One thing I learned at my time at Baruch is that opportunity and success is a friend to no one in particular. You must work for success and be around other with goals bound for success and those who have achieved a level of success. Teachers won’t hand you the “A”, you have to study, participate and perform. Recruiters won’t hand you an internship. You have to do some personal research to answer any questions professionals may throw at you in addition to showing up.

People say that people are lucky when they get opportunities to rise above their current status and succeed, but really they mean things have come together for them and they didn’t neither earn nor deserve their success. That is a misconception. Lucky people work hard to be lucky.

Luck = Skill + Opportunity

You cannot be lucky without any type of natural or hard earned skills. You cannot be lucky when you block any opportunities that come your way, or when you aren’t around when opportunities present themselves. Luck is something you work for. People who are lucky work for their luck and look for any opportunity to be lucky. When people study for the material in from their classes, they build skills around that material to be used in the class environment. When a pop quiz takes place, they are lucky enough to have studied to pass the surprise exam. When people use the career center to build their interview skills, develop their resume and cover letters, and develop their soft skills, they are developing professional skills to be used in time they meet an actual professional. So on and so forth.

In the end, it does not matter who you are. There are no rewards for any people in particular just because they are “special”, in the end only the one with the skills and opportunities succeed in Baruch.

My thoughts in the hallway are the product of the machinations of my mind,

Mind you it will never be a simple multiplication problem, I muse in Calculus

Because the halls of Baruch, the blessed vestibules of the secretary of Jeremiah

Has become the maze which I must go higher and higher for this education

From floor eight to eleven, where I become learnt in the vernacular of the business law

But the law of gravity is applied when I come back down to floor two

To take part in two free slices of pizza

Subs to Student life, who provided for the brother, or what my LC family likes to call “the hub”

Center for the life of the student, CollegeBoard definitely couldn’t have made a handbook for this.

I could not have prepared for an institution which mandates

A date I partake in a break from class every week to take action with clubs for a hour or three?

But then again there’s no disadvantage.

Some very astute vantage points proven to me that if I squad up, these clubs basically have to amount to a justice league of highly skilled individuals.

My thoughts led me to Sigma Alpha Delta, just call us the Auto-bots of Bernard.

We will roll out on your butt if you don’t pay attention, so don’t sleep on us and our 3.5’s

And keep your attention to another posse of mine

We are NABA, the national association of not just, but mostly, black people

I have to say that Baruch is definitely filled with beautiful men, but to me the women take priority

Around noon on a good day I can fall in and out of love around two to three times,

But the girl with the gorgeous eyes knows she has my heart, I see her at least once in my 24/7.

Remember this is a good day. That means it’s a Wednesday.

And I only have to put up with thinking about the BS coming out my mouth for 3-8 more hours

Excuse my abbreviated French, lord knows my heart.

Noon on Wednesday means it’s time for Sociology.

And I love that class man.

I love that class man.

You ever ask a question so serious

You know its funny,

And get half of the lecture hall to laugh with you?

I got to stay awake somehow.

But real talk, there are but so many ways you can tell someone “you are an individual,

But still a social statistic in the massive game we call ‘Life’.”

But no matter how I roll the dice, my friends and I will definitely be residuals.

I, the hottest Negro on the floor before the schmoney,

He, the Bengali with the hobby to play Tetris in the lobby,

She, the Chinese woman who dislike halal but loves soul food,

And the rest of the crazy cats from day 1. We are the data you can’t put a box around.

The colorful people of the Baruch discourse community.

Being here at Baruch, I can definitely say I have gained a newer perspective.

If I stand in the center and look up and down this path, I have to say

There is so much more to life.

But this is not the next rap song or the next poem with a powerful motivation

These are just my thoughts in the hallway.