The Road Ahead

Commencement exercises take place annually whereby academic degrees are bestowed upon students after completing a duly prepared curriculum of study. Hundreds of students graduate every year. There is no doubt that upon graduation a student sets out into the real world to face newer and perhaps harsher challenges. What would he make out of the rest of his life? The time of the year has come when students bid farewell to their alma mater and ask themselves the perennial question. “Where do we go from here?”

A great majority of graduates are most likely to raise the question: “Would I have a stable job? What kind of job would that be? Will there be people or companies willing to hire me? Would I be able to compete in this already highly competitive world?”

Education institutions were established to help prepare people for the road of life ahead. But do they do so well enough? Through extensive programs,a school can constantly develop the faculties and abilities of students to enable them to acquire and maintain the means to live a full life while at the same time being useful citizens of society.

Nevertheless, the bottom line is that the attainment of academic degrees at graduation is actually dependent on the efforts of students to learn as much as they can from the study program prepared by the school they are enrolled in. Harsh reality, however, shows us that many of our students do not work as hard and are learning less compared with students of earlier generations.

Sensing the need to address this problem, schools have come up with programs designed to effectively demand the best effort and performance from all students. But in the end, it is still the efforts of the students that count the most. There is a need for the students to cooperate with the academic endeavors of the school, because they are the ones who actually are to benefit from them. If this is done, the usual questions asked during graduation would no longer have to be asked.

For this year’s graduates you are urged to bravely press on in the journey through life. In the words of lawyer Sherman Finesilver, “life is a road with unpredictable forks and unexpected tomorrows. To take advantage of them, you can't let yourself be destroyed by a defeat, or let others set the limits on your ability to achieve.”

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