Congratulations to the 2007 Nursing graduates, family members, faculty, community members and college colleagues! Your attendance here today marks the greatest drive we have seen on our Southwestern Oregon Community College campus: a 100% graduation and 100% pass rate on nursing exams for your class! Your drive toward success clearly results from Personal pursuit, Intentional Tenacity and Compassionate Healing:
PITCH, not that dark tar substance, or a certain musical tone, but your action of reaching out and sending forth… of your caring and concern… in the ball game of life
· In Personal pursuit, each of you set your aim high on a medical field that requires an ever-increasing knowledge base, lengthening program of study and tightening window of professionalism. I was not here at Southwestern when you began your General Studies pre-requisite for our Associate Degree Nursing Program application, since this is my second year as President. But I know that many of you are completing a dream begun a decade, maybe even two decades ago. Your ability to balance your personal pursuit with your personal life; family obligations, educational background, lifestyle, residence, and financial resources; set you on this path toward success.
· Intentional Tenacity, not occasional tenacity or accidental tenacity but intentional tenacity kept you on the path toward your profession in nursing while some fellow students wavered, winds of change blew and days grew into long nights. You not only set your own tenacious course, but visibly modeled that intentional tenacity for others; setting the academic bar in biology and chemistry classes, assuring that your families needs did not go unmet amidst your long hours of study and dragging those stacks of books and resource manuals around on your back, in that suitcase or on top of the luggage carrier. Your intentional tenacity set watermarks even higher than you thought you could reach for your own ability to go without sleep, respond with new knowledge, work with new teams of health professionals.
· Your capacity for Compassionate Healing was tested early in your Nursing studies as we shared a medical emergency on our own campus. Your concern not only for our deceased adult student Nancy Douglas, but for each other, demonstrated the very core of your learning- the importance of humanity in our profession of service. Your focus on your fellow students’ health and wellbeing following that horrific event and long before you were expected to have the experience to do so demonstrated to all of us that you have the right PITCH:
The right Personal pursuit, the Intentional Tenacity and the capacity for Compassionate Healing that marks your graduation.
Congratulations, Nurses, you are the best, and Southwestern Oregon Community College is proud to call you one of our own!
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