black university, “Be confident in your heritage. Be confident in your blackness. There’s no one way to be black. Take it from somebody who’s seen both sides of the debate about whether I’m black enough.” He went on to talk about the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and continued to keep his words important and incredibly relevant.
On Sunday at Rutgers, the POTUS made his speech a little more political in that he took some not-so-subtle jabs at (Mc)Donald Trump. He never mentioned the Republican presidential candidate, but he did mention a few key aspects of Trump’s controversial plan for the U.S. From “isolating or disparaging Muslims,” to Trump generally being ignorant, Obama’s message to the graduates was, “It’s not cool to not know what you’re talking about.”
Obama is set to speak at one more graduation ceremony this year, unfortunately not at the University of Oregon, but at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on June 3.

Aside from giving speeches at graduations, the president continued to do good for the U.S. education system this week. According to USA Today, on May 13, the Obama Administration told “all U.S. public school districts to allow students to use restrooms and locker rooms ‘consistent with their gender identity’ in a letter from the Department of Education.” This policy was issued in response to the controversy surrounding the topic of transgender students and whether it should be permissible for them to use bathrooms according to the gender they’ve assigned to themselves, rather than the gender written on their birth certificates. I applaud Obama for paying attention to a marginalized community, and I encourage others to try it out.
One team that doesn’t need to hold try-outs for awhile is the Golden State Warriors who got to celebrate #AnotherOne this week in the fifth and final game of the NBA Western Conference Semi-Finals match-up against Portland. But the ‘Zers should be proud, since it wasn’t a blowout game, ending with a final score of 121-125. Mr. Zero, or Damian Lillard, and the rest of the Blazers went all-out in the paint on May 11, but the Bay Area’s bae, Steph Curry, just couldn’t be beat.
The man has no competition, which was clear at the end of the game on Tuesday when Curry received the 2016 Most Valuable Player award for the second year in a row. He’s the first player to ever win MVP by a unanimous vote.
Now, we’ll have to stay tuned to see whether Steph and his Warriors will come out on top in the remainder of the championship games, or if it’ll be the Thunder, Raptors or Lebron’s Cavaliers.