Williams Students Encouraged to Do Something They Love
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| Williams President Morton O. Schapiro and Mayda Del Valle.View Slide Show |
She was going to Sarah Lawrence, where Alice Walker went, then to law school and then to change the world.
But it didn't quite work out that way.
"You might have a plan of what you're going to be, and you've got a vision, and it rarely turns out the way you see it in your head, right?" the slam poetry champion said to the class of 2012 at Williams College on Saturday as she described her own experiences in trying to find her way through college and life.
Del Valle, who graduated in 2000, tries not to worry about plans anymore. In fact, after days spent working on a nine-page speech for the college's convocation, the petite poet tossed it out.
"I figured I would just wing it, just like you're going to do over the next year," she said to laughter. She would, however, read all nine pages of "My Life Is Usually Untitled ..." later, if anyone wanted to hear it.
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Del Valle recalled that her own years at Williams were not without trials and tribulations. She ended up in the Purple Valley because of a Williams connection she made in the South Side of Chicago, where she grew up. And Williams came through with full scholarships; attending first-choice Sarah Lawrence would have put her thousands in debt.
But Del Valle, the first in her family to go college, felt out of place at Williams and unsure what to do. "I tried everything." She left for six months to clear her head only to find the people and situations she'd fled hadn't changed.
"You can move past something but it's not the same as moving through something," she said. In a funk, Del Valle was considering giving up and leaving for good until she had an epiphany watching a mesmerizing spoken-word performance at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
It was familiar, it was what she had been doing in high school and it gave her a voice that would explode upon the national stage in what college President Morton O. Schapiro described as "the wondrously raucous world" of slam poetry.
"The plan appeared the moment I decided to do something I loved," said Del Valle, who discovered, to her joy, that if the college didn't have a class you wanted, it let you create your own. So, instead of giving up, Del Valle said she "sucked it up. That's what you have to do."
Her independent study would lead to the creation of an hourlong one-woman show with experimental video. She also would create her first award-winning work, "Descendancy" (one of two works she performed as part of her address). "Everything just solved itself in ways I did not imagine it could."
She urged the students to listen to "the little voice inside you" and choose something you love to do. Don't base plans on security, that's "an excuse not to follow your dream ... be true to yourselves."
Del Valle also was one of six recipients of the college's Bicentennial Medals that are given to its outstanding alumni. Schapiro said the presentation of the medals was moved to convocation to give students role models. "These are people who literally sat where you are sitting right now," he told the freshmen.
The other recipients were Dickinson R. Debevoise, class of 1946, a veteran of the invasion of Normandy who became a civil rights activist and senior judge for the U.S. District Court of New Jersey; Eugene C. Latham, class of 1955, for his voluntary service with Our Little Brothers and Sisters, which has provided care for more than 25,000 orphans in South America; Dean Cycon, class of 1975, founder of socially and environmentally responsible Dean's Beans and leader of the fair-trade coffee movement; Ambassador Susan C. Schwab, class of 1976, a U.S. trade representative with a long history in forming trade policy; and Michael J. Govan, class of 1985, director of the Los Angeles Museum of Art who worked on the early plans for Mass MoCA and who is known for his creative endeavors in bringing people and art together.
Senior Alicia Y. Choi performed Bach's Sonata No. 1 in A minor from "Fuga" on the violin; the symphonic winds brass section played "America" and the college song "The Mountains." College Chaplain Richard E. Spalding gave the invocation and the Rev. Gary C. Caster the benediction.
The Grosvenor Memorial Cup was presented to senior Rachel Ko. The cup is given annually by the student body to the senior who has best served the college. Ko, who is involved in a wide range of activities and projects and has taken leadership roles on campus, was cited by one of her "admirers" as "a rare visionary. Truly a nonanxious presence among us."
Schapiro welcomed members of class of 2009, calling them "a really great class. There is a myth that I say that every year but they're wrong ... if you listen carefully."
(He would be called out on that statement by seniors and College Council co-Presidents Jeremy M.P. Goldstein and Peter S. Nurnberg, who noted that three years before he had said their class was "the most impressive and attractive class you had ever seen." Which prompted a great deal of cheering.)
Schapiro encouraged the students to take advantage of the cultural, recreational, athletic and academic opportunities at the college and in the surrounding area.
Also get to know the instructors, he told them. While some faculty might be a little "dorky" or shy, Shapiro said, "we love our students."
"Don't wait for us to call you. Call us. You'll be amazed at how friendly we are."
Edited for content on Sept. 7, 2008.
