Speaking with High School Students from Across the Nation

Fun time this week working with NEXUS Summer Program students.  Everyone received a copy of 99 Motivators for College Success.  

NEXUS provides teens with on-campus academic and career development alongside immersive experiences in self-discovery including socio-emotional coping strategies, on leading college campuses throughout America.  

Lessons Learned from Sports

It was great meeting and speaking with the Atlanta After-School All-Stars this week!  In the early 1990's, I worked with the Miami ASAS Chapter, then known as the Inner City Games, and led by Olympian Bob Beamon.

99 Motivators - Student Summer Programs

Taking on 7'4" Mark Eaton, NBA Defensive Player of the Year

Looking forward to speaking with rising 9th graders in June, and rising 12th graders and college freshmen in July and August.

Our Greatest Barriers to Success:

   - Lack of curiosity

   - Fear of change

   - Fear of failure (see photo!)

   
You need a game plan, but no matter what you do in life, you always will have your education.  

 99 Motivators for College Success is dedicated to any person who walks into a college classroom, and dares to dream about a better today and tomorrow.

Rod Serling's Inspiring Graduation Speech - 50 Years Ago

Have you ever watched Twilight Zone re-runs on TV? Serling, who wrote 92 of the 156 scripts, had a flair for the written word. Part of his childhood was spent in Binghamton, N.Y., where I attended college.  The influence of upstate New York is evident in a handful of his scripts.  Twenty five years after his own high school graduation, he returned to his alma mater to deliver one of the most inspiring and timeless speeches you'll ever read.

Excerpt from Binghamton High School Commencement Speech, 1968:
... always do the things that you believe. Don't become monuments—sway with the wind. Change opinions, if the change is natural and believed. But believe in something and fight for those beliefs. Honor them by your commitment. Further them by your effort.
And what a wondrous and what an incredibly grand world you might build for your children.  Now this millennium may not be in sight, let alone in reach. The route to it may be pretty damned close to impassible.  It may be as distant and as complicated to reach as the moon or another solar system.  BUT IT IS THERE! It's there for the taking, the asking and the fighting. And the rhetorical question—are you tough enough—I think is already answered by simply the look of you and the feeling that's in the room.  Indeed, you're tough enough. And you're also human enough and sensitive enough and caring enough.

Full text: http://www.rodserling.com/01281968.htm