It is with great enthusiasm, deep admiration and a touch melancholy that I write to congratulate you at this special time.
You represent one of the largest and most successful classes in Mount Allison’s history – and for that alone you will always be remembered.
You have made an enormous impact on me and on my family. It has been great fun and a real privilege to meet, chat and engage with you over the years, whether at events or in activities, while walking across campus, in classrooms, at events or at Cranewood or in downtown Sackville. You have been enthusiastic, terrific and engaged students, and you have added so much to our Mount Allison and to Sackville communities.
I applaud your capacity to have taken in and benefited from all the activities, people and experiences of our community, while at the same time surviving and indeed excelling in your academic programmes.
The Mount Allison and Sackville traditions represent a long, historical extension of the grand University experience, whereby students leave their home environments to enter a new world and a new community. And, in this new environment, you have been asked to find yourselves and to help build your own community. You have done this in an enormously successful and consequential way.
I am confident that you have gone a long way to discovering who you are, what your values are, what makes you ‘tick’, and how you want to live your lives.
And I am also confident that – now that you have learned to survive and flourish in this social laboratory called Mount Allison, Sackville, New Brunswick – you are ready to go on and do the same in the communities that you join.
I appreciate that for many of you, this is a bittersweet moment – perhaps even a melancholy moment – at a point of moving on from this memorable, halcyon Mount Allison stage in your life.
But I feel that you will ‘live forever’ at Mount Allison and that you will always be a part of the Mount Allison community – and that the Mount Allison experience will in turn be a part of you forever.
So – to the Graduating Class of 2013: well done, thanks for the memories, good luck in the future, and do keep in touch. It has been terrific, and we are proud of you.
