"You are among hundreds of thousands of people starting their college experience right about the same time. The vast majority of them, and the vast majority of you, are at a place you’ve never lived before, with professors and students you’ve never met before, on a campus and in a culture that’s largely unfamiliar. Most of them, and most of you, would probably spend a lot of time and effort trying to fit in. Please. Don’t. Let me tell you why.

“Better yet, let me use Father John’s words to tell you why. About five years ago at commencement, Father John said this: ‘Several autumns ago, you came to Notre Dame from home. Now, Notre Dame has become home. And it always will be, for home is not where you live. Home is where you belong. And you will always belong here, at Notre Dame.’ If I could paraphrase those words, it would be: don’t try to fit in; you already belong. Professor Brene Brown, of the University of Houston, writes about the difference between belonging and fitting in. She says that fitting in means changing who you are so you can be accepted. Belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.

“When we invited you to Notre Dame, we did so because we wanted you to be who you are. Whatever it is that’s distinctive about you: where you come from, what your family does, what you want to major in, what books you read, what movies you watch, what instrument you play, what you fear, how you pray--don’t try to hide it, don’t try to change it to fit in. You don’t have to worry about fitting in here. You already belong; you belong here, at Notre Dame.

“In fact, the Notre Dame culture, the Notre Dame family, depend on an environment in which people believe they belong. As Professor Augustine Fuentes will tell you in his anthropology course, which I highly recommend to you, when people belong, when they naturally can be who they are, when they fit in, they are kind and good by nature. That’s an anthropological view. In his homily today, Fr. John said something similar from a theological perspective, that when people are at their best with the grace of God, with the help of the Holy Spirit, they are good and kind. We believe that a defining feature of Notre Dame is that members of the Notre Dame family are kind and good not only to each other but to all with whom they come in contact. It takes the right climate, it takes the right soil, but that’s what we try to cultivate here. At Notre Dame, we try to develop the whole person: spirit, body, intellect. We don’t measure your success by the size of the paycheck you get when you graduate. We measure it by how good you are as a person. And that’s why we want you to be yourself, to feel like you belong here, for the rest of your life.”