Illinois Wesleyan University


Honors Day Remarks
by Chelsey D. Hillyer
President, Class of 2005

Good morning, and welcome to this year's Honors Day celebration. We are here today to honor members of the student body and professors, to celebrate achievements each has made at this university, and, specifically, to congratulate members of the Class of 2005 on their accomplishments. So, congratulations to all.

When I visited this campus as a senior in high school, my mother told me she thought this was just the right place for me. When I asked her why, she replied simply that, “everyone seemed excited about what they were doing.” Now, after four years, I am finally able to admit that sometimes my mother is right.

The experience of walking into a Wesleyan classroom is exciting. Though as any other students would, we complain about reading loads, despair at the proximity of due dates, and have an otherworldly talent for procrastination, we are often at the same time electrified and thrilled by our material.

So many times, I have bumped into my classmates around campus and become deeply entangled in a conversation relating not to social agendas or to-do lists, but about the substance of our coursework and what it meant to our daily lives. From research experiences, to leadership, to studying abroad, rarely have I met a Wesleyan student who was not bursting with excitement about some new prospect or idea that had been set before them.

Now, granted, this does indicate that I am a member of the National Society of Nerds, but I might point out that many of those conversations happened with other people in this very room.

My point is that excitement can lead us in amazing directions. It often carries us without our knowing to achievements we never dreamed of, and that is what we are honoring today: that you who are sitting before me, at some point in your four years here became so excited by something that before you knew it, you were doing extraordinary things.

Now, I don't mean to make it sound like this excitement always happens on its own. There are, in fact, great magicians placed in each classroom who plant that excitement in us, sometimes tricking us into our passions. In fact, it is possible that those extraordinary thing doers I pointed out a minute ago would not have done extraordinary things if not for this trickery.

At Wesleyan, we are blessed with teachers who have great minds, and more importantly, who hope more than anything to share those great minds with us. Often, their excitement becomes ours and then develops a life of its own.

As an example, I turn to a class I took with the very professor we honor today, Dr. Prendergast. If any of you have taken his History of Social Thought course, you know about his tendency to get goose bumps. Now, not from the frigid Shaw classrooms or from the chilling silence of his students, but from the material itself: goose bumps from Marx, goose bumps from Durkheim, goose bumps from Weber and Mead and Cooley.

At first I was slightly concerned, wondering if Dr. Prendergast simply had a tendency to be cold. But as the semester went on, and the weather grew nicer, even I myself discovered that goose bumps would appear on my own arms when reading texts for his class.

I'm sure you've all had a similar experience with a professor over a book, a piece of music, a painting, or even just the glimmer of an idea. Go ahead, you can admit it. I promise we won't make fun.

In any case, what I am getting at today, and what I think my mother was getting at over four years ago, is that excitement and passion are things we here at Wesleyan know quite a bit about. And these tools have led us to do wonderful, imaginative, helpful things, and will continue to do so in the future.

So congratulations on all the accomplishments your excitement and passion have lead you to here at Wesleyan, and thank you to all who have allowed us to indulge in our excitement in these last four years.

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