Scholars Banquet Comments

For those of you who have other obligations, here is what I MEANT to say at the Banquet tonight:

Welcome to the Scholars Senior Banquet.  I am Dr. Mariah Birgen and I am the director of the Wartburg scholars program and I'm excited to see you here to help us celebrate the accomplishments of these students.  When I first met them, they were only a few months out of high school and slightly more than four years out of junior high.  Now, the students who will be receiving medallions today are ready to graduate, leave the Wartburg bubble, and go out into the real world, or more accurately for some of them, graduate school.

Will the seniors please rise.

In 2010 volcanic ash from a volcano in Iceland caused massive air travel disruptions over most of Europe, threatening some May Term travel courses, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion kills 11 people and lead to a massive oil discharge in the Gulf of Mexico, Lady Gaga won both the MTV Music Awards and the American Music Awards, the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell military policy was repealed by the federal government, and a group of Wartburg Scholars students arrived on campus.  Now, four years later I welcome you to the Wartburg Scholars end of year banquet.  We are here to honor students who have completed their Scholars project and will defend it tomorrow, as well as students who have successfully kept up with their Scholars Culture Point submissions.  These projects represent years if not weeks of hard work and struggle through unforeseen circumstances.

In college, you are often assigned a project and will be given a week to be worked upon.  A long project may be two or three weeks.  And it could be that the professor would assign a semester long project.  One of the shocks of graduate school is often working on an interminable project for years.  You have proposed and finished a project which took more than a semester to complete.  Although there was a deadline for the project to be completed, it is hoped that we have given you a bit of the graduate school experience so that next year will not come as such a shock to you.

You may be seated.

Loving God, thank you for this time of celebration. Bless all those who gather with us today, bless this food and all those who prepared it, and bless all who seek wisdom.  Help us reach out to the hungry, those in pain and let us work to lessen the suffering we see around us.  Amen