Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

Selecting Michelle Obama as UC Merced's key speaker
By Denise Tejada
Freelance Contributor
May 15, 2009

Graduation is always significant, but having first lady Michelle Obama as your key speaker, is even better.

UC Merced students wanted to take control over who spoke at their graduation. During a brainstorming session for who would be the best speaker, the name Obama kept coming up. At first, Barack Obama was the goal, but they figured it would be too much of a stretch, so they decided Michelle Obama would be the best—as if that wasn’t a stretch on its own.

Efferman Ezell, a 22-year-old senior and director of student activities for student government at UC Merced was responsible, along with other students, for getting the first lady to address his graduating class this Saturday. He says the idea started as a joke and developed into something much more serious.

“Originally me and Yaasha (President of UC Merced student body) were in the office of student government watching movie trailers,” Ezell said.“Somehow we got on the topic of commencement and how we didn’t have a speaker. We felt that for us being a new University of California and us being the first graduating class, we thought that people would see the benefit of coming to the university and speaking to us.”

That benefit kept them busy throughout their school year. They knew they were facing a tough road ahead, but not once did they get intimidated. “My personal duty was to get a letter out to Michelle, to our congressman, our senator, our lieutenant governor. That was my main focus,” Ezell said.

Writing letters was just one aspect of their campaign. The students set up a Facebook page called The "Dear Michelle" Campaign, a video “We Believe,” and sent out mroe than 1,000valentine cards to Michelle Obama. Ezell said the cards really got the White House and Michelle Obama’s attention. “We got over 1,000 students to personally write something on the card asking and telling Michelle Obama why it was important for her to come here.” Ezell said. “We also went as far as to hand write the return address as well as the mailing address of almost 900 plus cards.”

The next step was mailing the cards out, but the process behind mailing was the catch. “Originally, we were going to pack them up and send them all together,” Ezell said. Thinking back to some of the planning, Ezell remembers saying, “'We need to send these at least 50 to 100 at a time because we need to make sure they understand, it’s going to continue to come in.’”

Before, during, and after Valentine's Day, the White House was packed with UC Merced cards. This left the White House no choice but to take a closer look at the students' request.

After a couple of weeks of anticipation, the students received the answer they’d been waiting for. However, they weren’t allowed to share their happiness with the rest of the school.

“The White House wanted to go public first, so we weren’t allowed to say anything for two weeks,” Ezell said. “I was on spring break when the White House went public, and that’s when we found out officially that she was coming.”

Now, after all the hard work, graduation is only a day a way and Ezell can’t wait until he sees all of his classmates' work come together.

“One of the things we do expect from her—or would want to hear from her— is patience and being consistent when there are no results being shown at the moment,” Ezell said. “When you don’t see any immediate results from your efforts or from the efforts of the economy, businesses, stimulus package, or things in general, you have to be patient because things take time. I think our experience kind of correlates to that.”

Ezell said that on Saturday he won't be surprised if he starts crying. His four years at UC Merced have been the best of his life.

[ Back to Student Voices ]