Congratulations graduates!
You each have achieved a significant milestone in your academic career. We at the Colleges are happy to have been a part of your life and we are glad that you have been a part of ours.
As you leave us, I'd like you to think about this institution's mission and whether we were successful in what we tried to accomplish together with you. Education is a transforming experience -- how you have changed in the time you've taken courses with us.
Part of the mission of the Colleges is, and I paraphrase, "to provide access to a university education for students of all ages and backgrounds to prepare them for advanced educational and professional achievement, lifelong learning, leadership and responsible citizenship." Our goal is to provide you with the first two years of a university education, the general education component primarily.
Students frequently ask why they have to take courses that are not directly related to their major. Why take general education courses? Yes, you will need courses toward your major, but in the world in which we now live, the world in which many of you will live and work in 2050, 2060 and beyond, one can't rely on preparation for a job or even a single career. Each of you must prepare for a life which will undergo change, whether you like it or not. It won't be enough, nor is it really now, to learn certain skills and acquire certain knowledge and hope that those skills and that knowledge will be needed for decades to come. They probably won't be needed, at least not in their current form. In order to have productive, working lives all of us need to be able to adapt to change, to analyze situations, to communicate effectively, to be lifelong learners. This is what general education tries to accomplish.
We hope that you will be lifelong learners, that you will find ways to interconnect your work and the rest of your life, that you will use the perspectives you've gained in your education, that you will appreciate the world around you. And that 20 or 30 years from now you will look back at your time with the UW Colleges and feel that it was valuable to you.
