LOOK BEYOND SCHOOL: YOU WILL SOON BE A GRADUATE

Your days on campus will soon be over. You once matriculated as a freshman into this institution. Then it looked as though the journey will take an eternity before you graduate. Everyone was calling you by the name ‘Jambite’, and you were wondering what the next few years of your stay on campus will look like, as though it will never end. But now, you can see the end of the road from where you are standing. YOU WILL SOON BE A GRADUATE!

Starting college is a major transitional stage in one’s life, but leaving college is a greater one. The day of convocation, which marks the end of this stage of your life coincidentally marks the beginning of another. It launches you forth into the larger world outside there; a world in which you have to find your own footing for yourself, a world which accommodates the survival of only the fittest. Such a world should not be entered unprepared for.

The convocation ceremony is a bridge between the artificial campus life and the real world. It is a link between the imaginary future students build for themselves while on campus, and the factual world outside there, where, irrespective of your desires, only what you deserve is all you get.

You will soon be a graduate, and the whole world will rejoice with you for a job well done, whether you pass out, as it is commonly said, or you fail out, which nobody dares say! Everybody comes to rejoice with you, at least, for going through school successfully and not dropping out on the way. That makes you a graduate, and it is worth the celebration.

For you personally, if you must be sincere with yourself, the convocation day is always a day filled with both excitement and nervous apprehension. The convocation ceremony will soon be over. The music will soon fade. The dance will soon stop. Your guests will soon leave. The hall will soon be locked. And you will soon be left alone to do just one thing - decide what your fate will be!

Decide your own fate! This is one thing some students have never given a second thought all their days on campus. They have dined and wined, lived and relived, but never for once thought about life after graduation. They have been carried away with the hustling and bustling, academic pressure, social life, and religious activities of the campus so much so that their future had never really mattered a bit to them, or so it seem. They have always thought that things will sought themselves out when the time comes. “We will cross the bridge when we get there”, they seem to say.

If you are one of those who had earlier given the issue of your future this deliberate consideration, you may have little or no problem deciding where you go from here. But if you are one of those who just woke up and found the convocation gown on them, there is still much job to do if you want to live a fulfilled life.

What you eventually become in life, to a large extent, will be determined by how serious you take the issues that have to do with your future while on campus. It has nothing to do with what course the school offered you to study, or whether your lecturer likes your face enough to give you a pass mark.

If you had accepted responsibility for your future while on campus, it becomes easy to attain it outside campus. But if you had taken the issues of your future with levity, life will be glad to dribble you for a while on its field of play.

Immediately after the convocation, all you have been day dreaming about the future will either become a trip to the dreamland, like Alice in wonderland, or a nightmare, all depending on what you did or what you did not do while on campus.