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Beginning Again is Never Starting Over
2026-09-22
Most graduation speeches are geared towards the same kind of college graduate. This sort of graduate came to SUU straight from high school or fresh off a mission. Their college experience was an essential part of their coming of age story. They learned to live away from home, manage life with roommates, find new friends in a new environment, and live independently without having a parent constantly lording over their shoulder. Graduation for this individual is their next step into a new phase of adulthood with graduate school and lucrative full time jobs on the near horizon. If you are this individual, congratulations. I am thrilled for you. Your future is bright. The world is at your finger tips. Go forward and create a life you love. You can do it. However, there are also people graduating today who do not fit that mold. Non-traditional students—as SUU lovingly calls them—haven’t experienced the same linear forward progress as you would expect from your average early 20-something year old college graduate. Non-traditional students have lived a life that can appear out of order. Jobs, family demands, or unique personal circumstances, wedge their way between these students and the life they may have expected to live. A college education is something that likely sat on the backburner for a while until the time was right, and then they gave it another go. Beginning a college education over again poses some unique hardships. I know because I’ve done it more than a few times myself. I began my college education for the first time in 2016. Since then I’ve withdrawn from school three separate times, taken a pause once for a mission and once to support my partner through her final year of school after our child was born. I’ve come back to school after an extended break on four different occasions. If there's anything I know, I know how hard it is to feel like you’re starting over. It’s humbling once you realize that you are closer in age to your professors than your classmates. It can be downright humiliating to register for English 2010 for the third time or attempt to learn statistics seven years removed from your last math class. Returning to the same environment at 28 as I was at 18, at times, felt like an acknowledgement of failure. This last winter break, while I was playing a silly video game, a thought came to me that changed the way I see the act of trying again after failure. Here’s the phrase, “beginning again is never starting over.” The video game I was playing is called Hades. The game falls into the genre of a “Roguelite”— meaning that when you die, you start over from the beginning. In this video game, you play as the dashing and rebellious son of Hades, god of the underworld. Your goal in the game is to escape from the underworld, and if you fail to make it out before dying, you’re dragged back to the start. And that’s the entire game: hop out a window, slice through increasingly powerful monster hordes, meet a variety of Greek deities, die, and begin again. The magic of well-made Roguelite games is that even without upgrading stats, players will naturally get further and further with every attempt because their abilities and knowledge grow as they fail and begin again. Beginning again is never truly starting over because the player on their hundredth run is a very different player from who they were on their first. And to be honest, the game is a lot more fun once you have the experience and skills from a hundred failed runs. Over this last winter break, I realized that my circuitous path through college education was not so much a story of constant failure, as it was a story of beginning again. Each time I had the chance to begin again, I became a little bit stronger, a little bit more resilient, a little bit more stubborn, and although it took a decade, I did finally find my way here to graduation. Over the years, I’ve read through some of the stories highlighted in the SUU non-traditional student newsletter, and I am struck by how much these non-traditional students show the value in embracing the act of beginning again. These people come back to school after years away with greater ambition, focus, and intentionality. They know what they want and why they’re at SUU, and they’re better prepared than ever to make it where they want to go because of where they’ve been before. Graduation likely means something a little different to these people. And the tenacity and resilience required to make it to graduation as a non-traditional student deserves the chance to be recognized. Their examples serve as striking reminders to me that moments where it feels like I’m starting over after failure, are really just opportunities to begin again. Whether it’s starting a new job, reopening the budgeting app you downloaded in January, or finding yourself newly single after years in a relationship, you will be better for the fact that you’ve already tried. Experience is never lost. Beginning again is never starting over. I hope in the near future you all have the opportunity to be non-traditional students in some form or another because you’ll find out that you’re more tenacious and determined than you believe. You’ll find that you don’t give up easily. You’ll find that you can learn to be persistent in the face of humbling circumstances. And you’ll learn as I have that beginning again is never starting over.
