Convocation speaker challenges first-year students to build a community where they belong

When Wendy Gates Corbett ’91 arrived at Guilford as a first-year student, she remembers standing outside Bryan Hall and watching her parents head back to their car for their drive back to New York. And just like that, they were gone.

She was alone, excited and terrified, and wondering the question many of Guilford’s newest students may have asked themselves this week: Do I belong here?

At Tuesday’s Opening Academic Convocation in Dana Auditorium, Wendy, now a College trustee, told first-year students that she eventually found her answer — and that they would, too.

“Circles began forming around me and I began finding my place within them,” Wendy said. “I learned I belong here. And today I want you to know, so do you.”

Wendy, president of a business and consulting company in Raleigh, told students that creating a sense of community is not something they should simply expect from their College. It is something they have a responsibility to build for one another.

For people to feel that they belong, she said, they need to feel connected, respected and protected. That means knowing someone’s name, having relationships and feeling part of something meaningful. It means knowing that your voice matters and that you can ask questions, make mistakes, change your mind and grow.

“Community isn’t just proximity,” Wendy said. “It’s connection. It’s responsibility. It’s understanding.”

That responsibility, she told students, begins with paying attention.

She cited examples: Look up from your  phone. Notice who enters the room. Listen without already composing a response. Ask another question. Become curious about someone whose experiences differ from your own. And, perhaps most importantly for students navigating their first days on campus, notice the person sitting alone and make room.

“Attention is a gift because attention says, I see you,” she said. “You matter enough for me to be here with you.”

Wendy drew on her own first weeks at Guilford to illustrate how relationships can expand a person’s understanding of the world. During her first week, a new friend, Amy, told her she was a lesbian. The friendship, and later relationships with members of Guilford’s LGBTQ+ community, challenged Wendy to question assumptions she did not know she held and taught her what it meant to stand beside people as an ally.

“That education didn’t just happen in a classroom,” she said. “It happened in relationship.”

President Jean Bordewich also challenged the first-year class to think beyond the traditional boundaries of a college education. She told them that Guilford is working to reimagine a liberal arts education for the world this generation will enter.

That includes combining analog and digital learning, emphasizing reflection alongside activity and relationships and community alongside individual achievement. The College is also placing greater emphasis on ethical leadership and strengthening students’ ability to apply a moral compass to the challenges they will encounter.

At the center of that education, Jean said, is something increasingly important in a world shaped by artificial intelligence and other technologies: being human.

“A Guilford education is about human beings, learning from other human beings, how to be human,” she said, quoting late Guilford Geology professor Cyril Harvey. 

The College’s education, she said, is intended to nurture students as whole people — mind, heart, body and spirit — and prepare them for whatever comes next, from graduate school and entrepreneurship to business, public service, nonprofit work and government.

Jean also acknowledged the uncertainty facing the generation entering college today. Democratic institutions are under pressure, the world is simultaneously more connected and more fragmented, and new possibilities are emerging alongside old systems.

“You will help shape the emerging world,” she said.

For Wendy, that future begins with the people sitting beside them.

She noted that students will spend more time with one another than with almost anyone else on campus, giving them unusual power to shape one another’s Guilford experience. She urged them to “keep your circles open, invite someone into the conversation, learn a new name and ask the second question.”

“Every one of you has the power to change someone’s experience on this campus,” Wendy said.

Guilford may welcome students into its community, she said, but from this point forward, they are responsible for creating it.

“A community where people know deep in their bones, ‘I belong here,’ isn’t created by a mission statement,” Wendy said. “It’s created by people.”

Convocation is an annual assembly occurring the day before fall semester classes begin.