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My name is Cheryl Tawil, I am an attorney from Lebanon the Middle East and I am in the international and comparative law LLM track.

Even though I walked at the May 2017 ceremony I want to attend the celebration to thank the people who helped make this happen, Professor Frank Emmert first for giving us the opportunity to be here, Miki, Boyet, and the people I met throughout my journey, especially Miss Jennifer Thuma, who is a great motivation and positivity when you can’t find positivity and the list goes on and on.

Nevertheless, I learned a lot from living in a foreign country and I learned that achieving and succeeding do come easy, all you got to have is consistency, confidence, a mindset focused on success, love for yourself, and others, if you’re not a giver, the world will not reward you back. What goes around comes back around.

Now since my speech is called you got to have a strategy, I would like to take couple of minutes to talk about that, strategy.

Being here in the states, I got so excited for all the opportunities I can seize in this beautiful country, so why not take advantage of that? I had an amazing plan, strategy, succeeding in the law field, in the sports fields, all fields I was ambitious to succeed in.

Hence, since I had little time left in this country I asked myself why not join a sports competition and I did and I trained day and night and I won, I won first place for my weight division, I cried, just like I did when I walked the 2017 graduation ceremony, proud of myself for achieving my goal, knowing that if I set my mind to do anything I can achieve it.

I woke up the following day feeling strange and ended up in the emergency room. Stress had taken over me, worrying about succeeding and a million thought running through my head, but after a lot of tests with the results coming back normal I knew what I had done to myself. Again, pressured myself with more stress.

At this point I realized my plan was failing I cannot do everything at once like I thought I could so I decided to change my plan and so I did, but still nothing changed.

And then it hit me, sometimes you don’t need to have a strategy you need to have faith, a heart, hope, and to believe in God’s plan for you. You need to have people who believe in you and your success. Because sometimes strategies fail and failure is only our motivation to try again but harder, work for it and let it go, if it is meant for you, it will be!

It’s crazy how we try to control what we have no control over!  As soon as I gave up trying to control everything, new doors and opportunities began to open up and I now see a bright future in all aspects of life. There is truly great possibility in all that we do and if we just put forth out best intentions, life works out for the best.

Thank you and congratulations class 2017