My Honors Day Speech

I got an email a few weeks ago from Linda Condon, an advisor in the Honors Program, with an update on my Honors graduation status, and it’s probably a bad thing that I was genuinely shocked to see I was on track to graduate with full honors. Back when I was a freshman planning my college career, the list of Honors requirements had seemed so daunting. When I opened that email, I was sure I’d need to find one more experience for credit in my last semester, but I had fulfilled all the academic and extracurricular requirements without giving it a second thought. Included in the email was a list of blurbs corresponding to each of my fulfilled requirements, and I scoured the list to make sure there hadn’t been a mistake. As I reflected on those experiences of the last 3½ years, I started feeling sentimental for obvious reasons. When I have sat down and let my mind wander since then, I have been amazed by the sheer quantity of stuff I have managed to cram into my undergraduate career — not just opportunities that I took full advantage of, but also things I wish I had been more grateful for and more excited about pursuing. You may be sharing that feeling with me, especially today.

When I graduated from high school, the experiences ahead of me were not on my horizon at all. I had terrible anxiety about messing up, about getting bad grades and about taking on things that might be the slightest bit difficult. With a new school came new beginnings, though, and I made a decision at the start of my freshman year that caused a seismic shift in what would be possible for me at NIU.

I have only ever taken one improv class, at Christian summer camp when I was 13, and I was not good at it. However, it was not a total wash — I did learn the most important rule of improv: “Yes, and.” Essentially, “yes, and” decrees that you create a scene with your improv group by taking ideas and making them bigger and better, rather than rejecting them and slowing down your collective momentum. For example: Yes, I am graduating, and its from clown college! Each idea takes the best parts of the last one and magnifies them to create an absurd and (ideally) funny result.

I’m not good at improv comedy, but I do not think the role of “yes, and” is limited to that space. Applying a “yes, and” philosophy to my academic career has paid off spectacularly, and Honors is the perfect structure to encourage it with the flexibility to apply passions and interests to the greater goal of graduating. I have watched my friends use “yes, and” to take them places they never expected. My friend Emma said yes, she wanted to take an internship at the NIU Foundation, and she gladly made herself so indispensable that they are considering hiring her after she graduates. Jeremy said yes, he wanted to do undergraduate research in a field that interested him, and he would go on to get that research published in a professional journal as an undergraduate. Catherine said yes, she would get her English degree in three years and finish law school in two more.

When I was asked to think about what Honors at NIU has meant to me, I did not think about a specific set of qualifications, or experiences, or requirements. I thought about all the things I could have done, and all the things I chose to do. Your departments, your clubs, the choices you were presented when you got here have shaped your experiences in the same ways as mine. And our choices and resulting experiences here have shaped who we are and who we will be. When I wrote this speech, I tried to summarize my own NIU experience in a single “yes, and” statement and I absolutely could not. Between internships, major extracurricular projects and part-time jobs, the last 3½ years have been a blur of opportunity that I have tried to say yes to whenever possible. As we leave NIU and our home departments, the same attitude can help us spread our wings and fly. As we enter this next phase of our lives, it’s up to us to continue to — or to choose for the first time — to say “yes, and.”

By Cameron Simpson

Cameron Simpson, history and English major/communication studies minor.