By David Brooks, The New York Times
Hello, Boston College Class of 2021! You guys certainly didn’t take the easy route to get here. You managed to complete all this during one of the hardest periods of our lifetime.
And yet, this day is real. You know it’s real because you are hungover, your parents are proud, your professors are shocked, and I am in awe.
You are the Winston Churchill of college classes. You’ve shown tenacity, courage and admirable ability to only moderately cheat on the social distancing rules. You mastered amazing skills. You learned the principles of biology over Zoom at the same time you were actually making yourself breakfast. You learned to aggressively contribute to seminar discussions in the first third of your class so you could turn off your video for the second two thirds of the class. You learned to adjust back to in-person discussion and the harsh realization that you were going to have to go back to wearing pants. You learned to stare at me right now with expressions of rapt attention, even though, in fact, you are all fast asleep.