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Brett Spangler of Oshkosh graduates magna cum laude, earning his bachelor’s degree in business administration with a double major in accounting and information systems. Spangler started at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh as a transfer student and quickly acclimated to student life. Outside the classroom he served as Oshkosh Student Association senator and vice president and was an active member of the Beta Gamma Sigma Honor Society. After graduation Spangler will work on finding a position in the finance or information technology field.

The following is a transcript of his speech during the 11 a.m. ceremony during UW Oshkosh’s 147th spring commencement: 

♦ ♦ ♦

Brett Spangler

Hello and, again, congratulations to all my fellow graduates, wherever you’re watching from today, near or far.

You might even be sitting where you’ve spent a majority of the last 14 months since that historic day when Chancellor Leavitt was nice enough to give us an extra week of spring break. That was a Friday the 13th, if you can believe it. Sometimes history has a twisted sense of humor like that.

As we sit here though, there’s no denying the different energy or emotions that a distanced ceremony creates. To help fight those unfamiliar feelings, I’ll try to stick close to the cliche positivity that these speeches usually have. But, instead of saying something like, “You can do anything you want as long as you believe in yourself!” I want to talk about why we, the class of spring 2021, are set up better than any other to emerge from this situation as agents of change and transformational leaders.

When you look back at it, people our age have been through an unbelievable amount of history; the kind that will take up entire chapters in future (overpriced) textbooks.

Born near the end of a century, we were too young to understand a legitimate panic created by 9’s changing to 0’s in computers. In our kindergarten years, we absorbed the psychological trauma, consciously or unconsciously, of an event now known simply by the day it took place: September 11th.

We’ve also had to deal with our fair share of subtle mockery about the fact that we’ll have more than 10 different jobs in our lifetimes (on average). But with the worst economic period since the Great Depression taking place during our formative middle school years, who can blame us? We had to endure watching our parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, get unceremoniously laid off from the jobs that they’d had for decades. In most cases, nobody at the company had a bad thing to say about them. We were told, “it was just business.”

And just when we thought we had firm ground beneath us that would finally give us some stability, 2020 happened. We had a virus that was different than anything the world had seen since the early 1900s, which caused the largest number of job losses since the Great Depression again, and then we were a part of the most significant racial movement in over 50 years, a movement that’s still far from over. All of that was in one year.

Now that I’ve cheered everyone up, I want us to give ourselves some credit and realize that these are assets, not liabilities. In most cases, you don’t get to pick your moment to take the lead. Sometimes, history chooses you.

History chose us to be the last generation that developed social skills primarily before social media, but it also chose us to be fluent in technology at an early age.

History chose us to be one of the most understanding and accepting generations in years.

In reality, history has made us carpenters, and it’s given us the most complete toolbox we could ask for.

In the new normal that’s coming, people will be looking for answers. They’ll be looking for carpenters to rebuild our world, and the class of 2021 will be there with our toolboxes. And it won’t happen if we “just believe in ourselves,” but when we’re given the opportunities, we will build the future that we want to see, even though it still looks dark.

To quote one of my favorite movies, The Dark Knight, “the night is darkest just before the dawn, but I promise you, the dawn is coming.” And we’ll be ready because history. chose. us.