Read excerpts from the commencement speeches

Robbie Rohlena of Sioux City, a longtime Morningside College instructor and administrator, received an honorary doctorate in recognition of her 25-year career as an instructor and administrator at Morningside.

I am truly humbled by this honor. For 25 years, I came to work at Morningside, loving my job and enjoying the people I worked with. It has been an honor to watch thousands of Morningside students grow and learn and graduate from this great college. It has also been a pleasure to watch this college grow in new facilities and added programs.

I appreciated taking home a paycheck every month. But just as meaningful was my payment in “AH HAs.”  To a teacher, there is nothing more special than that moment when a student’s eyes light up and they say – oh, I get it. That is an AH HA. To a nurse, an AH HA may be a patient who responds to a medicine or the good care they received. To a salesman, an AH HA may be getting an order from a new customer.304 hours – the average number of free time hours each month each of us has. I subtracted a 40 hour work week and 8 hours for sleeping and still we each have 304 hours each month of discretionary time. So how are we going to spend this time? Yes – socializing with friends and family; staying in touch on Facebook; exercising. I would suggest each of you find ways to share your time, talents and treasures through volunteering. Volunteer opportunities are everywhere. The wonderful thing is you can choose exactly what you want to do – coach a little league baseball team, rake a neighbor’s lawn, build a home for a family in need, raise money for an animal shelter, be a mentor to a child with special needs, teach Sunday school, serve on a board of a non-profit agency.

When you volunteer, you do not get paid in dollars, but you will find many AH HA moments. I used to tutor at a neighborhood center. All the students I worked with had English as their second language. One year a young Vietnamese  eighth-grade girl came for help every week. Mihn was bright and eager to learn, but struggled with English and self –confidence. So we worked on English, social studies, math, and self-confidence. At some point, I started encouraging Mihn to think about college. She did not see this as even remotely a possibility in her future. Well, Mihn went on to high school and I lost track of her until one day when she came to my student services office here at Morningside. In her hand was her acceptance letter to Morningside. Big AH HA for me.

In closing I want to give just a few suggestions. First, find a meaningful job you love working with people you like. Enjoy the AH HA moments in your life. VOLUNTEER – give of your time, talent, and treasures. Try to see the world as others see it – listen carefully to others. Teach your children their multiplication facts.

Thank you for listening. God bless each and every one of you.

-Robbie Rohlena

Jeffrey Selingo, editor at large for The Chronicle of Higher Education in Washington, D.C., received an honorary degree in recognition of his prominence as one of the nation’s leading authorities on higher education and his collaboration with Morningside.

I want to encourage you to embrace the serendipity of life. Because what you end up finding of value in your career, and in your life, often comes in those chance encounters, those wrong turns, that story on the next page of the newspaper that you never thought would interest you.

I stand here today to say that the last 20 years have been a fantastic ride. Sure, I’m not the network news anchor I thought I’d be at 18 or the newspaper journalist I thought I’d be when I sat in your spot at graduation in 1995. We always talk about the road we took, but forget that sometimes the best opportunities in life happen because of the road not taken.

Working at The Chronicle of Higher Education for the last 15 years gave me incredible opportunities to travel in pursuit of good stories and eventually, write a book

Let me quickly share with you four perspectives I gained in reporting the book.

The first is that we are truly lifelong learners now. Only a third of students on college campuses these days are 18 to 24 years old. With the economy changing at warp speed, and with it, careers coming and going, there is simply no way we can guarantee the job we’re training for today will be around in 20 years. So the best skill you can have today is that you have learned how to learn – so that you have the capability to find the answers to the questions of tomorrow that we cannot envision asking today.

The second element I learned in reporting the book is that the most successful of us approach learning with a certain amount of rigor. There’s no taking it easy. So whether you’re going off to work or going to graduate school, it’s sometimes less about what you do, than how you do it.

Third: Take risks, especially now. This is a time in your life when many of you have very few responsibilities or commitments. If you know the solution to a problem or the destination at the end of the road you’re taking, you’re probably playing it too safe.

Finally, when you take those risks, you’re sometimes going to fail. Learning how to fail gracefully and recognizing the mistakes you made is highly valued by employers these days. As I interviewed corporate CEOs for the book, many of them worried about the impact of a generation of college graduates who always won at something – who always got a trophy just for showing up. Failure teaches you resilience and helps you appreciate the successes even more when they eventually come.

I envy your position today. Some of the most passionate people I met in the last year and half were in their 20s ready to conquer the world. And if you don’t quite know what you want to do, don’t worry. You just accomplished something great by getting a degree. You wouldn’t be here today if you didn’t have the drive and passion that will fuel your journey. Just remember a map isn’t always necessary if you let the serendipity of life carry you.

-Jeffrey Selingo