 Oh, say can you see light, What's so bright, Whose broad stripes and bright stars. Join me for the Pledge of Allegiance. I have the pleasure of introducing our dignitaries and distinguished guests. Please hold your applause until the end. Tom Williams, Interim Chancellor of NCSSM. Gita Patel, Convocation Speaker, Class of 1994. Steve Walshaw, Vice Chancellor for Academic Programs. Saga Shuka, President of Student Government. Valid Zhu, President of Student Senate. Shirley Fryer, Chair, NCSSM Board of Trustees. Henry Quo, Vice Chair, NCSSM Board of Trustees, Class of 1982. Lavonia Allison, NCSSM Board of Trustees. Jay Wink, NCSSM Board of Trustees. Charles Elber, Chancellor Emeritus. Brian Mahoney, President, Alumni Board, Class of 1990. And in the front, we have the parents of our speaker, Gita Patel. Mr. Ms. Patel, please stand. And Associate Producer and a friend, Tricia Scruvalla. Please join me. Thank you, Dr. Barber, for providing our introductions and for our special guests that have joined the faculty and staff along with our students here this evening. I would be remiss if I did not extend a special thanks to the NCSSM Convocation Orchestra under the conductor, Scott Laird. The women's quartet under conductor, David Stuntz. And finally, to Violetta Zoo for leading us in our pledge. Let's give each of them another well-deserved round of applause. On behalf of our Board of Trustees and its Chair, Ms. Shirley Fryer, Permanent Chancellor, Roberts, who cannot be with us this evening and the entire faculty and staff of NCSSM, it's indeed my distinct pleasure to welcome our returning seniors of the Class of 2011 and our entering juniors of the Class of 2012 to this evening's 31st Convocation. Today has been a fabulous first day for me as your interim Chancellor and I am so honored by the appointment to have the privilege of working with all of the NCSSM students, parents, and this tremendous faculty and staff. We're indeed so fortunate to have Ms. Gita Patel, NCSSM 94 with us tonight. Like you, I look forward to hearing her remarks and gaining from her insights. So at this time, I'd like to call upon our Vice Chancellor Academic Programs, Dr. Steve Warshaw for the introduction of our guest speaker. Dr. Warshaw. Good evening. You have probably seen Ms. Patel's photo on NCSSM.edu. And you may have read the biographical information and the interview that are posted there. I will assume that many of you have done that. So I'm not going to repeat much of it. She graduated from NCSSM in 1994, having served as our student government president. She graduated from Duke with a degree in comparative area studies and after spending a couple of years in the world of the financial management industry, subsequently discovered that her vocational path would be in writing, directing, and producing films as well as being a writer of novels. And she has a remarkable record of accomplishments. She has directed a number of films. She worked at one time or another with PBS, Disney, Universal Pictures, Imagine Entertainment, ABC, NBC, and 20th Century Fox. She has taught master classes and served as a visiting lecturer at universities throughout the world. While she was at NCSSM, Gita lived in Hill when it was a girl's residence hall and in Reynolds. She played soccer and says, they called me the bulldozer because I just kept trying to run people down. She was also active in tennis, dance team, jazz band, Model UN, and she remembers winning the Turkey Trot one year. You juniors will find more out about the Turkey Trot later on. I remember Gita Well in her role as student government president. More than I remember many of the SGA presidents who have succeeded her. In the interview that's posted on the website, she says or describes herself as a troublemaker. She was student body president, but she thought of herself as a troublemaker. I remember her as being passionate and a reformer, someone who invests a lot of her life's energy in identifying and addressing injustice in order to make things better. That reformer passion seems to be a driving force in her career. Most recently in Project Kashmir, a PBS documentary, she directed about the lives of ordinary Kashmiris, the unfortunate inhabitants of what has been a war zone for many, many years, not unlike the West Bank in Gaza, Northern Uganda, and other tormented areas of the world. Bulldozer? Reformer? Yes. But clearly with a deeply nuanced understanding now of the complexities of addressing injustice effectively and sustainably. I am delighted to introduce Gita to you. Please welcome her warmly back to NCSSM. Thank you so much for that deeply moving introduction. I don't think I can get my words for a couple of minutes. It's really wonderful to be back here. I thought, we were joking before I came out here, that I thought I would get the levels that I didn't get back then. There was some residual trouble that I was in from when I was here before. I walk into this universe. It's like a country. I think back to a lot of things, and maybe these are the things that you're feeling right now. I think about feeling like there's so much to do, there's so many decisions to make, there's so much work, and there's so many people I want to see, so much time I want to spend with everyone, and also feeling like I have so much energy I don't know what to do with. And to me that is ambition, and that's why I'm so honored and thankful that all of you are here today to listen to Little Me because I know that you guys are the people that are going to change the world, and I know this because the people that I went to school with are indeed doing that, and they are people that have inspired me and have taught me so much. And I also just want to again thank all of you who taught me and welcomed me back here, because I feel like the person who I am right now and the person I've grown into and all the things that I've come to kind of realize about myself started here at this school. Before I came to this school, I think I didn't really know who I was, and when I came here, I started feeling my edges, and I think I gave everybody a pretty hard time. I was always just pushing the limits and questioning everything, and as I moved on from NCSSM, that was a journey that took me everywhere, and I really grew up. I learned a lot of lessons about how to communicate, how to get what you want, how to understand what you need, how to listen. That was the most important thing, how to listen. And I think most of all, I learned how to love, and my parents, you know, I think when I was in school here is when there were a lot of things with my parents that I didn't know if they knew who I was, I didn't know who I was, and we didn't know what we wanted together, and I think what I've come to realize now it's ten years, many more than ten years later, is that family is the most important thing. And so the one thing I want to start with and go into my speech is that although we're all very ambitious that go to this school and we're all very ambitious who make this school come to life, it's a unique visionary place that you live in. This is a country, it is a universe that's hard to explain to people when you move on from here. That your ambition is a very, very delicate thing, and I'm realizing that. I still feel like I have a lot to learn and how to really take ambition and change the world, but also take ambition and remain who I am and be true to myself. It's something that can do positive things and also put you in compromising positions, and it's a really, really big gift that you all have. It's a huge responsibility, as they would say to Spider-Man. It's a huge responsibility that you have, and you are all leaders if you go to school here. You're all leaders if you make this school happen. And so keeping track of your ambition is something that I wish for you, and I hope for myself even, because I think it really is what makes or breaks anything visionary in this universe. I wanted to talk a bit. In terms of storytelling, that's what I do for a living, so I thought maybe the best way to open this speech was to do it as a storyteller, because that's really the way I can express myself, so I hope you don't mind. Every great story, as you may have learned, starts with a hook. So maybe we'll start there. I'm in Hollywood. I'm on a set, and Angelina Jolie was right there in front of me, and this producer that I had been wanting to work with for so long, so long, finally was taking me around on his arm and introducing me to this actress who he wanted to be in my film. This is very recent. And I walked up to her, and she started talking to me, and I couldn't move. The strange thing was that I couldn't feel anything, and I thought, well, maybe I'm not feeling anything because this is so overwhelming and so great. I've wanted this for so long. And then I thought, well, wait a minute. Maybe I'm not feeling anything because I'm not feeling anything. And that's when things started to get a little strange. And I felt this thing I called the pull. I don't know if you guys have felt that pull. It's that strange feeling inside of you that is telling you something, but you don't know what it's telling you. And I stepped back from the conversation. I didn't even know what she said. I stepped back, and the producer and I started walking away. And in those moments of walking away, I made a huge decision, something that I never would have expected for myself and nor did anyone else in my life. But let's start at the beginning, right? My dad, sitting over there, came to America with $8 in his pocket. I mean, I've heard this a million times. Maybe you have too. You know, they went around the entire village in India and everybody in the village pulled their money to send my father to America. And he was from a vegetarian state. When he came here, he worked in a steakhouse. Never complained. He was short, but never thought he was short. You still don't think you're short. He married my mother who came to America and from the minute she got here started working and speaking a language she couldn't speak. And together they created a home in which all I can remember is my mother singing and my father looking at me as if I was magic. And I remember a stream of family coming in as I was growing up. Always somebody sleeping in my bed, you know, of some relative from India. Somebody, my mom would be teaching them how to drive. My father would be doing their immigration paperwork and I just remember a movement. I remember a love that was unconditional and I remember these people doing something that was impossible, impossible. It's impossible to even be an American and stay here and get a great job. Can you imagine coming to this country, many of you can, coming to this country, not knowing a lick of the language, not having an education that counts for anything, not having any skilled accounts for everything and then maybe having low self-esteem and then trying to conquer this place. So that's what I remember. When I got to NCSSM, I started to feel the pull. I started to feel this crazy feeling inside of me. It was like, you know, like I had a gremlin or something in my chest. I ran for student body president and I was obsessed, we can all say. Those of you who may remember, I made 3D milk cartons of Vote for Geetha. I made up all night long when I was posturing my homework and I created, I remember a life-size window where it said when a door is closed, Geetha will open a window. I was nuts, sort of flyably. And I failed all my classes and you guys might remember this. My parents came up to pick me up because I was getting kicked out of school and I told my dad, I made up all these stories. This is what I was known for. I always made up stories to get out of things. So yes, you're right. I was lying all those times and I made up this story and I said, dad, butt, butt, butt. And dad looked at me with this enormous sense of disappointment and so did mom. And that's what changed me is the disappointment that I didn't do my best. I did not do my best. And so after that, even though I didn't excel in science and math very easily, I did it. I turned my grades around. I walked over to Duke University. They weren't going to let me in. I went into the offices and told them they had to accept me. Please accept me. I need to go to this university. I promise I'll work very hard. And they accepted me. So it wasn't very easy, but it happened. And I can say it came from that look. After that, I did start at Duke and I went to Germany. And I started feeling this pull. I was studying abroad in Germany, which many of you guys I'm sure will study abroad. And I was going to class one day. It was a political science class and I had that feeling. And I started thinking about the fact that there was a film festival going on in Berlin at the time. And so I'm putting my clothes on, getting ready, walking out the door, and something stops me. It's the pull. I go back into my room. I put down my books and I pick up the phone and I call my friend and say, I'm not coming to class. I go down to the theater where the film festival was happening. I stood in line for eight hours for a ticket to a movie. I have no idea why to this day. I just felt the pull. They gave me a ticket to a movie. That night, I skipped school again because we had something that evening. And I'm in line for this movie. It's a red carpet event. You know, cameras everywhere. I'm walking down the aisle. I have no idea what I'm doing here, but I have to be here. The movie starts. It turns out to be this movie that's premiering called The English Patient, that at the time, no one had heard of. I watched the movie and as I watched the movie, the pull is unbelievable and I feel like I'm going to throw up. The movie's over and I can't stop looking at the screen. The entire audience like this empties and I see all the stars in the movie in the back of the room, including the director. And all the stars walk by, Juliette Benoche, Ralph Fiennes, and I wait for the director and I look at him and he looks at me and he's waiting for me to say something and I just can't move. So he keeps going. We go outside and my friend says, you seem like you need to talk to this director. I was like, yeah, I don't know why though. So I go up to him again and this time he's waiting. He's like, okay, and I just open my mouth. Nothing, nothing. I'm just opening my mouth to this guy and he just thinks I'm psycho. So finally he goes home, I go home. The next morning I'm getting ready for class and I again have my books and I feel it again. It's so annoying, the pull. I know you guys all have it. And I call every hotel in Berlin looking for Anthony Mengele, the director of the English patient. And this woman answers the phone at one of the hotels and I say, hi, my name is Geeta. I'm the girl. I know, I know. You're the Indian girl, right? From yesterday. I was like, yeah, yeah, that's me. She goes, yeah, Anthony thought you might try to find him again. Here he is. She gives him the phone. He says, hello. And I'm like, hi. He goes, yeah, yeah, I know you're the Indian girl. And I said, listen, sir, I can't really explain myself, but could you just talk to me for a few minutes? And he goes, yes. And he goes, come to my whatever press conference, fine. So I go down, skip school again. And I go to this press conference and I'm surrounded by all these movie people and I go straight up to this room. I remember it was up in the clouds. It was like a metaphor. And I'm up in the clouds with Anthony Mengele. This guy, I don't even know who he is. And he looks at me and it's as if he read my thoughts and he said, very simply, he said, my parents were immigrants. And he said, my father was an ice cream vendor. And he said, my parents are very proud of me. And then he handed me his script for his film. And on top of his script, he had written his address. After that, I wrote to Anthony Mengele for the rest of his life. He just passed away recently. But that moment was the beginning for me. So then we go from Germany back to the US. Years later, I've graduated college somehow. And I'm in New York. I took the first job I could get, which was with General Electric. I'm in finance, which makes sense, right? So I'm working in finance. It's a two-year program. It's a fast-track CFO program. I'm doing debits and credits, which I didn't know what they were until I got there. And every day, I can't stop thinking about that moment, that conversation. I can't stop thinking about stories and movies. And I think to myself, you know, I keep that you got to stop it because that's not real. This is real. Everybody wants to be an actress. Everybody wants to be an actor. Everybody wants to be a movie star or a singer. Every single person wants to. But it's not true. You can't do that. It's not realistic. And so I talk to myself out of it. But at night, no matter what happened, I would sit there and I would start writing stories by myself. If I watched television or movies, I would start analyzing them. If I saw a book or someone talking about stories in any way, I would start studying them in a way that I never studied before, ever. Let's just admit it, I was a horrible student. So this was a new thing for me. I didn't know where this came from. Then one day I'm sitting at my office and I find out there's a show called West Wing in Development. And I couldn't believe it because the thing that I had been working on every night by myself was this show about politics and government and how there could be an ideal group of people who could really change this country and they are the people that are our leaders. And yet there's a show being developed at General Electric or at NBC that General Electric owned. And so I thought, wait a minute, this is a sign. This is somebody, they have my idea. Have you ever felt like that? Like somebody took your idea and you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's a sign. That was supposed to be me. And so in that moment, I felt the spiritual kind of thing and it was the pull coming back again with revenge. And in that moment, I didn't know what to do. I had no options to get out. I had a great job. I had family that was really proud of me. And I found out that someone else you may have heard of, I don't know if you guys have heard of Ali McBeal, a show that was on, but there was another writer in town in New York and he had written Ali McBeal. And he was being honored. And I thought, well, maybe this is a sign, this guy, this huge writer's in town, so maybe I can go find him and get him to read what I'm doing. So I decided to try to get into this fancy-schmancy dinner that he was being honored at. And it was about $1,000 a plate. And I go to the NBC room where a girl my age was working and I said, listen, you got to get me in. And she goes, Geetha, you're crazy. It's $1,000 a plate. And she said, no. And I said, listen, I made up some crazy stories, usual, how I have to get into this. It's like life or death. And she calls me at the end of the day. She's like, OK, listen, I got a ticket. I was like, who says it? She goes, it's the president of NBC's ticket. You'll be sitting next to his wife. I was like, OK. So I get to this dinner and I'm wearing a bright purple dress because I don't know anything about fancy dinners. Of course, everybody else there is wearing beautiful black dresses. I'm wearing this frilly thing that I wore in college to a formal. And I sit there with these people that don't believe in me clearly. The wife, a few other people, their wives, and everybody's looking at me like I don't belong. And what I remember is feeling that everything they felt about me, all of the things of this girl is an idiot who found her way into here. She doesn't belong here. All of that, I internalized and I started believing it. Because as you know, when you're insecure and when you don't believe in yourself and someone gives you any inkling that you're not special, that's what you're going to remember. Not the positive, but the negative. And that is where we get into danger as visionaries. And in that moment, I'm sitting at the table and I see David E. Kelly across the way, his wife, Michelle Pfeiffer, sitting next to him and I chickened out. I walked out of the room and I started walking out of the event. And then this waiter came after me. I swear to God this happened. This waiter comes after me. He's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you told me why you were here. Why are you not talking to him? And I said, I just can't do it. And he goes, no, no, no. You go back in, you finish this. And so I went back in and I talked to him but I didn't quite tell him why I was there. I just kept saying, I need to talk to you. I need to talk to you. And he's like, yeah, I'm right here. I'm right here. And he kind of got so scared of me that he pushed me away and said, you know, why don't you just call my office in LA next week? I was like, okay, okay, I'll call you. And I left and I went home and that was it. That night I realized I was just, that was it. I needed to stop. And my roommates, my friends, my family, everybody said, Geetha, you are this close to getting fired. You have been running around and doing this kind of stuff forever. You need to stop. I said, okay, that's it. I'm going to stop. I was bawling, crying. I need to just commit to my job, don't I? Yes, yes, reality. The next morning I just called his office just to finish it, just to make sure. He calls me back and he says, okay, it's me. What's your story? And I said, well, I have this idea for a show. And at that point I had lost all confidence. So I just waited a few seconds and he listened. That's what changed. Is that this man listened to me. After that, I ended up calling every hotel again in New York and finding another writer and another writer. And long story short, I hopped on a plane two years later and moved to LA and started working for someone who said that I could get him coffee for four weeks. And that was it. My dad and mom were not pleased. And all I remember is my father saying, I just want my daughter to be happy. And my mom on the other line calling some uncle of an uncle of an auntie of an uncle and getting me a place to stay. From there on, I went on to make many films like Fast and the Furious, Blue Crush as an apprentice. And this man taught me everything he possibly knew. And he believed in me more than I believed in myself. After that, I finally started believing in myself. And it wasn't alone. I went on to make a documentary that took eight years in the Warzone of Kashmir. And I don't really know why I did it. I just followed my heart. I just knew it was what I wanted to do. And that was serving me well. I never made any decision of what I was going to be, what I was going to be called, never. I always followed what I was interested in. And that's what led me to great places. After I made the documentary in the Warzone, we premiered on PBS. And all of a sudden I was a director. And I was part of programs at Sundance and Tribeca. And I didn't even know really how I got there. All I know is that I was doing something that was important to me, which was communicating with people about important things through media. After that, I found myself broke and wondering what to do next. I thought, okay, now I have to make a living. And also, eight years of making a documentary and being that focused on my ambition, I hadn't spent a lot of time with my family. I hadn't spent a lot of time with my friends, my brother. I didn't really have a personal life. And I realized that I didn't want a life of 100% ambition anymore. I wanted a life that was balanced. And when I die one day, I want to know that I had great relationships, not great movies. And now we find ourselves with Angelina Jolie. I had written a film that would be the first action film, if it was ever made, to penetrate the action genre market and it would have a social justice message. So think of all the war zones in the world, like Israel-Palestine or Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and imagine the dark night taking place in a village. That's what I wrote. And I'm sitting here with this producer and he's got this great, awesome actress. My dreams couldn't be truer. And he's telling me all this stuff, you're going to work 24-7, you're going to spend your vacations also networking. This is what it takes. I don't know if you guys have seen Entourage, but it's exactly like that. And he's also telling me to take out the politics from the film, to change the film, to make it more like what's already out there. And this is when I realized there's two different kinds of people in the world. There are people that see what already exists. And there are people who see what already exists. Which one are you? And which one was I? And in that moment, I turned to him and I said, I'm very sorry. I know you're going to think I'm absolutely out of my mind. But I am not changing a word of this film. I am not changing my life. I am going to be a family person and I am going to pursue my ambition of making awesome films. And that's it. And I walked away. I was so scared, so alone, so broke. And then I found people to work with me, like my colleague who I've brought here, who are also visionaries and dreamers and respect people and we're good people. And I know that sometimes people will tell you it's naive to want to work with good people. You know, just suck it up. I don't like him, but I just have to work with him. I personally am here to say I don't believe in that. Your life is too short. You should work with great people. You should be a great person and respect everyone that comes across your path. And I promise if you do this, your work and your visions will come to life. I promise if you don't do this, you will be miserable if you are a visionary. I found a group of visionaries around me and I scored a lunch with the producers of The Matrix. I had lunch with them and told them the entire crazy, crazy idea for this movie was, you know, martial arts. It was like Crouching Tiger meets Dark Knight. I mean, their eyes were spinning and they walked out and they're like, no thank you. I said, well, could you just read the script? They said, sure. I drove away in a rented car. I didn't even have a car. And then the producer calls me and he says, would you like to meet me for a drink? I have some notes on your script. I met him for a drink and he said to me, you know, when you first told me about your idea, I didn't think it made any sense, you did it. We can do this together. And that's the beginning of the end of my story. We are making the film but I don't think that's what I'm here to tell you. What I'm here to tell you is that every single day of my life I have been trying, trying to do my best without any expectations. And this is something my father and my mother have taught me. Don't expect anything. Just do your best. In that poll it will be quenched. That poll is your need to be who you are and you don't need to put any labels on it. You just need to be that person and if you feel like you're not being who you are and you're not being true whether it be a good son, a good daughter, a good student, a good teacher, whatever it is, a good person, a good artist, a good professional, it's always going to be there in a way that's uncomfortable but if you look at that poll and understand that it's challenging you to do everything in a way that is full of truth then I think that your life will be very fruitful so I wish that for all of you. More than anything else I hope you will all jump and take chances and please, I know this is the opposite of what many people will tell you but don't have a parachute. That when you jump the parachute will appear because that's what visionaries do. They believe in the impossible and I do believe that the parachutes will appear. Don't worry. Thank you very much for having me here today. I'm so honored and I'm so proud of all of you. Good evening. Distinguished faculty, guests and fellow students to the 339 juniors welcome. And to the 341 seniors welcome back to the greatest high school in the country. You already know that we are extraordinary in many standards. Being ranked as one of Newsweek's top public elite high schools every year since the list has been conceived and nursing some of the nation's top science Olympiad science bowl, quiz bowl, math robotics and debate teams name it, we're the best. Our sports teams dominate as well winning state championships multiple times. It is exceedingly simple to say we are exceptional. People here take on challenges, yes whether academic, athletic or philanthropic on a worldwide scale. We deal with every challenge be it adjusting to an entirely new lifestyle and coping with homesickness or taking on a multitude of extracurricular activities all while maintaining a high standard of academic achievement. Well you have been accepted and have enrolled at the North Carolina School of Science and Math where we accept the greater challenge daily but don't get intimidated you have also unwittingly enrolled at the North Carolina School of Support and Mentorship. Now what do I mean by an eternal social network by the way that North Carolina School of Support and Mentorship now what do I mean by social network I don't mean the internet addiction that is called Facebook. The social network is the essence of science and math composed of the personal one-on-one connections you will develop with many a student. In many cases people you thought you would never have talked to you will develop lifelong relationships. The social network is part of the three S's rather an extension of the third S study sleep socialize I hope you've heard of them otherwise you've probably been taking that second S a bit seriously and napping through those orientation sessions. Social does not mean just going out to happy half and talking with a few people here and there it is about creating lasting bonds. The members of the social network are your support group the people who encourage you the people who look out for you the people who look after you they are the people you live with these are your study groups your physics lab partners your chemistry WebAssign buddies the amp stutters the calculus pods these people are your hall mates, your teammates your RLAs, your tutors, your teachers your administrators I could keep going but I hope you get my point the social network if you out of all the parts is the entire school if you ever have any issue with your adjustment to residential life your schoolwork or overcoming obstacles someone will be there for you I guarantee it juniors you are now part of the greatest social network ever created and seniors it's our year to keep the legacy that our seniors left us going so my challenge to you is don't be daunted by what we face in the coming days instead embrace what we have the opportunities we are given gather strength from the courage of our peers become inspired by those who lend a helping hand when they are the ones who are truly in need realize that success is not solely a product of one's individual effort but by the nurturing of the hall environment we a school 680 students strong along with a fabulous faculty and staff our leaders in academics and athletics we are all members of a single social network a support group that we call NCSSM I look forward to what I hope to be one of the greatest years this school has ever witnessed thank you I now invite Dr. Tom Williams to the stage let me begin by first extending on behalf of each and every one of us to Miss Patel again her presence here tonight the time and the energy and the thoughtfulness that she put into sharing her insights and reflections with us thank you so much we are grateful and also to our student government association president Sagar Shukla who has done a fabulous job of stealing part of my comments without even knowing that so he's obviously the visionary that we need because he did talk about the accolades just from 2010 and while he didn't hit them all he hit a lot of them he didn't get to mention he would have if he had time the selection of Miss Maria Hernandez as a 2010 presidential award in excellence in teaching math and science congratulations to her but one of the accolades that we kind of need to keep in the house a little bit is the fact that last year's class of 2010 had 22,000 plus hours of community service and some very important projects in our local community and around the state and around the country and around the world so those 22,000 hours of community service hours I think get at the essence of the power of the network of what you as a class of 2011 and 2012 have so those kinds of opportunities are there as important as these past successes are it is what we do with this year's opportunity that's the most important NCSSM presents an opportunity of a lifetime but each of us as students as well as members of this faculty and staff if you believe as I do success is best defined as when preparation meets opportunity then each of us must be willing to step up and make sure that we give more to NCSSM than it gives back to us NCSSM's past successes are the result of thoughtful and dedicated work by the students before you and by the faculty and staff that have served this school I am fully and totally confident that this year will be the same as at the 32nd convocation next year the accolades of NCSSM for 2011 will be the greatest ever have a great start to your year I look forward to seeing you across the campus as you pursue your academic extra and co-curricular pursuits and personal development activities to the class of 2011 and the class of 2012 as Dr. Roberts heard from many of you at his reception last Friday you my friends are NCSSM have a great beginning to your school year thank you to everyone for participating in the program this evening thank you