It is such an honor to deliver this year’scommencement address to the University of Southern California’s graduating class of2017. I would like to say thank you, graduates,for that warm welcome. I would also like to apologize to all theparents who are sitting there, saying, ‘Will Ferrell? Why will Ferrell? I hate Will Ferrell. I hate him. I hate his movies. He’s gross. Although he’s much better-looking in person. Has he lost weight?’ By the way, that discussion is happening outthere right now. Today I have also received an honorary doctorate,for which I would like to give my thanks to President Max Nikias. I would also like to recognize my esteemedfellow honorary doctorates, Suzanne Dworak-Peck, a great humanitarian and visionary in thefield of social work. Dr. Gary Michelson, whose innovation as oneof the country’s leading orthopedic spinal surgeons has revolutionized this field.
Mark Ridley Thomas, a pillar of local andstate government for over 25 years. David Ho whose work in AIDS research led himto be TIME Magazine’s Man of the Year for 1996. And one of the great actors of our time, Academy-Awardwinning actress Dame Helen Mirren. And then there’s me. Will Ferrell, whose achievements include runningnaked through the city of Montrose in Old School. Montrose in the house, alright. Running around in my underwear and racinghelmet, thinking that I’m on fire as Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights. Running around in Elf tights eating gum offthe ground and playing cowbell. I think my fellow doctorates would agree basedon our achievements we are all on equal footing. I want the university to know that I do nottake this prestigious honor lightly. I’ve already instructed my wife and my children,from this point on, they have to address me as Dr. Ferrell. There will be no exceptions. Especially at our children’s various schoolfunctions and when opening Christmas presents. ‘Yay, we got the new Xbox, thank you Dad! I mean, Dr. Ferrell.’ I’ve been informed that I can now performminimally invasive surgery at any time or any place, even if people don’t want it. In fact, I am legally obligated to performminor surgery at the end of today’s ceremonies, or my doctor’s degree will be revoked. So if anyone has a sore tooth that needs tobe removed or wants hernia surgery, please meet me at the “surgery center” – by“surgery center” I mean a windowless van I have parked over by the Coliseum. The next time I’m flying and they ask ifthere’s a doctor on board, I can now confidently leap to my feet and scream, ‘I’m a doctor,what can I do? Yes, no problem, I can absolutely deliverthat baby.’ Hopefully it will be on United Airlines, inwhich I will be immediately be subdued and dragged off the aircraft, which we all knowwill be recorded on someone’s iPhone and put on YouTube. You will hear me say, “Call Max Nikias,President of USC. He told me I’m a doctor.’ Rest assured, President Nikias, I will usemy powers wisely. Although this is my first commencement addressI have delivered to an actual university, this is not my first commencement speech. The institutions to which I have spoken atpreviously include Bryman School of Nursing, DeVry Technical School, Debbie Dudeson Schoolof Trucking, University of Phoenix, Hollywood DJ Academy and Trump University. I am still waiting to get paid from TrumpUniversity. In fact, it turns out I owe Trump Universitymoney for the honor to speak at Trump University. You are the graduating class of 2017. And by every statistical analysis you arecollectively considered the strongest class ever to graduate from this university. All of you have excelled in various coursesof study. All of you, except for four students. And you know exactly who you are. If you would care to stand and reveal yourselfright now, that would be great, those four students. There’s one. Two. Three, four, five, six, eight, more like 20. Very honest of you. It is incredibly surreal, one might even sayunbelievable, that I get to deliver this address to you. As a freshman in the fall of 1986, if youwere to come up to me and say that in the year 2017 you, Will Ferrell, will be deliveringthe commencement address for USC, I would have hugged you with tears in my eyes. I then would have asked this person from thefuture, ‘Does that mean I graduated?’ ‘Yes, you did,’ says the person from thefuture. ‘What else can you tell me about the future?’ Future person turns to me and says, ‘I cantell you that you will become one of the most famous alumni in this university, mentionedin the same breath as John Wayne, Neil Armstrong and Rob Kardashian. You will be referenced in rap songs from KanyeWest, to Little Wayne to Drake. Nas will say, ‘Get me real bonkers likeWill Ferrell on cat tranquilizer.’’ ‘Is that it?’ I would ask. ‘Yes, that sums it up. Except one other thing – in the future therewill be something called Shake Shack. It will start in New York and then come toLA and people will wait hours for a milkshake that is definitely good but not that goodthat you should wait two hours.’ So yes, if I had heard all of that I wouldhave been incredulous at best. But it turns out I did graduate in 1990 witha degree in Sports Information. Yes. You heard me, Sports Information. A program so difficult, so arduous, that theydiscontinued the major eight years after I left. Those of us with Sports Information degreesare an elite group. We are like the Navy Seals of USC graduates. There are very few of us and there was a highdropout rate. So I graduate and I immediately get a jobright out of college working for ESPN, right? Wrong. No, I moved right back home. Back home to the mean streets of Irvine, California. Yes. Irvine always gets that response. Pretty great success story, right? Yeah, I moved back home for a solid two years,I might add. And I was lucky, actually. Lucky that I had a very supportive and understandingmother, who is sitting out there in the crowd, who let me move back home. And she recognized that while I had an interestin pursuing sportscasting, my gut was telling me that I really wanted to pursue somethingelse. And that something else was comedy. For you see, the seeds for this journey wereplanted right here on this campus. This campus was a theater or testing lab ifyou will. I was always trying to make my friends laughwhenever I could find a moment. I had a work-study job at the humanities audiovisualdepartment that would allow me to take off from time to time. By allow me, I mean I would just leave andthey didn’t notice. So I would literally leave my job if I knewfriends were attending class close by and crash a lecture while in character. My good buddy Emil, who’s also here today– Emil, in the house – Emil told me one day that I should crash his Thematic Optionsliterature class one day. So I cobbled together a janitor’s outfitcomplete with work gloves, safety goggles, a dangling lit cigarette, and a bucket fullof cleaning supplies. And then I proceeded to walk into the class,interrupting the lecture, informing the professor that I’d just been sent from Physical Plantto clean up a student’s vomit. True story. What Emil neglected to tell me was that theprofessor of his class was Ronald Gottesman, a professor who co-edited the Norton Anthologyof American literature. Needless to say a big-time guy. A month after visiting my friend’s classas a janitor, I was walking through the campus when someone grabbed me by the shoulder andit was Ron Gottesman. I thought for sure he was going to tell meto never do that again. Instead what he told me was that he lovedmy barging in on his class and that he thought it was one of the funniest things he’d everseen and would I please do it again? So on invitation from Professor GottesmanI would barge in on his lecture class from time to time as the guy from Physical Plantcoming by to check on things, and the professor would joyfully play along. One time I got my hands on a power drill andI just stood outside the classroom door operating the drill for a good minute. Unbeknownst to me, Professor Gottesman waswondering aloud to his class, ‘I wonder if we’re about to get a visit from our PhysicalPlant guy?’ I then walked in as if on cue and the wholeclass erupted in laughter. After leaving, Professor Gottesman then weavedthe surprise visit into his lecture on Walt Whitman and the Leaves of Grass. Moments like these encouraged me to thinkmaybe I was funny to whole groups of people who didn’t know me, and this wonderful professorhad no idea how his encouragement of me — to come and interrupt his class no less — wasenough to give myself permission to be silly and weird. My senior year I would discover a comedy andimprov troupe called the Groundlings located on Melrose Avenue. This was the theater company and school thatgave the starts to Laraine Newman, Phil Hartman, John Lovitz, Pee Wee Herman, Conan O’Brien,Lisa Kudrow to name a few. Later it would become my home where I wouldmeet the likes of Chris Kattan, Cheri O’Teri, Ana Gasteyer, Chris Parnell, Maya Rudolph,Will Forte and Kristin Wiig. I went to one of their shows during the springsemester of my senior year and in fact got pulled up onstage during an audience participationsketch. I was so afraid and awestruck at what theactors were doing that I didn’t utter a word. And even in this moment of abject fear andtotal failure I found it to be thrilling to be on that stage. I then knew I wanted to be a comedic actor. So starting in the fall of 1991, for the nextthree and a half years I was taking classes and performing in various shows at the Groundlingsand around Los Angeles. I was even trying my hand at stand-up comedy. Not great stand-up, mind you, but enough materialto get myself up in front of strangers. I would work the phones to invite all my SCfriends to places like Nino’s Italian Restaurant in Long Beach, the San Juan Depot in San Juan,Capistrano, and the Cannery in Newport Beach. And those members of my Trojan family wouldalways show up. My stand-up act was based mostly on materialderived from watching old episodes of Star Trek. My opening joke was to sing the opening themeto Star Trek. [Sings] Thank you. Not even funny, just weird. But I didn’t care, I was just trying tothrow as many darts at the dart board, hoping that one would eventually stick. Now don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t extremelyconfident that I would succeed during this time period, and after moving back to LA therewere many a night where in my LA apartment, I would sit down to a meal of spaghetti toppedwith mustard, with only $20 in my checking account and I would think to myself, ‘Ohwell I can always be a substitute schoolteacher.’ And yes, I was afraid. You’re never not afraid. I’m still afraid. I was afraid to write this speech. And now, I’m just realizing how many peopleare watching me right now, and it’s scary. Can you please look away while I deliver therest of the speech? But my fear of failure never approached inmagnitude my fear of what if. What if I never tried at all? By the spring of 1995 producers from SaturdayNight Live had come to see the current show at the Groundlings. After two harrowing auditions and two meetingswith executive producer Lorne Michaels, which all took place over the course of six weeks,I got the word I was hired to the cast of Saturday Night Live for the ‘95-‘96 season. I couldn’t believe it. And even though I went on to enjoy seven seasonson the show, it was rocky beginning for me. After my first show, one reviewer referredto me as ‘the most annoying newcomer of the new cast.’ Someone showed this to me and I promptly putit up on the wall in my office, reminding myself that to some people I will be annoying. Some people will not think I’m funny, andthat that’s okay. One woman wrote to me and said she hated myportrayal of George W. Bush. It was mean-spirited, not funny and besidesyou have a fat face. I wrote her back and I said, I appreciateyour letter and she was entitled to her opinion, but that my job as a comedian especially ona show like Saturday Night Live was to hold up a mirror to our political leaders and engagefrom time to time in satirical reflection. As for my fat face, you are 100% right. I’m trying to work on that. Please don’t hesitate to write me againif you feel like I’ve lost some weight in my face. The venerable television critic for the WashingtonPost Tom Shales came up to me during my last season of the show. He told me congratulations on my time at theshow and then he apologized for things he had written about me in some of his earlyreviews of my work. I paused for a second before I spoke, andthen I said, ‘How dare you, you son of a bitch?’ I could tell this startled him, and then Itold him I was kidding, and that I’d never read any of his reviews. It was true, I hadn’t read his reviews. In fact I didn’t read any reviews becauseonce again, I was too busy throwing darts at the dartboard, all the while facing myfears. Even as I left SNL, none of the studios werewilling to take a chance on me as a comedy star. It took us three years of shopping Anchormanaround before anyone would make it. When I left SNL all I really had was a moviecalled Old School that wouldn’t be released for another year, and a sub-par script thatneeded a huge rewrite about a man raised by elves at the North Pole. Even now I still lose out on parts that Iwant so desperately. My most painful example was losing the roleof Queen Elizabeth in the film The Queen. Apparently it came down to two actors, myselfand Helen Mirren. The rest is history. Dame Helen Mirren, you stole my Oscar! Now one may look at me as having great success,which I have in the strictest sense of the word, and don’t get me wrong, I love whatI do and I feel so fortunate to get to entertain people. But to me, my definition of success is my16-and-a-half-year marriage to my beautiful and talented wife, Vivica. Success are my three amazing sons, Magnus,13, Matthias, 10 and Axel age 7. Right there, stand up guys, take a bow, thereyou go. Success to me is my involvement in the charityCancer for College, which gives college scholarships to cancer survivors, started by my great friendand SC alum Craig Pollard, a two-time cancer survivor himself, who thought of the charitywhile we were fraternity brothers at the Delt house, up on West Adams. Craig was also one of the members of my Trojanfamily sitting front-and-center at my bad stand-up comedy shows, cheering me on. No matter how cliché it may sound you willnever truly be successful until you learn to give beyond yourself. Empathy and kindness are the true signs ofemotional intelligence, and that’s what Viv and I try to teach our boys. Hey Matthias, get your hands of Axel rightnow! Stop it. I can see you. Okay? Dr. Ferrell’s watching you. To those of you graduates sitting out therewho have a pretty good idea of what you’d like to do with your life, congratulations. For many of you who maybe don’t have itall figured out, it’s okay. That’s the same chair that I sat in. Enjoy the process of your search without succumbingto the pressure of the result. Trust your gut, keep throwing darts at thedartboard. Don’t listen to the critics and you willfigure it out. Class of 2017, I just want you to know youwill never be alone on whatever path you may choose. If you do have a moment where you feel a littledown just think of the support you have from this great Trojan family and imagine me, literallypicture my face, singing this song gently into your ear: If I should stay, I would onlybe in your way. So I’ll go, but I know, I’ll think ofyou every step of the way. And I will always love you, will always loveyou, will always love you, Class of 2017. And I will always love you. Thank you, fight on!
Mark Ridley Thomas, a pillar of local andstate government for over 25 years. David Ho whose work in AIDS research led himto be TIME Magazine’s Man of the Year for 1996. And one of the great actors of our time, Academy-Awardwinning actress Dame Helen Mirren. And then there’s me. Will Ferrell, whose achievements include runningnaked through the city of Montrose in Old School. Montrose in the house, alright. Running around in my underwear and racinghelmet, thinking that I’m on fire as Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights. Running around in Elf tights eating gum offthe ground and playing cowbell. I think my fellow doctorates would agree basedon our achievements we are all on equal footing. I want the university to know that I do nottake this prestigious honor lightly. I’ve already instructed my wife and my children,from this point on, they have to address me as Dr. Ferrell. There will be no exceptions. Especially at our children’s various schoolfunctions and when opening Christmas presents. ‘Yay, we got the new Xbox, thank you Dad! I mean, Dr. Ferrell.’ I’ve been informed that I can now performminimally invasive surgery at any time or any place, even if people don’t want it. In fact, I am legally obligated to performminor surgery at the end of today’s ceremonies, or my doctor’s degree will be revoked. So if anyone has a sore tooth that needs tobe removed or wants hernia surgery, please meet me at the “surgery center” – by“surgery center” I mean a windowless van I have parked over by the Coliseum. The next time I’m flying and they ask ifthere’s a doctor on board, I can now confidently leap to my feet and scream, ‘I’m a doctor,what can I do? Yes, no problem, I can absolutely deliverthat baby.’ Hopefully it will be on United Airlines, inwhich I will be immediately be subdued and dragged off the aircraft, which we all knowwill be recorded on someone’s iPhone and put on YouTube. You will hear me say, “Call Max Nikias,President of USC. He told me I’m a doctor.’ Rest assured, President Nikias, I will usemy powers wisely. Although this is my first commencement addressI have delivered to an actual university, this is not my first commencement speech. The institutions to which I have spoken atpreviously include Bryman School of Nursing, DeVry Technical School, Debbie Dudeson Schoolof Trucking, University of Phoenix, Hollywood DJ Academy and Trump University. I am still waiting to get paid from TrumpUniversity. In fact, it turns out I owe Trump Universitymoney for the honor to speak at Trump University. You are the graduating class of 2017. And by every statistical analysis you arecollectively considered the strongest class ever to graduate from this university. All of you have excelled in various coursesof study. All of you, except for four students. And you know exactly who you are. If you would care to stand and reveal yourselfright now, that would be great, those four students. There’s one. Two. Three, four, five, six, eight, more like 20. Very honest of you. It is incredibly surreal, one might even sayunbelievable, that I get to deliver this address to you. As a freshman in the fall of 1986, if youwere to come up to me and say that in the year 2017 you, Will Ferrell, will be deliveringthe commencement address for USC, I would have hugged you with tears in my eyes. I then would have asked this person from thefuture, ‘Does that mean I graduated?’ ‘Yes, you did,’ says the person from thefuture. ‘What else can you tell me about the future?’ Future person turns to me and says, ‘I cantell you that you will become one of the most famous alumni in this university, mentionedin the same breath as John Wayne, Neil Armstrong and Rob Kardashian. You will be referenced in rap songs from KanyeWest, to Little Wayne to Drake. Nas will say, ‘Get me real bonkers likeWill Ferrell on cat tranquilizer.’’ ‘Is that it?’ I would ask. ‘Yes, that sums it up. Except one other thing – in the future therewill be something called Shake Shack. It will start in New York and then come toLA and people will wait hours for a milkshake that is definitely good but not that goodthat you should wait two hours.’ So yes, if I had heard all of that I wouldhave been incredulous at best. But it turns out I did graduate in 1990 witha degree in Sports Information. Yes. You heard me, Sports Information. A program so difficult, so arduous, that theydiscontinued the major eight years after I left. Those of us with Sports Information degreesare an elite group. We are like the Navy Seals of USC graduates. There are very few of us and there was a highdropout rate. So I graduate and I immediately get a jobright out of college working for ESPN, right? Wrong. No, I moved right back home. Back home to the mean streets of Irvine, California. Yes. Irvine always gets that response. Pretty great success story, right? Yeah, I moved back home for a solid two years,I might add. And I was lucky, actually. Lucky that I had a very supportive and understandingmother, who is sitting out there in the crowd, who let me move back home. And she recognized that while I had an interestin pursuing sportscasting, my gut was telling me that I really wanted to pursue somethingelse. And that something else was comedy. For you see, the seeds for this journey wereplanted right here on this campus. This campus was a theater or testing lab ifyou will. I was always trying to make my friends laughwhenever I could find a moment. I had a work-study job at the humanities audiovisualdepartment that would allow me to take off from time to time. By allow me, I mean I would just leave andthey didn’t notice. So I would literally leave my job if I knewfriends were attending class close by and crash a lecture while in character. My good buddy Emil, who’s also here today– Emil, in the house – Emil told me one day that I should crash his Thematic Optionsliterature class one day. So I cobbled together a janitor’s outfitcomplete with work gloves, safety goggles, a dangling lit cigarette, and a bucket fullof cleaning supplies. And then I proceeded to walk into the class,interrupting the lecture, informing the professor that I’d just been sent from Physical Plantto clean up a student’s vomit. True story. What Emil neglected to tell me was that theprofessor of his class was Ronald Gottesman, a professor who co-edited the Norton Anthologyof American literature. Needless to say a big-time guy. A month after visiting my friend’s classas a janitor, I was walking through the campus when someone grabbed me by the shoulder andit was Ron Gottesman. I thought for sure he was going to tell meto never do that again. Instead what he told me was that he lovedmy barging in on his class and that he thought it was one of the funniest things he’d everseen and would I please do it again? So on invitation from Professor GottesmanI would barge in on his lecture class from time to time as the guy from Physical Plantcoming by to check on things, and the professor would joyfully play along. One time I got my hands on a power drill andI just stood outside the classroom door operating the drill for a good minute. Unbeknownst to me, Professor Gottesman waswondering aloud to his class, ‘I wonder if we’re about to get a visit from our PhysicalPlant guy?’ I then walked in as if on cue and the wholeclass erupted in laughter. After leaving, Professor Gottesman then weavedthe surprise visit into his lecture on Walt Whitman and the Leaves of Grass. Moments like these encouraged me to thinkmaybe I was funny to whole groups of people who didn’t know me, and this wonderful professorhad no idea how his encouragement of me — to come and interrupt his class no less — wasenough to give myself permission to be silly and weird. My senior year I would discover a comedy andimprov troupe called the Groundlings located on Melrose Avenue. This was the theater company and school thatgave the starts to Laraine Newman, Phil Hartman, John Lovitz, Pee Wee Herman, Conan O’Brien,Lisa Kudrow to name a few. Later it would become my home where I wouldmeet the likes of Chris Kattan, Cheri O’Teri, Ana Gasteyer, Chris Parnell, Maya Rudolph,Will Forte and Kristin Wiig. I went to one of their shows during the springsemester of my senior year and in fact got pulled up onstage during an audience participationsketch. I was so afraid and awestruck at what theactors were doing that I didn’t utter a word. And even in this moment of abject fear andtotal failure I found it to be thrilling to be on that stage. I then knew I wanted to be a comedic actor. So starting in the fall of 1991, for the nextthree and a half years I was taking classes and performing in various shows at the Groundlingsand around Los Angeles. I was even trying my hand at stand-up comedy. Not great stand-up, mind you, but enough materialto get myself up in front of strangers. I would work the phones to invite all my SCfriends to places like Nino’s Italian Restaurant in Long Beach, the San Juan Depot in San Juan,Capistrano, and the Cannery in Newport Beach. And those members of my Trojan family wouldalways show up. My stand-up act was based mostly on materialderived from watching old episodes of Star Trek. My opening joke was to sing the opening themeto Star Trek. [Sings] Thank you. Not even funny, just weird. But I didn’t care, I was just trying tothrow as many darts at the dart board, hoping that one would eventually stick. Now don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t extremelyconfident that I would succeed during this time period, and after moving back to LA therewere many a night where in my LA apartment, I would sit down to a meal of spaghetti toppedwith mustard, with only $20 in my checking account and I would think to myself, ‘Ohwell I can always be a substitute schoolteacher.’ And yes, I was afraid. You’re never not afraid. I’m still afraid. I was afraid to write this speech. And now, I’m just realizing how many peopleare watching me right now, and it’s scary. Can you please look away while I deliver therest of the speech? But my fear of failure never approached inmagnitude my fear of what if. What if I never tried at all? By the spring of 1995 producers from SaturdayNight Live had come to see the current show at the Groundlings. After two harrowing auditions and two meetingswith executive producer Lorne Michaels, which all took place over the course of six weeks,I got the word I was hired to the cast of Saturday Night Live for the ‘95-‘96 season. I couldn’t believe it. And even though I went on to enjoy seven seasonson the show, it was rocky beginning for me. After my first show, one reviewer referredto me as ‘the most annoying newcomer of the new cast.’ Someone showed this to me and I promptly putit up on the wall in my office, reminding myself that to some people I will be annoying. Some people will not think I’m funny, andthat that’s okay. One woman wrote to me and said she hated myportrayal of George W. Bush. It was mean-spirited, not funny and besidesyou have a fat face. I wrote her back and I said, I appreciateyour letter and she was entitled to her opinion, but that my job as a comedian especially ona show like Saturday Night Live was to hold up a mirror to our political leaders and engagefrom time to time in satirical reflection. As for my fat face, you are 100% right. I’m trying to work on that. Please don’t hesitate to write me againif you feel like I’ve lost some weight in my face. The venerable television critic for the WashingtonPost Tom Shales came up to me during my last season of the show. He told me congratulations on my time at theshow and then he apologized for things he had written about me in some of his earlyreviews of my work. I paused for a second before I spoke, andthen I said, ‘How dare you, you son of a bitch?’ I could tell this startled him, and then Itold him I was kidding, and that I’d never read any of his reviews. It was true, I hadn’t read his reviews. In fact I didn’t read any reviews becauseonce again, I was too busy throwing darts at the dartboard, all the while facing myfears. Even as I left SNL, none of the studios werewilling to take a chance on me as a comedy star. It took us three years of shopping Anchormanaround before anyone would make it. When I left SNL all I really had was a moviecalled Old School that wouldn’t be released for another year, and a sub-par script thatneeded a huge rewrite about a man raised by elves at the North Pole. Even now I still lose out on parts that Iwant so desperately. My most painful example was losing the roleof Queen Elizabeth in the film The Queen. Apparently it came down to two actors, myselfand Helen Mirren. The rest is history. Dame Helen Mirren, you stole my Oscar! Now one may look at me as having great success,which I have in the strictest sense of the word, and don’t get me wrong, I love whatI do and I feel so fortunate to get to entertain people. But to me, my definition of success is my16-and-a-half-year marriage to my beautiful and talented wife, Vivica. Success are my three amazing sons, Magnus,13, Matthias, 10 and Axel age 7. Right there, stand up guys, take a bow, thereyou go. Success to me is my involvement in the charityCancer for College, which gives college scholarships to cancer survivors, started by my great friendand SC alum Craig Pollard, a two-time cancer survivor himself, who thought of the charitywhile we were fraternity brothers at the Delt house, up on West Adams. Craig was also one of the members of my Trojanfamily sitting front-and-center at my bad stand-up comedy shows, cheering me on. No matter how cliché it may sound you willnever truly be successful until you learn to give beyond yourself. Empathy and kindness are the true signs ofemotional intelligence, and that’s what Viv and I try to teach our boys. Hey Matthias, get your hands of Axel rightnow! Stop it. I can see you. Okay? Dr. Ferrell’s watching you. To those of you graduates sitting out therewho have a pretty good idea of what you’d like to do with your life, congratulations. For many of you who maybe don’t have itall figured out, it’s okay. That’s the same chair that I sat in. Enjoy the process of your search without succumbingto the pressure of the result. Trust your gut, keep throwing darts at thedartboard. Don’t listen to the critics and you willfigure it out. Class of 2017, I just want you to know youwill never be alone on whatever path you may choose. If you do have a moment where you feel a littledown just think of the support you have from this great Trojan family and imagine me, literallypicture my face, singing this song gently into your ear: If I should stay, I would onlybe in your way. So I’ll go, but I know, I’ll think ofyou every step of the way. And I will always love you, will always loveyou, will always love you, Class of 2017. And I will always love you. Thank you, fight on!
