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Awards, the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell military policy was repealed by the federal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
