How many of us started UCLA as political science majors to pursue law school or to enter politics? Or constantly checked the news only to always add our own commentary on everything? What about those of us who initiated heated debates over controversial topics because we loved to argue and as classic poli sci majors, we loved to hear ourselves speak? And how many of us entered the major really just to learn more about politics and the world around us?

I started UCLA as more of a means to an end. My end was law school UCLA was the means. Throughout my four years at UCLA I was searching for what I thought should be the “college experience” I always heard people talk about. Was it being an intellectual and gathering with friends in eclectic coffee shops to discuss the current state of world affairs? Was it going to parties and staying out till dawn? Was it the Greek experience?

In the end I realized it was not one particular thing that made UCLA what it was to me. It was experiencing all of these new things and learning how they each made UCLA a little bit more home. And in the process of making UCLA more of a home, we had to leave a little bit of our old homes behind.

You can't make progress without risk. That risk was discovering who we were in college. It was taking classes with professors who challenged us and opened our minds to new concepts we never thought we would so passionately agree or disagree with.

Our risks were cramming at four in the morning the night before our finals for an exam worth 60% of our grade. That risk was learning to live in the dorms with roommates and sharing communal bathrooms! That risk was what made college what it was. College wasn't only about academics as we all learned. The college experience was what we made of it; it was about learning...about different relationships, about new living situations, about ourselves.

Before entering UCLA, I had lived in bubble my whole life, let’s be honest, I lived on the side of a hill in .... I don’t think I ever ventured outside of the area between the valley and the beach. I was scared of anywhere I wasn’t familiar with, which was everywhere. So you might imagine my shock when attending UCLA led me into the inner city.  

In an attempt to get an easy A my junior year, (okay we all know we did this at one point), I took a class that took us into elementary schools to tutor students in disadvantaged communities.  My school was Cabrini, and while the class was only two quarters, I ended up staying the entire year. Being a spoiled girl from Bel Air, initially those kids hated me. They didn’t trust me, and I couldn’t blame them, but I stuck through it, and showed up every week until they had no choice but to accept the fact that I really wasn’t going to go away; I can be really annoying like that.

By the end I had students who wouldn’t even finish their homework running up to me with extra credit assignments in their hands. They engaged me, and showed me first-hand what it was like to try and learn in an environment without textbooks and I loved them for it. I saw through these kids what it was like to be at a school where nearby shootings were not an outrageous concept. I experienced first hand, the environment that I wanted to go into and work in after college.

I came to college as an idealist with a vision of changing the world, and UCLA taught me what it meant to really do it. I remember feeling so sad at the lack of opportunities the students’ had but I worked through it to make it a more positive situation instead of dwelling on what was missing. I ended up starting my own class at Cabrini and helping to change the program so we UCLA students could help supplement the materials they should have been learning in class.

And that was one of the most important things Cabrini taught me, that we could take the knowledge we had acquired from UCLA and implement it in the world around us. On my way there every week I ended up driving around more of LA than I ever imagined and sitting through more of five o’clock traffic on the 405 freeway than I could ever have wished for, but I wouldn’t have traded it for the world!

And in the end, I wasn’t scared anymore because I had become knowledgeable about something that was only a distant concept to me before college, I had learned about it through my own experiences with it.

And even with all I did, there are so many opportunities that I could say I missed out on at UCLA. I could have gone to more office hours to talk to professors that I admired yet was incredibly intimidated by, been more involved in on-campus organizations, or even made more friends. We could look back on all the mistakes we made and all the things we wish we could have done differently during our four years at UCLA, but the most important thing we can take away from here is what we learned from those mistakes because they made us who we are today.

Anthony D'Angelo once said, “The only real failure in life is one not learned from.” Because through these mistakes we learned more about who we were and who we wanted to be, because of these mistakes we allowed ourselves to experience the trials and errors of life in maturing and growing up.

Some of us may already be nostalgic that we are leaving here and ending our college careers and all I can say to my fellow students here is a quote I read by Sir Winston Churchill, a man I am positive we all encountered in one of our classes at UCLA. “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” And with any ending, there is a new beginning. 

We have started a path that we now have our entire lives to finish, we have given ourselves more opportunities than we could ever imagine by graduating from one of the top universities in one of the most diverse cities in the country, and now this is our time to look ahead and move forward because the path in front of us is open to any direction we wish to take. 

We all started at UCLA with different goals in mind, goals that would separate us, only to bring us together again now, at this moment to realize our greatest accomplishment, the achievement of our goal. I spent hours trying to find an ending to this speech when I realized it wasn’t missing an ending, it was missing a new beginning. So on that note: I want to welcome you all and myself to the beginning of the rest of our lives. I think we’ll like it here.

Thank you.