My Friends, Esteemed Faculty and Administration, Honored Guests…. remember the day we graduated from the Pepperdine School of Law. To our family and friends, here with us today, it’s hard to put into words the experience of the last three years and how much it has meant to each of us. But you can feel it, can’t you? The faces of the parents here today are smiling with pride, or maybe its just relief… that your son or daughter graduated…and that their tuition and student loans can’t get any higher. There’s this feeling of excitement and nervousness, and we’ve felt it before. Remember the first day of school – August 2004 – “Big Day, Big Day, Huge Day….time to get started here we go, time to get started here we go”. Remember meeting everyone for the first time, thinking “What am I doing here; Am I cut out for this. He’s from Harvard, she’s from Yale, he’s 35, she…oh, she’s cute” Remember the endless notes and outlines, inventing games in class, discovering myspace and instant messaging, forming dodge ball teams, and remember that person in our first year section that asked just one too many questions… if you can’t remember that student, just so you finally know… you probably are that student. Remember finishing our very first set of finals… when was the last time we were that scared… or annoyed… “did she really put treasure trove as an issue on our property final”. And remember how much we wanted to know what everyone got on their grades after that first year – “Can you believe they got in the top 10%... how‟d you do… ah, you know „average‟” Personally I liked to say I was in the top 90% of the class.
Remember the teachers we love. A 5 ft feisty blond hair corps professor with a disregard for your personal space, who told us we should have bought Microsoft stock… in 1980, thanks for the tip. Two very different con law professors. The soft spoken renowned expert who’d break into a Ronald Regan Impression. “What‟s the constitution trying to say here professor….. (in Ronald Regan voice) Well, I don‟t know…. “ And the consummate Pepperdine veteran who really has no problem making fun of students. “If you‟re going to ask that question Mr. Nazar, then you must be dumber than I am” The torts professor and dean, whose secret guilty pleasures include reality television, poker, and the buffalo wings from hooters. Was there ever a problem we had that he didn’t listen to and try and fix. And a self deprecating contracts and tax professor who would periodically stop class to tell us about personal anecdotes of unrequited love… including our favorite about his pants tearing and falling off while ice scatting with a date. …But whose heart of gold and caring for his students made him so loved, like so many of our professors. Now three years later we are here at the finish line. So before we walk off campus for the last time, Remember the day our professors thanked us for being in class with them for the last three years, Remember the feeling of walking out of a final for the last time, and Remember in the coming weeks that “bar review” will not be the same as was our first year.
Remember what we have learned. Not from those endless pages of outlines, books, and notes. But rather what we’ve learned about ourselves. We learned about faith, how to have faith in ourselves. And there couldn’t be a better place than Pepperdine University to help teach that lesson. There will be times in life that we find ourselves in new and unbelievably challenging situations. There won’t be any external validation or experiences from our past that we can rely on to tell ourselves we can accomplish and excel in the task before us. It’s in these moments we look inside our self and find the faith and belief that precedes every extraordinary moment. As lawyers we’re trained to think skeptically… “I’ll believe it when I see it”. But remember, sometimes in life you have to have to say “I’ll see it… when I believe it.” And that’s what has made the last three years at Pepperdine so special. It’s an institution that teaches about faith and character. Its not only the Quantitative Qualities, the location, our new rankings, the dean, that make this place special, it’s the Qualitative Qualities --- the fact that Pepperdine attracts and fosters students of amazing character - genuinely honest, caring, hard working students who’ve formed extraordinary bonds of friendship. So it’s to you my friends I say, remember, it’s not what we have done, but what will do, that is extraordinary. And for everything we have to remember in the last three years, it’s now what we have to look forward to in the years to come that’s the most exciting of all. But that’s for another day….
Remember this moment, because they don’t come often. Remember looking across at the friends sitting next to you today, because it’s with a little bit of sadness that we realize we’ll never be here again. We’ll never fight over parking spots 20 minutes late to class at10:30 am, or stand in a 40 person lunch line as the guy behind the counter cooks one burger at a time, we’ll never pull all-nighters in a library full friends - with breaks every 15 minutes to the vending machine, and we’ll never again, all be together, as we are right now. But we will remember it, we will remember all those moments, every one of them, for the rest of our lives…. and most of all, we will remember the day we graduated from the Pepperdine School of Law.