Remarks of the Outstanding Graduate
by Nick Frankenhauser
While
I'm not the most traditional person, most people who receive an award
begin by
thanking all the people that helped them along the way. My list
is short, but those people who helped
me get here were more important to me than I can articulate in a mere
five
minutes. First and foremost, I need to
thank my wife, Madeline. She supported
me through two years of graduate school, both financially and
emotionally, and
now it’s my turn to get a job and pull up some of the slack. My
parents have always supported my
education, and it was never a question to me that I would go to college
or get
my master’s degree. I can, however,
credit my younger sister Heidi for getting hers done first, which
motivated me
to get off my butt and go back to school.
Sibling rivalry is a surprisingly powerful motivational tool.
I also need to thank the professors here at ECU who helped me with my academic studies and encouraged me to pursue my interests beyond the classroom. These people include, but are not limited to Drs. Anna Froula and Don Palumbo, Jim Holte, Amanda Klein, Wendy Sharer, Jim Kirkland, Rick Taylor, Will Banks, and Gregg Hecimovich. All of you were never anything less than one hundred percent supportive of my projects, and a few of you even tolerated me beyond the limits of human reason. I’d also like to thank Dr. Brent Henze and the rest of the Scholarships and Awards committee members for selecting me for this honor of Outstanding Graduate Student.
I’d like to point out that I've never felt myself to be outstanding. I didn't even walk at my undergraduate commencement because to me it felt like a defeat. I had spent nearly five years as an education major, only to enter my student teaching experience and realize that I hated it.
I changed majors
and made up a
degree program with my advisor, just to get out as quickly as I
could. I ran away.
I worked for two years just to get by, got married, moved to North
Carolina, and
found myself with the opportunity to teach high school English
anyway. I took it, to prove to myself that I could do
it after all, but the situation still made me miserable. I ran
away again. It took me yet another year to decide what I
wanted to go back to graduate school for, and to put it in motion.
I say all this because I want you to understand how utterly lost I felt for four years of my life, and I'm the sort of person that needs purpose. Without it, I stagnate, and before I came to East Carolina, I was as purposeless as I've ever been. This place, all of you here today, changed that for me. My father always told me that his best friends in life were the people he met in grad school. He spoke truth, and it has become my truth as well. I don't know if I can explain how utterly joyful it was for me to go from a state of disappointment and aimlessness to feeling a true sense of belonging for the first time in my professional life. Even though we all have our own separate interests, we have more in common than not, which I think is easy to forget in the world of academia. We all enjoy the play of language, a clever turn of phrase, and we all recognize and revel in the power of words, ephemeral as they are, to create human reality.
As we disperse from here, to enter doctoral programs, publish articles, or even compete with each other for the same jobs, I pray we keep these commonalities in mind and never lose our affection for one another. Bonds of experience and of love tie us together, and I count myself lucky to have been part of such a thing. If I am outstanding, it is only because of the family, friends, and faculty here at ECU that have made me so.
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