WSU General Studies Convocation 
Convocation Speech, May 4, 2007

I am honored to be here celebrating with you. Being awarded an Associates Degree is a wonderful accomplishment.  The degree marks the completion of a broad range of general education courses which is key step in your growth as an Educated Person.  
It is customary that a commencement speaker offer you advice about your future. I am not going to do that, at least not directly.  What I want to do is to share what I think you have accomplished by virtue of you sitting in this auditorium today.  
I want you to think about what learned from your experiences at Weber State University. For a minute, think of yourself now and before you started your degree. In what ways are you different, which go beyond just being older?  Also think about others you may know who chose not to go to college or who started but who did not complete the Associates degree.  Think about ways you are different from them. 
Maybe in doing these comparisons, some of you have downplayed what you have accomplished.  You may think that the Associates degree is just not that important. To some, the degree may mark nothing more than how to cram too much information, in too little time, to pass too many tests. Maybe you feel that all you learned was how to write a paper in one draft the night before it is due.  Still others may believe that all you really learned was how to more effectively guess on multiple choice tests.  
To tell you the truth, these are not bad skills to learn.  We live in a world of information overload, where people can literally be paralyzed by too much information. In a time when a simple Google search can turn up over a million hits, learning the skills to efficiently cram, write quickly, and effectively test will come in handy. 
But I believe that there is much more to completing the Associates degree than that.  Besides the hard work, persistence, and commitment it takes an openness to learn. You have taken a range of survey courses, from Math to English, Science to Art, and Social Science to Humanities.  While these courses have little in common, by taking them, you have been open to learn to think from multiple different perspectives. What does this mean and what difference does it make? Well you rather than seeing the world in your regular, familiar and customary manner…. 
1.	You can adopt a historical perspective, treating your world as an unfolding story with reoccurring patterns and plots that have shaped your experiences. This gives you wisdom.

2.	You can adopt a mathematical perspective and formalize various aspects of the world, deriving the general and abstract from your specific and concrete experiences.  This makes you analytic.

3.	You can adopt a literary perspective, meaningfully comparing the real world to a fictional one, appreciating that your world is really only one of many possible ones. This makes you imaginative.

4.	You can adopt an artistic perspective and see beauty and elegance of your world by becoming conscious of the mixing of elements as color, contour, movement and texture in even mundane situations. This makes you perceptive.

5.	You can also adopt a scientific perspective and test ideas about how best to understand your world. This makes you insightful. 

	Your accomplishment sitting here today is that you learned to adopt these different, sometime foreign, conceptual perspectives. Psychologists speak of this as flexibility of thinking. You have learned how to deliberately put on hold and depart from your own vantage point, and consider other conceptual perspectives.  As a Research Psychologist who studies this form of thinking, I find more cognitive flexibility among those who have completed their Associates degree than those who have yet to do so.  My research shows that those who have completed their Associates Degree can think in a much more sophisticated way precisely because they can bracket and step out from their habitual way of thinking about the world to thinking about it from a different vantage point.
You will need these skills going forward as you step into new roles and confront new challenges.  Know that you are equipped with perhaps the best tools to deal with novelty and ambiguity, which is the cognitive flexibility to see an issue from multiple perspectives.  You have accomplished a lot and done an amazing job becoming an Educated Person.  Use it well.  Goodbye, good luck, and congratulations!