Graduation Speech : After Retirement Essay

Growing up, school was not a major factor in my life. I come from a hard-working, middle-class military family. My mother, a Filipino immigrant, was a homemaker. My father was a 21-year United States Marine veteran. They were my first impression of what I thought my future would be. Being the youngest of four children, I was expected to fall in line behind my siblings when it came to education. I was never pushed to excel in my studies, so I did just enough to get by. As I watched friends escape the grasp of a military town and ascend to their respective colleges, I was left wondering what was next for me. I attended my local community college for a brief period of time. I treated college no different than high school. I

Throughout high school, students are told over and over how they need to go to college. Some students decide to go to college and some don’t. I will be honest, I didn’t want to attend college at all after high school. Mostly because I didn’t like school, and I was tired of hearing everyone tell me I needed to go, so I rebelled and didn’t enroll in any college. I didn’t understand the importance of a college degree at that time. After getting married in 2013, I began to realize what a mistake I made. We struggle from day-to-day, because I don’t make enough at my job. I can’t move higher up in the “career ladder”, because I didn’t take the opportunity to earn a degree.

Education is the main goal of college. I had always considered myself a person dedicated to the pursuit of more knowledge and a better education. My mother, being a teacher, had instilled these values in me. When I was in elementary, I tested into a gifted center and from there I tested into selective enrollment college prep. The obvious next step seemed to be college. Looking the scholarship given to me, it just didn’t seem to add up. I had scored a 32 on the ACT but my scholarship was barely covering half of my expenses. But I knew if a just gave up, the meant giving up on everything that I believe in. By pursing college I was able to be challenged, pursue subjects which interested me and discover new pathways that I was interested such as African American studies. Without taking that chance, I may have never received that knowledge.

While I was in high school I wasn’t fully committed to my studies and believed I didn’t have the potential it took to get into college. I graduated high school early when I first turned 17 through a early graduated program because I followed the wrong crowd and believed I wouldn’t be accepted to a university anyways. After I graduated high school I wanted to move out on my own and get a low paying job and apartment so I could support myself because I was always worried about being a burden to my family. Struggling to make ends meet every month really gave me a good work ethic because this was the first time I experienced having to make ends-meet. I worked until the end of my 6-month lease and eventually ended up moving back in with my parents

Edgar Allan Poe once said, "All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream."

I have spent the past fifteen years in the Air National Guard which has taken me to places and countries that I never imagined I would see. In those years my job has primarily been a fuel system operator of which my duties have spanned from maintaining the fuels system, quality assurance evaluator, and my current position as a training manager for the fuels section. As a training manager my duties include preparing 22 individuals for deployments and ensuring that those personnel are capable of performing their job which includes nearly 200 individual tasks outlined and documented in their training records. I tried college multiple times during the past fifteen years, first at community college, which was a few half attempts at an education.

As the seventh child in an eight child household, I heard the mantra repeated that after graduation you go to college or join the military. I did the former, without any real expectations of what I wanted to achieve by this choice. The only things I knew as a high school graduate was that I was going to travel and change the world. “Enter stage right, Reality”! I did not have a clue of what I wanted to be when I grew and subsequently spent the next twenty years fulfilling my glib senior year statement about where I would be in ten years, being a “wayfaring wanderer”.

College life and sometimes life its self can often and frequently seem challenging and overwhelming. In all likelihood, you were taught at a juvenescence age that getting an education would be conducive to living a prosperous lifestyle. For that reason, your primary motivator to attend college is so you can live the American Dream, an ionic symbol that symbolizes an ideal lifestyle of one achieving success in America. It is well known in today's society that the economy is endeavoring to thrive in such a competitive world, and without a college degree or skilled trade life can become financially unmanageable. Subsequently, after completing high school you enrolled in a post secondary institution, college. You selected a filed of study you would

You have fulfilled a quantifiable set of requirements, but what did you really learn? You learned a little something about quadratic equations, how to write the perfect English essay, or the causes of the Civil War. Our most important lessons, however, cannot be recited or written down and turned in for a grade. These lessons involve friendship, hard work, love, and dedication.

Well guys, we've made it. We've made it through four years of one of the most highly involved times in our lives. We've seen all, we've done all, and at this point in the year, most of us have probably had enough of it all. If you think about it, four school years is really a long time. four years of high school is equal to 720 school days, 4,320 class periods, and if you're a busy guy like me and you tend to count things by the minute, then it might surprise you to know that we've been in class for about 237,600 minutes. Class of 2006- are you ready to graduate?

(Love you mom and dad in Romanian) A lot of people here today probably didn't understand what I just said because I am Romanian, but if you take a look at my parents face they know I love them. I am Romanian and my parents came to the U.S. and could have chosen any state but they chose Washington. For all the people who don't appreciate Washington as much as me let me lay down some vibes. After I went to Arizona and California and some other states I came to realize that everything here is so much greener. Washington has the best-tasting tap water and yes, there is a difference in taste of water. Did you know Washington has an awesome kelp forest? People from all around the world come here to dive in our ocean to see our kelp forest. If

We live in a time in which everything is categorized by lists, whether it’s a dreaded school rubric or a David Letterman Top Ten List. As the millennium turns, we are deluged with lists: the best books of the millennium, the greatest songs of the millennium, the most influential people of the millennium. Personally, I may be sick of all these lists, but no graduating class of 2006 could let this occasion slip by without one more list: The Top Ten Things I Learned in High School. So listen along and see if your experience parallels mine. Here goes:

Ever since I was a little girl my grades have been phenomenal. They used to take me into the principles office because they would swear that I would cheat on almost all my assignments and test. I will never forget the biggest struggle that I had to go through in primary school and that was when I skipped a grade.

My mom has kept everything in the house the way it was before. It has the same furniture and the same pictures on the wall. It’s minimal with a nice brown couch and a wooden coffee table across the fireplace. He had some pictures he bought years ago organized neatly in their own individual spaces. Everything is here except the empty coffee mugs, randomly opened books, his ashtray, and the classic music he loved to fill his home with.

When I was younger, I wasn’t sure which career I wanted to pursue after leaving school, but I was certain that it needed to be something that was hands on as my favourite subjects had always been the ones where I could use my hands, such as art, metalwork and woodwork. I remember one project I was particularly proud of was a square coffee table made from walnut that I built in my woodworking class, I was given a brief with the dimensions and left to design and build it myself.