ASOC Presidential Convocation Speech
August 24, 2026
Good morning! My name is Trisha Bhima, President of the Associated Students of Occidental College, and I am so excited to welcome you all to the start of a new academic year.
Today is the beginning of something that, right now, probably feels both very exciting and a little overwhelming. You are officially college students. And as I told you last week, over the next four years, this place is going to become much more than a campus you attend. It is going to become the community you build, the person you become, and the story you'll tell for the rest of your life.
You heard President Stritikus say that students here help steer this college. I want you to take that seriously. With about two thousand of us on this campus, you are not a small voice in a large crowd — you are one of the loudest voices in the room. If you have an idea for a club, a research question, a business, a tradition — there is a real and short path here between having that idea and making it happen. Professors will take your calls. Deans will read your emails. This is a place that says yes to students who show up with something they want to build.
That is the rarest kind of gift a school this size can give you: proximity to power over your own experience. Most people go their whole lives without a real shot at shaping the institutions around them. You get four years of it, starting today. So do not spend them waiting for permission. The classes that will matter most to you might not be the ones on the syllabus you were handed — they might be the independent study you propose, the research project you pitch to a professor whose work you admire, the internship you talk your way into before you feel qualified for it. Say yes to the thing that scares you a little. Raise your hand for the opportunity you don't feel ready for. Ready is a feeling you build by doing the thing, not a permission slip you wait to receive.
Say yes to the thing that scares you a little. Raise your hand for the opportunity you don't feel ready for. Ready is a feeling you build by doing the thing, not a permission slip you wait to receive.
And here is the other gift, the one that is easy to miss in the excitement of the first week. The people sitting around you right now are going to become your closest friends, your teammates, your roommates, and sometimes the people who see the world nothing like you do. You will keep running into them, in class, on the quad, for four straight years. You cannot simply walk away from someone here the way you might have back home. You have to keep talking. You have to keep showing up to the same rooms as people whose politics, faith, hometowns, and life experiences might look nothing like yours.
Lean into that instead of avoiding it. Sit with the people whose experience of this campus is nothing like your own. Ask the questions you're a little afraid to ask. Let someone change your mind about something. Let yourself be surprised by how much you have in common with someone you assumed you wouldn't. Every single person you meet here has lived a life you haven't, and has something to teach you if you are willing to listen for it. That kind of exposure — real, sustained, unavoidable exposure to people unlike you — is one of the rarest and most valuable things college can give a person, and most people don't get nearly enough of it after graduation. You have it in abundance right now. Use it while it's here.
Class of 2030, you have arrived at a place that is genuinely built for you to do remarkable things — academically, creatively, personally, and in ways you probably haven't imagined yet. Four years from now, when you're the ones sitting where the seniors sit, I want you to look back and know that you used every bit of what this place offered you. So reach for all of it, starting this morning. Welcome to Occidental.