Carter Uslabar of Appleton graduates with a bachelor’s degree in multimedia journalism with a minor in English. While on campus he has served as a community adviser in the residence halls for six semesters and served on the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Segregated Fees committee. Uslabar has written for the Advance-Titan newspaper throughout his college career and recently won three Wisconsin Newspaper Association awards. After graduation, Uslabar will look for a position that allows him to explore his passion for writing.

Carter Uslabar

The following is a transcript of his remarks at the 5 p.m. ceremony during UW Oshkosh’s 147th spring commencement: 

♦ ♦ ♦

Congratulations. You’ve made it. You made it through years of studying, countless nights spent burning your eyes on screens, and an indeterminate number of trips across a frigid, unrelentingly cold campus. You’ve made it through assignments, quizzes, exams, and even the unspeakable (pause)  group projects. You’ve made it through packs of Ramen, badly-prepared quesadillas, and every concoction from Blackhawk. (I’ve worked and lived on campus all four years, and thus eaten at Blackhawk all four years, which—at this point—just feels like penance for some yet-uncommitted sins.)

Through all this, you’ve acquired many things: knowledge, experience, statistically speaking, most of you have acquired debt, and, most importantly, you’ve acquired friends and lovers.

And here you are. Finally. So what’s next? You got a job? You going to grad school? Law school? Med school? Are you going to work for a couple years at a Midwest accounting firm before applying to one of the big four? Are you going to work your way up the ladder at a FAANG company? What about after grad school or law school or the rungs of the career ladder? What are you going to do next? What’s next? What the hell is next? For the last four or so years, that’s the question that’s been dominating our minds. The nature of university demands that kind of forward thinking. It requires an almost mechanized mental orientation towards tasks, a systematic way of accomplishing your goal, and the next goal, and the next goal.

This isn’t a bad thing. It’s gotten you here and it’s getting you where you want to go. But where you go comes later; right now, you’re sitting here. In this very instant, you’ve accomplished what you’ve been working and waiting for. So revel in it. It’s not coming again.

Yesterday and the day before yesterday, all the tests, quizzes, projects, study sessions—all of it’s gone; it’s reduced to dreams and fragments of memory.

Meanwhile tomorrow is nothing at all. It’s a hallucination, a rippling projection, a mirage. All you have is today; this very day that has been your north star, your guiding light.

So enjoy it. Live it well, make the most of it. Do you feel the weightlessness of having accomplished something difficult, or are you already beginning to despair at the dreadful prospect of an uncertain future? Let’s have this day and be happy. Because if we delay that happiness to another date—when we get to the next part—we’ll invariably delay it again. If we told ourselves we’d be happy when we graduated, but right now are sitting here telling ourselves we’ll be happy when we get a job, that’s fine. But once we get that job, what’s stopping us from telling ourselves we’ll be happy once we’re making 80 grand, or that we’ll be happy once we’re married, that we’ll be happy when we retire, or that we’ll be happy once we get to the next part?

All of us sitting here are at risk of chasing the false goddess that is ‘the next thing.’ We’re at risk of spurning the priceless moments we’ve spent years working towards, disregarding and forgetting the hours we put in and the sleep we lost, all because there’s something new and a bit more shiny on the horizon. We’re at risk of getting stuck in an all-out sprint on the treadmill while the children we’ll have will be taking their first steps, our friends will be getting married, and our parents who proudly watch us here today will continue, despite our protests, to age. And each of these almost cartoonishly-romanticized moments will come and go so fast it will make our heads spin. After all, we just started here at UWO a few days ago, right? You blinked in March and now you’re here. What happened?

With that in mind, how do we orient our lives around the precious and wildly delicate instant we are living in in this very moment? It’s not that we should give in to lives of unbridled hedonism, maximizing our pleasure in each moment, or live with a disregard of the future. But we shouldn’t deny ourselves these moments to stop and recognize that where we are right now is where we once dreamt of being.

So how do we do it? How to we get there—mentally? I don’t know; I’m only 23. But I hope we can all find the joy and beauty in the priceless gift of today, and live each day well. For if we live each day well, the past becomes a peaceful dream and the future becomes a vision of hope.