Fellow graduates, I have a startling statistic for you: 100 percent of you are gonna die.

Yes, all of you. Dead. Gone. Kaput.
Now, this message won’t be some fire-and-brimstone sermon about your impending demise. Nor will I lay out how you should spend your post-college lifetimes. I’ll leave that decision up to you, your parents and, if you majored in investment banking, your parole officer.
I wrote this message to convey the following: If you’re graduating this week, you possess an innate desire to accomplish something with your life.
Some of you already mapped out your lives, and some of you are waiting for directions. Some of you think you know where you’re going but will completely change course 20 years from now upon realizing pornography is a severe waste of a bachelor’s degree in dramatic writing.
Now, if I wanted to give you life wisdom, I’d have written a book already. Or, at the very least, I’d have read one. All I have to offer are life lessons learned here at Syracuse University:
First, classrooms are but one of many viable sources of education. Next, greatness is almost always achieved by someone simply trying to complete the task at hand. And finally, female bone structure is considerably better suited for high heels than my own.
If polled, I’m sure SU’s Class of 2012 could offer hundreds more life lessons from its time here. After all, you had to pick up something of value here or you wouldn’t be graduating.
So, here lies the question: How will we, the newest members of society’s educated elite, apply those lessons to the world that awaits us between now and death?
Today, we possess a rare combination of youth, education and awesomeness. Will we use those advantages to better the world like Steve Jobs and Spider-Man? Or will we throw it all away and go to law school?
As much as we’d like to pass the buck and say our future is a product of the world we’ve inherited, I believe we choose our own destiny. Sure, we’re entering a system we did not create, but pretty soon – sooner than we think – we’ll be running that system.
Syracuse University Class of 2012, let’s run that system with the greater good on our minds, passion in our hearts and giant grins on our faces. Let’s turn the status quo on its head and then make it do cartwheels in a leotard until it shapes up into something we like.
The path ahead of us is anything but easy, but the path behind us was no cupcake either. We braved years of brutal winters, final exams, term papers and Keystone Light. And somehow, we came out the other side with a college degree.
As individuals, some of us might not accomplish all we hope for in our post-Syracuse lives. Some of us might accomplish more than we ever dreamed possible. One of us might cure cancer, another might write the world’s next great novel and a third might ingest enough Chipotle to singlehandedly solve the energy crisis with natural gas.
As a group, the stakes are much higher. We have the potential to drastically alter the course of history for better or worse. We could be either the generation that brings about a new era of global prosperity or the age group that officially dwindles the human attention span to 140 characters or fewer.
Whatever our futures bring, we can put faith in our shared experiences. Syracuse has taught each of us a great deal. And as of Sunday, 100 percent of us will have a college degree to show for it.
Now that’s a startling statistic.
Danny Fersh completed his bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism in December. He will receive his degree May 13. He is currently a Senior Associate at Inkwell Strategies, a speechwriting and executive communications firm based in Washington, D.C. He can be reached at danny@inkwellstrategies.com.