May 12, 2023
President Robert W. Iuliano
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
As Delivered.
Members of the Class of 2023, families, friends, and colleagues, it my pleasure to welcome you to your Baccalaureate Ceremony. Tonight is an opportunity for you to pause and reflect, to catch your breath, and most of all, to savor this remarkable milestone in your life.
You have worked extremely hard to get to where you’re at today. I’d invite you to take it all in. The music. The traditions. The pomp and circumstance. The campus views. You deserve every bit of it.
I hope you feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment in all that you’ve done over these past four years. Class of ’23, you have left an indelible mark on the campus and have navigated a moment in time unlike any other class before you. We salute you!
This evening, we are gathered together once again at Pennsylvania Hall—a backdrop that symbolizes the bookend of your story as Gettysburg students.
While the chapters you have authored between Convocation’s start and Commencement’s end are uniquely your own, as a class, the characters who have given your stories their meaning are one and the same.
And they’re all around you.
They are your classmates. Your teammates. Your friends. This community.
Class of 2023, you have learned a lot of valuable lessons during your time at Gettysburg College. Central among them I hope is this: It is the people in our life who give our story purpose, and the purpose of our story is to give our life to people.
I remember it wasn’t that long ago that my two sons were set to graduate and write the next chapter in their life’s story.
Graduation is a time of transition. Students are transitioning into their adult lives, as they start their careers or begin the specialization that occurs in graduate school. Parents are experiencing a transition of their own, as they watch their children take that consequential step into their adult lives.
Speaking now as a parent who’s experienced that transition, it can manifest itself in a time-honored question from parent to student: “What are you going to do when you graduate?”
It’s a question asked in phone calls. While packing up dorm rooms. Maybe even in car rides back home. I can see both parents and students nodding in a sign that they, too, perhaps have been party to such a question.
Students, bear with us parents. Your graduation is hard on us.
In the days and weeks ahead, you can expect many of the people in your life who love and care about you to continue to ask, “What do you want to do?” It’s an important question, to be sure. But perhaps the more important question is, “Who do you want to be?”
You get to make that choice too.
Tomorrow you will walk across the stage behind me and receive your hard-earned diploma. It is because of your education—and your commitment to that education—that many of life’s doors will now be open to you.
And soon enough, your walk will bring you to pursue new and exciting opportunities around the world.
While Gettysburg will always be home, these opportunities will undoubtedly afford you the chance to immerse yourself in new communities—at your workplaces, your graduate schools, your places of worship, your neighborhoods.
Class of 2023, with this new beginning, take every opportunity to give your story purpose by giving your life—your whole self—to the people around you.
It takes only one person to uplift an entire community. This is what you can do. This is who you can be.
A few months before your Orientation, in May of 2019, our Commencement speaker was Newbery Prize-winning author Jerry Spinelli. Jerry is a Class of ’63 alum of the College and the author of more than 30 books, including New York Times bestseller, Stargirl.
How many of you have read the book? It’s now a Disney movie too.
Jerry calls his books his “love letters to the world.” It’s easy to see why. Stargirl is a captivating story that centers around a teenage boy, Leo, and the arrival of a charismatic new student named Stargirl Caraway.
Stargirl is a “parade of one” in the most amazing ways. She is unique and compassionate and kind, even when it is difficult.
She knows her path would be smoother if she simply deflected the light and faded into the background. But ultimately, Stargirl chooses to live her own story. She chooses to be true to herself and to give her whole self in service to the people around her.
It’s her life’s purpose. She always puts others first.
By doing so, Stargirl’s story soon becomes a part of everyone’s story. She enlivens the school, she brings the town together, and she makes people believe that they are capable of far more than they ever dreamed was possible.
Stargirl uplifts the entire community forever—and I’m here to say that I see that same promise in you.
Class of 2023, as Gettysburgians, this is what we are called to do.
This is who we are called to be.
In so many beautiful ways, it is exactly what you’ve done here for our community from the very first moment you stepped onto campus.
We will always be grateful for being a part of your inspiring story.
On behalf of all of us here at Gettysburg College, we wish you the very best as you write the next great chapter in your life, and we look forward to celebrating with you tomorrow as you embark out into the world to better the lives of the people around you.
Again, congratulations!