Hi everyone. I cannot believe I'm here, standing in front of you, right now in this space.

After getting over the initial shock of hearing that I was going to be student speaker (Thank you Magda for nominating me and putting me in this position), I had to sit down to tackle this rather daunting task. How to put into words an experience that took so much time, money, blood, sweat, tears, late late nights, brain cells. How do I do it justice? Will I be funny enough? Poetic enough? Memorable enough? Will I satisfy your expectations or non-expectations? What about my own expectations? Soon this speech turned into much more than a graduation speech. It began to reflect my own struggles about my art practice while at the SMFA. 

I'm going to start at the beginning.

When I first came to SMFA I was nervous, scared, excited and wholeheartedly open to the possibilities. I didn't know what to expect. I felt conflicted. What would come out of this venture? I'm investing in myself but what will be the outcome? Will I get my money's worth? I arrived in Boston near end of summer ... a stranger in a strange land.

It's a bizarre time right now. To go through a program like this one at SMFA consumes you. Not just mentally, but physically and emotionally. Your every waking hour is filled with completing your coursework, papers, projects, coming up with new ideas. This time and experience owns you and now that it's all over, you have to move on to the next thing. But let's take this moment to reflect on what it all means. What does this time spent at SMFA mean for you? For me? For your classmates sitting next to you?

You take away what you put in. Sure, some things might have been lacking, but this is the case in any institution. We are incredibly lucky to be studying and doing what we love.

To me, my time at SMFA has put me in situations I would have never experienced in any other setting. Situations that terrify me, such as now, but have made me grow. Situations that made me feel like this was the best decision I ever made. I threw myself into each and every one of them, not sure if I would land on my feet or flounder. Meeting, critiquing and talking with famous visiting artists...making friends...feeling like I am part of something bigger than myself. Like many of you I had a very hard first semester and first year here. Even during my second year I was plagued with doubts about my work, failed pieces and projects that never saw the light of day, critiques, so many critiques—harsh, good, unhelpful, you name it.

But the thing I was most afraid of was failure. But I soon learned that failure was an essential part of learning and improving. Like the time during my last semester of second year, I hurt myself in a performance for my performance seminar. It was supposed to be an easy and fun project (playing Chinese jump rope). The rope was about waist high when I jumped into the air and found my socked foot slipping on the wood floor of the performance room. I rolled onto the side of my right foot and heard a loud crunch. I was mortified and not to mention my ego was bruised. I had a limp for many weeks. Needless to say, my review board teachers were not happy to learn that my fall rendered me unable to make art for a period of time. After that incident I decided that I was going to stick to things that wouldn't land me in the hospital. And that is the beauty of the SMFA. You can experiment, try different things and even fail at them. By the end of my second year and before the start of my third year I learned to be okay with my relationship with failure. And soon things started coming out of the woodwork, awards and opportunities sprang up.

When I look back at my time at SMFA what will I remember? What will you remember? Will it be the mad scramble to prepare for Review Boards, the late hours working deep into the night, navigating the Tufts SIS system, Woodshop Walter, taking the rickety shuttle to Tufts (and fearing your life would end on the freeway), buying coffee and green pistachio muffins from the Café des Arts, Ahmed, Kamel, the walk between the Main building and Mission Hill, Shantytown, Manuel the janitor, the sinks upstairs at Mission Hill that always smelled, Relationals versus Makers, the Boys Club, waiting in line for free lunches in the Atrium, looking for David Brown, New York bus trips, critiques with visiting artists, having critiques where you felt like crying afterwards, having crits that made you feel on top of the world, working late hours into the night, the Medicis, the insanely long email chains regarding various topics of concern...

I have no regrets about my time here at SMFA. It is even more special because of you; the people I have met here who have touched my life. And that, in and of itself, was worth it. I hope it has impacted you as much as it did me. While I, like many of you, have struggled and triumphed through this program, the biggest challenges lie ahead in the unknown and unforeseeable future. This is an ending but also a beginning. We will be fine, whatever we do, wherever we go. We are artists. We are resilient creatures. I leave you with this quote from Samuel Beckett: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."