Spring 2023 Student Commencement Speaker - Kelsey O'Connor

Each semester the Commencement Advisory Committee is charged with conducting a campus-wide search to select a graduating student to deliver the message on behalf of the entire graduating class. At this morning's commencement exercises we're delighted to have with us College of Humanities and Social Sciences graduate Kelsey O'Connor. Kelsey is a dedicated student, a volunteer, a former student-athlete. During her time at NC State she worked as a research assistant for the School of Social Work and contributed to published work with Professor Terrence Ruth on emotional intelligence. She logged more than 200 volunteer hours with several organizations in the community including Safe Child, Oak City Cares and Chorale. She's also a co-founder of the Wolfpack Beds at NC State, a program that repurposes plastic bags to create sleeping mats for people experiencing homelessness in the Triangle. She's a member of the University Honors Program, a College of Humanities and Social Sciences Dean Scholar and a recipient of the College's Highest Impact Enhancement Award. A member of the NC State women's softball team for almost three years she suffered a career-ending concussion. Following this incident she worked as a youth softball coach to begin advocating for improved mental health resources for student athletes. Today, yes, today Kelsey graduates with a Bachelor of Social Work degree and a minor in psychology. Her plan after graduation is to become a sports psychologist and a licensed mental health counselor. Everyone please join me in welcoming Kelsey O'Connor. Thank you for the introduction. Good morning. Welcome friends, family, graduates, honored guests to our spring 2023 commencement ceremony. My twin brother was asked to sing at his graduation last year so I decided to one-up him and give a speech. He's actually graduating from his master's program next week and both of us are continuing to grapple with the same question that everyone has been asking us. What are you going to do next? As I'm sure all of you have been asked the same exact question, what are you going to do? That's a very different question from who are you going to be. What I want us to consider is what does it mean to be a human being not a human doing. When I first came to NC State I had a lot of labels that I was proud of. D1 athlete, softball player, researcher, social work student. If you were to ask me about my identity I would have listed all of those tangible things. But during my junior year I suffered a traumatic brain injury from softball. My career-ending concussion meant that softball was now forever over and I was on the brink of even continuing as a student. I struggled to speak without frequent stuttering, pausing, confusion and couldn't prove myself through performance of any kind. The external labels that I built my entire identity on were broken. Crumbled to the core and I was left with all of the pieces of who I used to be and unsure how to rebuild. So as I recovered for several months I made a resolution to help rebuild my identity. I decided that in order to heal the way I saw myself I had to start by the way that I saw and spoke about others. I would start describing people not by their labels but by three things. Their attitude, the way that they treat others and what makes them uniquely beautiful. Instead of describing my roommate as an engineer I would first tell you that she is a kind, intelligent, adventurous girl who loves her family deeply. The more I started equating other people's identities towards their internal characteristics the more I began to build a healthier foundation for myself. Seeing individuals and myself not for what they do but who they really are. So some of us have next steps planned out and that's amazing and some of us don't and that's okay too. That just means that not all of us have an answer to the question of what are you going to do. Yet we all have the opportunity to decide who we are going to be when we leave this place today. We can choose to be kind, ambitious because who we are internally is the root of what we do and what we produce to the world. Your roles in life are going to change whether it's a relationship role, a role in a job but you are so much more than your role. So you might be going to do work in engineering but that means you're going to be an intelligent problem solver. You might be going to do social work but that means you're going to be a compassionate community member. Regardless of what you do you always have the opportunity to be the person that you've dreamed. When you choose a positive attitude treat others with genuine kindness and appreciate your own unique inner beauty. If you embrace those three things your life will become more rich with seeing the world through a lens beyond the labels that confine us. I don't know everyone here but there is one thing that I do know just from being here. We are resilient. Graduation isn't just a celebration of passing classes and balancing work. It's about doing all of those things despite the challenges in between. We have students here who are mothers raising children. We have students who are battling with illness, maybe working multiple jobs, maybe traveled across country or even across seas to be here. You are resilient and the things that you do will go beyond your occupation because they start with an internal spark based on who you are and that's not just the graduates either. It's our supportive community that helped us get here. You are resilient too and we thank you for being here. All of you came in wearing several external labels. A graduate, a student, an almost alumni, maybe some alumni here and I hope that you leave knowing that you will always be a member of the NC State Wolfpack. But we have to look beyond our labels to appreciate who we really are and appreciate others for who they really are. And because of that, I encourage all of us to think and do and become something uniquely amazing. Thank you.