Amidst formals, mom's weekends and standard weekend activities, approximately 50 students gathered in Meharry Hall Saturday night to await the arrival of Hill Harper.
Harper is an actor perhaps best known for his role as Doctor Sheldon Hawkes in CSI: NY. He is also a published author and founder of the Manifest Your Destiny Foundation, which helps underserved teenagers find academic success.
After missing his connecting flight from Chicago to Indianapolis due to a delay in his earlier flight from Los Angeles to Chicago, Harper was about half an hour late. During Harper's speech, a part of the Urban Lecture series, he marketed the idea of being an architect for one's own life.
According to Harper, each individual's goals should be similar to those of an architect: to make an impact and to leave a legacy. However, he noted that you cannot have one without the other.
"Unless you marry impact with legacy, it doesn't really matter," Harper said.
While, the first step is to create a blueprint, Harper said most people do not write their blueprints down, which would not be acceptable for actual architects. The reason for this, as Harper sees it, is that either most of people have never been taught to do so or they are afraid. Harper uses an acronym to define fear as "false evidence appearing real."
"We're afraid of how great we can be," Harper said.
The next step is to provide structural support for the dreams contained within the blueprint. Examples of foundations that each person can build are education, faith, relationships, family, aspirations and money.
"We've been taught that money is actually the result and something that you chase rather than what it really is: a foundational tool," Harper said. "Neither one guarantees success, neither one guarantees happiness, but they both buy you something very valuable, and that is options."
Harper then related this advice to his personal experience during his time at Harvard Law School, where Harper met, unbeknownst to him, future President Barack Obama playing basketball. Obama, according to Harper, went back to school in order to build a bigger foundation for himself educationally, because his previous foundation did not support his dreams.
The third step is to erect a frame flexible enough to withstand one's environment. Harper pointed to the fact that environment influences choices. Rather than referring back to their blueprints, most people make choices based on the immediate situation, which Harper believes is where several people go astray.
The final necessity in Harper's model is a door.
"People have to be able to get in," Harper said.
These doors provide new people, ideas and perspectives an opportunity inside, which changes the blueprint. Harper advised those in the audience to value diversity and to interact with others outside of our daily lives whenever the opportunity presents itself, which most people do not do
Harper said you also have to be able to let people out. He recommended that each person creates their own personal board of directors to make sure that the blueprints go in the right direction and to help the follow through.
"If people are telling you what they want you to do," Harper said, "they should not be on your board of directors."
Harper applies this model of being an architect to his own life. He emphasized the importance of making the model circular instead of linear because plans change and foundations can become larger.
He believes that the architect structure can be applied to the microcosm of individual classes, the macrocosm of personal dreams and the even bigger macrocosm of one's community.
"If you take energy, you think about it critically, and then you only do things that are in your heart, then you will lead a life of impact and energy," Harper said. "It's impossible not to."
In order to combat the fear and the negative energy that tends to stop people, Harper believes personal affirmation is necessary. Harper provided his own personal affirmation, which he had the audience repeat after him.
"I will not allow fear to stop me from making the choices that I know I should make. Instead, I will act with courage from my heart, and, in doing so, give others permission to do the same," Harper said in his affirmation.
Harper voiced his belief that there are other goals to be attained after successfully building the blueprint and that education can be a way to expand the foundation to include the new dreams.
"A lot of people have been taught that old school way of thinking, meaning you the reason to get an education is to do whatever you're educated for," Harper said. "The reason you get an education is to build a foundation to support a life that you can be proud of."
Junior Joshua Jones, president of the Men of Excellence at DePauw, saw an overarching message, which he thinks all students at DePauw can benefit from.
"Don't be afraid to step out of your comfort zone to achieve the successes that you want," Jones said.
For freshman Maria Nguyen, the speech gave her some encouragement and determination, but she thinks that there was a bigger, perhaps more important reason for having a talk with the messages that Harper expressed.
"Here, on DePauw's campus, the racial and economic lines are so clear," Nguyen said.
To end with, Harper challenged his audience to make their dreams even bigger.
"If someone doesn't laugh in your face when you tell them your goals," Harper said, "your goals are too small."