Cory Alpert is a fourth-year Russian and sociology student from Irmo, South Carolina. A member of the Omicron Delta Kappa leadership honor society, Alpert served on the USC Student Government Election Commission and ran for the position of student body president in 2016. Last week he received the Steven N. Swanger award, the second-highest honor available to USC undergraduate students.
When we came to UofSC, we were trying to understand what was possible. What is possible. Instead, over these four years, we’ve forged a new path. We’ve won championships, conducted groundbreaking research and led movements that showed the power of our community coming together. We have practiced the art of making things possible.
None of us is the same person as we were four years ago. We’ve made friends and fallen out of touch with them. We’ve put ourselves through long nights in the library during exam week when we should have been doing our reading all along. We’ve had snowball fights on the Horseshoe, and we’ve helped out our neighbors in the face of a devastating flood.
The best four years of our lives are not behind us. When we walk across the stage, they don’t become part of our past, but the memories we’ve made here stay with us. They are part of who we are. They’ll be with us when we move to New York, and when we decide that living in the north just isn’t for us. They’ll be with us when we find the love of our lives, and they’ll be with us when we need our friends the most.
While we’ve done some amazing things, it’s the little things that stand out the most sometimes — the friend who invites you home for Thanksgiving because you don’t have anywhere else to go, the acappella concerts in the fall, taking a class that opens your mind to something you had never heard of.
All of these moments, big or small, are things we never thought possible four years ago. We’ve challenged what we knew, and we’ve challenged what we were told. And now, we begin to enter the so-called real world. As we march into that great unknown, we face a challenge to create possibilities where they didn’t exist before. We now have the chance to reject the cynicism of merely understanding what is possible, but instead we get to blaze forward into what can be possible. It’s our time now.
Forever to thee, Class of 2017.
