Astro-Nut 👨🏽‍🚀

Greetings and Salutations to the Graduating Class of 2024,

It’s my pleasure to stand before you and praise your remarkable accomplishment. Today is much more than just a commencement; It’s a benchmark to the culmination of a multitude of years, as part of a meaningful journey of hard work and dedication. You have showed a level of true resilience, embraced change and endured improbable outcome of major life impacts. 

You were directly thrown into a worldwide pandemic which changed life as we know it. Your fortitude for success was put on front stage as you as well as the faculty and staff met the challenge without skipping a beat to the educational standards and commitments that had to take place. Your posture was strong and exemplified your true sense of articulation and a voice that screamed the mantra, “I will continue to fight and never give up”.

This mantra for your graduating class speaks volume to your strength and your power to achieve a common goal of raising awareness to so many things that impact life as we know it. Graduates, look to the left and to the right and ponder on the game changers that will conquer some of the many issues that we face as a people, as a country, and as members of the world we live in.

When I look back on when I was in your shoes. My mind danced with excitement on the shear endless amount of possibilities within the spectrum of discovery. I encourage you all to define a mentor and allow them to guide you and empower you to set goals and hold you accountable for the journey ahead of you. This framework I found invaluable and still consult with my mentor to this very day.

You are part of a new movement, a generation that will take the technology of today and make tomorrow’s conservation of natural resources a true obtainable goal. The Engineering industry is on a fast track to exploring new worlds and evolving earth as we know it. With our given technology and images being provided by telemetry from the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) that is currently in the constellation of Scorpius, which is a million kilometers away giving visions of vast galaxies and stars never seen before. 

We now have the technology to peer into phenomena light years away as well as explore surfaces to define not only if water exists, but the potential of human existence. We have reduced space transportation costs and developed a path for a sustainable colony on Mars. We now have the capability to launch, land and reuse spacecraft, opening the world of discovery to incredible new heights.

We have had approximately 21 Mars Landers on the surface and found small traces of water, which does provide hope that life could have been possible on another planet other than earth and for future sustainability. Yes, your generation will be on the forefront of returning to the moon and taking the realm of possibility to new heights and galaxies!

These small miracles are all on the backbone of discovery and a young person with the mindset  that complacency just wasn’t in their DNA, and wasn’t satisfied with just what has been done before.  It thrives on mystery and exploring ways to not only save the environment, but increase the efficiency as scientists and engineers to solve issues that plague the world by coming up with real-time solutions for generations to come. 

You all possess some very important tools in your Batman infused utility belt, and you have chosen to use them all for noble and righteous baselines for good.  You have all of these attributes; Strong work-ethic, Resilience, Commitment, Dedication, Sacrifice, Determination, Fortitude, all baselines that during your college career assisted you in setting initial goals and push that threshold of discovery to even tougher goals and higher heights.

This was accomplished with allot of hard work, blood, sweat and even tears at times, but the outcome could be seen with personal achievement and the satisfaction of creating a new level of self-belief and confidence in the profound ability to succeed.

My hope is that by instilling these attributes, the knowledge transcends far beyond this noble institution of learning and manifests itself into the overall framework that is used for academia, to achieve the high standards that are needed to accel in life and propel our world into the next phase of regeneration and capability.

I challenge you all to not rest on your current comfort of profound knowledge and increased financial bank account zero’s.  But, continue to “think outside the box” and push your comfort level of reality and true understanding to unthinkable phenomena and discovery to assist further generations in making this world a better place than you currently found it…..

Astro-Nut 👨🏽‍🚀