Alumni

Commencement 2007 > Senior Class Speech
Katy Burroughs '07

Distinguished faculty, valued staff, esteemed trustees, honored guests, and cherished family members and friends, welcome on behalf of the graduating class of 2007.

Sitting before you today are 300 hopeful men and women who are waiting for the moment that they can move their tassel from the right to the left.  We come from 36 states and 22 countries.  We represent different cultures, different religions, different ideals, and different goals. And our futures will be as varied as our pasts have been.

When I was selecting a school four years ago, my father told me that ‘the purpose of college is to expand the mind, and never to narrow it,’ and that ‘college is about much more than you learn in a classroom.’  When Lake Forest sent me a small brochure that read “We’re not for everyone, but we might be for you,” I knew I had found the school that would offer me all that my dad had mentioned in his advice, and I excitedly began preparing for freshman year here. I had never shared a bedroom until coming to college, and I was very worried when my roommate e-mailed to say she was blonde and her favorite color was pink. On move-in day, I was nervous about meeting her, but I soon realized that she would become one of the greatest friends I would ever have. She even taught me how to do my own laundry. See Dad, college is about more than what you learn in the classroom.

Our freshman year flew past. It was a whirlwind of adjustments to difficult classes, meeting new people, making new friends, and experiencing my first snow that didn’t melt in one day. At graduation that year, I watched another good friend walk across this stage. I also heard the senior class speaker, and I hoped I would be the one giving the speech in three years because I knew I would have so much to say about this place.

In the fall of 2004 we returned to campus as sophomores. This was a defining year for us.  We changed our majors, our advisors, and our housing. We changed ourselves. We were no longer the young green students of freshman year. We were collegiate and confident. We wrote papers, made slideshows, and participated in symposium presentations. We were ready to take on the world, and through our work with United Students Against Sweatshops, The Vagina Monologues and the various political campaigns of that fall, we did.

We were more focused our sophomore year, and we needed to be as we started taking 300-level classes and working on our theses. At first, we tried to make it through each of our required general ed classes gaining as much knowledge as possible while doing the least amount of work. But somewhere around the time when we made our final decision on a major, we found the classes and the professors we loved, and suddenly we couldn’t learn enough, and our work became a lot more enjoyable. Then, suddenly it was spring, and just a few days after TOGA we left the Forest for another summer.

When we came back for junior year, we were missing some people. They were studying in Europe, in Australia, on Semester at Sea, and in the Chicago Arts Program, and as they returned to campus for the spring semester some of us were leaving for our own adventures abroad. Through our travels we learned how to be adults, how to cook our own meals instead of eating in the caf, how to find the cheapest hostel and take advantage of all our opportunities. We acted as adults, and we even had to deal with adult problems such as lost luggage and managing a budget. But all of these lessons were just another aspect of what we learned through our experiences at Lake Forest.

This year has been both the most difficult and the most exciting. We cannot forget state security arriving on campus in early September to protect former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami as he spoke to a few classes in Hotchkiss Hall. We will always remember last semester’s Big Band Party at Fatman’s. And the whole campus will remember reading the Stentor every Thursday as it covered all of Lake Forest’s accomplishments and antics, and even had some great letters to the editor. Perhaps the best memory of this semester was finishing that final paper, putting down our pens after the last exam, or finally turning in the theses we have worked so hard on—sometimes for three years.

Freshman year seems like yesterday and I had no idea this moment would get here so fast. At times it seemed that college would last forever, and as our older friends graduated and our classes got harder, we wanted this moment even more. But now we are the ones with the younger friends who are watching us leave, and some of us have been able to have an easier schedule this semester. Since January, we have been counting down the days to graduation, but now that it is here we understand that the wonderful memories we have of classes, friends, and the past four years are too numerous to be counted. Happy as we are to graduate today and move those tassels, we know that our memories of Lake Forest College will stay with us forever.

We remember the old library that no one used, and the opening of the new library that has become a social center on campus. We remember when the student center was just an idea and we participated in the Forester Day that opened it. We participated in the arrival of national sororities to campus, and we remember which residence halls have changed from smoke-free to substance-free and back to just smoke-free. We know about the coffeehouse in Commons that is now the commuter lounge and what we did to procrastinate when there was no Facebook.

For the past four—sometimes five—years we have studied, worked, and played together. We have learned here. We have grown. We have made friendships that will last a lifetime, professional connections that will hopefully get us a job, and, perhaps most importantly, we have found professors who inspire us just as much as they teach. These professors have done exactly what my father told me college was about. They have provided us with an education both in and out of the classroom. 
History professor Dan LeMahieu once said, “All work is just practice for what will come later.  Every moment in your life has led to the moment that you are experiencing right now.”

Class of 2007, this statement holds true for us as we sit here today. Our work in class has gotten us here, but all the moments we had in our dorm rooms, in the caf, and around campus have prepared us for this moment. As I look out from this stage, I see 300 hopeful men and women who are the future lawyers, senators, doctors, businessmen and women, future activists, writers, aid workers, and teachers that I have come to know as classmates, friends, and a second family.  And as our parents, our professors, and the staff, friends, and guests of the college watch us walk across the stage today, they know that they have given us the tools to succeed in that big, scary world we are about to enter.

I welcomed everyone at the beginning of this speech; now on behalf of the Lake Forest College graduating class of 2007, I want to say thank you. Thank you for making us men and women who appreciate and treasure the education we have received. Thank you for making us the people who can leave this school knowing that it has changed our lives forever. And Dad, thank you for giving me such good advice four years ago. Because of your words, I chose a school that has taught much more than knowledge from a book, and I know that because of Lake Forest my mind has expanded never to be narrowed again. Thank you.