This was finally my move forward. I’m thankful for my dynamic block mates and professors. I thank God for having gone through three internships in companies I never thought would hire me, and I even got to apply what I had learned from my previous program. Our thesis group won the outstanding thesis award. And now, I have the honor of responding on behalf of the graduates especially on the centennial of my college, the Ramon V. Del Rosario College of Business.
In retrospect, my Lasallian journey was definitely not a straight line in the same way that life is not. I won’t even compare my journey to a line after all the uncertainty I had to endure. Rather, my Lasallian journey looked more like a scatterplot because I had to connect the dots myself. All our step-backs in the past will make sense because even if each step backward will bring us farther from where we want to be, the distance will give more clarity to the bigger picture of what we can do and achieve. More importantly, each step backward will give us a different vantage point from which we can redirect our next course of action in our lives. We are now at a different vantage point, and as our Lasallian journey comes to a close, we may be facing the greatest step backward our entire Lasallian experience has been preparing us for–graduating in a pandemic.
In 2013, an international business newspaper interviewed graduates of the Class of 2008–the graduating class at the onset of the 2008 Great Recession. These graduates had to enter a job market at its lowest and global unemployment rates at its highest. For one of the graduates interviewed, her first job was a veterinary assistant–a job not aligned with her advertising degree. Yet she stayed because during that period, she knew that her priorities had to change temporarily–from excelling in an advertising career, to putting food on the table. After a few years, she left her vet assistant job and eventually began a corporate career in advertising. All of the graduates interviewed were making less money than they had expected to make. They, too, acknowledged that they wouldn’t have survived without the recession’s redirecting them to new or alternative ways to make a living. Despite that difficult step-back in their careers, they moved forward from the recession. Since then, some of the biggest companies today were either founded or recovered after that Great Recession: Uber, Instagram, and Netflix.
Graduating at this moment in history may prove to be a challenge to start our respective careers. I’m sure none of us expected to graduate amid a pandemic, of a slowing economy, of headlined social injustices, and of heightened political tension. However, we, fellow graduates, are somewhat lucky. We still hold the power to become catalysts of social, commercial, and economic transformation. We may learn something from the graduates of 2008, but we cannot fully apply what they did in their time to our current situation. Remember, they graduated from what started as a financial crisis. Ours is a health crisis. And not only does that create a struggling job market, but the physical and social interactions that are essential in commerce have now been limited. Our lives after today will be a new experience for anyone.
The way we do business is starting to change, and surely our priorities will change, too. There is no other generation we can ask how ‘graduating in a pandemic’ was like, or what it was like for a Lasallian in the Time of Corona. Our actions after today will provide those answers. When the next generation turns to us, what will we answer them? How will we inspire them? And so, we must not only fully adapt to this new normal, but also foster our Lasallian ingenuity and take advantage of the new opportunities to make the most of this current situation. This pandemic may have brought us two steps back, but we must always learn to take that step forward. As Lasallian economics, education, science, and business graduates, we are now called, more than ever, to be the discerning, innovative, and socially responsible economists, educators, scientists, and business leaders De La Salle University and our country expect us to be–bridging our faith and our practice not just for ourselves but more so for the common good–men and women for all men and women.
Let ‘graduating in a pandemic’ be a challenge for all of us on how much we can answer to these times and improve our situation. De La Salle University has always taught us that our arrows do not simply fly; they soar. But should your arrows miss, not only can you find more arrows along the way, but you can certainly make your own.
Godspeed, and Animo La Salle! May our hearts stay restless until they rest in Him! Live, Jesus, in our hearts–forever!
The author delivered this speech as the response on behalf of the graduates during the 188th Commencement Exercises of De La Salle University on November 7, 2020. He can be reached at [email protected].
The views expressed above are those of the author’s. They do not necessarily reflect the position of De La Salle University, its faculty and its administrators.