In the next decade, all of you will face a unique challenge. You are soon to be Groton graduates. You will join a pool of some of the most prestigious alumni in this nation’s history. Many of you will have resumes marked with Ivy League schools and internships and jobs at the top companies in the world. Your legacies of success and achievement will begin the moment you receive that high school diploma. From here on, parents, family, friends, and colleagues will comment on how much you have accomplished, how gifted you are, and how wonderful you all are. You will need to be conscious of not pursuing a life that only preserves that success. You must define success for yourself. For many of you, the people around you will decide that heading off to Doctors Without Borders, the Marine Corps, Teach for America, the Peace Corps, or whatever other wild endeavor would be “bad timing,” “a waste of your potential,” a “waste of a valuable life,” “foregoing a lucrative career path,” etc., etc. The people you most expect to encourage you to be bold and to sacrifice when it is most difficult to do so will not. Instead, many will defer to protecting and “enabling” the path of success you will create. They will want to shield you from failure and keep you on a narrow path considered “acceptable.” Challenge them! I encourage you to do something uncomfortable, something with a piece of your life where you are in deep service to others, and where it is tremendously difficult to give. You must define the value of “your” life for yourself. Do not let the institutions and your quest for the “perfect resume” define it for you. It is critically important that over the next 10 years you fail a lot, because from those failures will come your deepest learning for future success. My soccer coach and hockey coach at Groton, Fred Beams and Cathy Giles, made me get back up after lost games and get ready for the next ones. Failure was not an excuse on the athletic field to stay down or lose confidence. Those two coaches drove tenacity into me and taught me that perseverance will triumph always. Take what I am sure you have learned on those fields at Groton and bring it with you into your life beyond Groton. Do not be afraid to fail. Take risks! Groton has given you a toolbox and an ethical compass to tackle whatever you may face after Prize Day. Few people in this world are afforded the resources and opportunities provided to you at Groton, and even fewer ever have the mentorship and leadership of such an incredibly dedicated and passionate faculty. As you shake hands and bid your mentors and friends farewell, promise yourself that you will reflect on what you have been given and what you have worked so hard to achieve at Groton. You will not know on Prize Day what your greatest passion in life is nor where or how it is best for you to be in service to others. However, when and where the opportunity arises, seize it. Keep the lance corporal on the rooftop in your mind and constantly ask yourself what a valuable life means for you. I want to share with you my favorite quote. It is from Theodore Roosevelt [1906]: “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.” Before I close tonight, I’ll be honest and tell you that on Sunday morning it will not be easy for me to get back on the plane to Iraq. In fact, bidding my family and my country farewell this time around may be the hardest thing I have done in my 30 years. However, looking at you all tonight, knowing that Groton has equipped a group of people to do great things for this nation and people the world over gives me a deep sense of peace. So for that I thank you. Ann Gildroy Fox ’94 served with the U.S. Marines from 2001-05 and 2007-08. Quarterly Spring 2012
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