Question

有没有关于大学生生活的英语演讲稿以及对于此稿可能提出的相关问题？

Answer 1

College Life

Mainly I try to remind students that the road ahead is a long one and that it will have more unexpected turns than they think. There will be plenty of time to change jobs, change careers, change whole attitudes and approaches. They don't want to hear such liberating news. They want a map--right now--that they can follow unswervingly to career security, financial security, social security and, presumably, a prepaid grave.

What I wish for all students is some release from the clammy grip of the future. I wish them a chance to savor each segment of their education as an experience in itself not as a grim preparation for the next step. I wish them the right to experiment, to trip and fall, to learn that defeat is as instructive as victory and is not the end of the world. My wish, of course, is naive. One of the few rights that America does not proclaim is the right to fail. Achievement is the national god, venerated in our media--the million-dollar athlete, the wealthy executive--and glorified in our praise of possessions. In the presence of such a potent state religion, the young are growing up old.

I see your kinds of pressure working on college students today: economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure and self-induced pressure. It is easy to look around for villains-to blame the colleges for changing too much money, the professors for assigning too much work, the parents for pushing their children too far, the students for driving themselves too hard, but there are no villains; only victims.

"In the late 1960s,"one dean told me" the typical question that I got from students was 'why is there so much suffering in the world?' or 'how can I make a contribution?' Today it's 'do you think it would look better for getting into law school if I did a double major in history and political science, or just majored in one of them?' Many other deans confirmed this pattern. One said "there are trying to find an edge-the intangible something that will look better on paper if two students are about equal."

Note the emphasis on looking better. The transcript had become a sacred document, the passport to security. How one appears on paper is more important than how one appears in person. A is for Admirable and B is from Borderline, even though, in Yale's official system of grading, A means "Excellent" and B means "very good" Today, looking very good is no longer good enough, especially for students who hope to go on to law school or medical school. They know that entrance into the better schools will be an entrance into the better law firms and medical practices where they will make a lot of money. They also know that the odds are harsh. Yale Law School, for instance, matriculates 170 students from an applicant pool of 3,700; Harvard enrolls550 from a pool of 7,000.

It's all very well for those of us who write letters of recommendation for our students to stress the qualities of humanity that will make them good lawyers or doctors, and it's nice to think that admission officers are really reading our letters and looking for the extra dimension of commitment or concern. Still, it would be hard for a student not to visualize these officers shuffling so many transcripts studded with as that they regard a B as positively shameful.

The pressure is almost as heavy on students who just want to graduate and get a job. Long gone are the days of the "gentleman's C," when students journeyed through college with a certain relaxation, sampling a wide variety of course-music, art, philosophy, classics, anthropology, poetry, religion--that would send them out as liberally educated men and women. If I were an employer I would rather employ graduates who have this range and curiosity than those who narrowly pursued safe subjects and high grades. I know countless students whose inquiring minds exhilarate me. I like to hear the play of their ideas. I do not know if they are getting As or Cs, and I don't care. I also like them as people. The country needs them, and they will find satisfying jobs. I tell them to relax. They can't.

Nor can I blame them. They live in a brutal economy. Tuition, room, and board at most private colleges now comes to at lease $7,000,not counting books and fees. This might seem to suggest that the colleges are getting rich, but they are equally battered by inflation. Tuition covers only 60 percent of what it costs to educate a student, and ordinarily the remainder comes from what college receives in endowments, grants, and gifts. Now the remainder keeps being swallowed by the cruel costs--higher every year--of just opening the doors. Heating oil is up. Insurance is up. Postage is up. Health-permium costs is up. Everything is up. Deficits are up. We are witnessing in America the creation of a botherhood of paupers--colleges, parents, and students, joined by the common bond of debt.

Today it is not unusual for a student, even if the works part time at college and full time during the summer, to accrue $5,000 in loans after four years--loans that he must start to repay within one year after graduation. Exhorted at commencement to go forth into the world, he is already behind as he goes forth. How could he not feel under pressure throughout college to prepare for this day of reckoning? I have used "he" incidentally, only for brevity. Women at Yale are under no less pressure to justify their expensive education to themselves, their parents, and society. In fact, they are probably under more pressure. For although they leave college superbly equipped to bring fresh leadership to traditionally male jobs, society hasn't yet caught up with fact.

Along with economic pressure goes parental pressure. Inevitable, the two are deeply intertwined. I see many students taking pre-medical course with joyless tenacity. They go off to their labs as if they were going to the dentist. It saddens me because I know them in other corners of their life as cheerful people.

"Do you want to medical school?" I ask them.

"I guess so." They say, without conviction, or "not really."
"Then why are you going?"
"Well, my parents want me to be a doctor. They are paying all this money and..."

Poor students, Poor parents. They are caught in one of the oldest webs of love and duty and guilt. The parents mean will; they are trying to steer their sons and daughters toward a secure future. But the sons and daughter want to major in history or classics or philosophy--subjects with no "practical" value. Where's the payoff on the humanities? It's not easy to persuade such loving parents that the humanities do indeed pay off. The intellectual faculties developed by studying subjects like history and classics--and ability to synthesize and relate, to weigh cause and effect, to see events in perspective--are just the faculties that make creative leaders in business or almost any general field. Still, many fathers would rather put their money on courses that point toward a specific profession--courses that are pre-law, pre-medical, pre-business, or, as I sometimes heard it put, "pr-rich", but the pressure on students is severe. They are truly torn. One part of them feels obligated to fulfill their parents' expectations; after all, their parents are older and presumably wiser, another part tells them that the expectations that are right for their parents are not right for them...

I know a student who wants to be an artist. She is very obviously an artist and will be a good one-she was already has several modest local exhibits. Meanwhile she is growing as a well-rounded person and taking humanistic subjects that will enrich the inner resources out of which her art will grow. But her father is strongly opposed, he think that an artist is a "dumb" thing to be. The student vacillates and tried to please everybody. She keeps up with her art somewhat furtively and takes some of the "dumb" courses her father wants her to take--at lease they are dumb course for her. She is free spirit on a campus of tense students--no small achievement in itself--and she deserves to follow her muse.

Peer pressure and self-induced pressure are also intertwined, and they begin almost at the beginning of freshman year. "I had a freshman student i will call Linda." one dean told me, "who come in and said she was under terrible pressure because her roommate, Barbara, was much brighter and studied all the time. I couldn't tell her that Barbara had come in two hours earlier to say the same about Linda." The story is almost funny--except that it's not, it's symptomatic of all the pressures put together. When every student thinks every other student is working harder and doing better, the only solution is to study harder still. I see students going off to the library every night after dinner and coming back when it closes at midnight. I wish they would sometimes forget about their peers and go to a movie. I hear the clacking of typewrites in the hours before dawn. I see the tension in their eyes when exams are approaching and papers are due: "Will I get everything done?" Probably they won't. They will get sick. They will get blocked. They will sleep. They will oversleep. They will bug out.

Part of the problem is that they do more than they are expected to do. A professor will assign five-page papers. Several students will start writing ten-page papers to impress him. Then more students will write ten-page papers, and a few will raise the ante to fifteen. Pity the poor students who is still just doing the assignment. "once you have twenty or thirty percent of the student population deliberately overexerting," one dean points out, "it's bad for everybody, when a teacher gets more and more effort from his class, the student who is doing normal work can be perceived as not doing well. The tactic worked, psychologically." Why can't the professor just cut back and not accept longer papers? he can, and he probably will. But by then the term will be half over and the damage done. Grade fever is highly contagious and not easily reversed. Besides, the professor's main concern is with his course. He knows his students only in relation to the course and doesn't know that they are also overexerting n their other courses, nor is it really his business. He didn't sign up for dealing with the student as a whole person and with all the emotional baggage the student brought along from home. That's what deans, masters, chaplains, and psychiatrists are for.

To some extent this is nothing new: a certain number of professors have always been self-contained islands of scholarship and shyness, more comfortable with books than with people, but the new pauperism has widened the gap still further, for professors who actually like to spend time with students don't have as much time to spend. They are also overexerting. If they are young, they are busy trying to publish in order not to perish, hanging by their finger nails onto a shrinking profession. If they are old and tenured, they are buried under the duties of administering departments--as departmental chairmen or members of committees--that have been thinned out by budgetary axe.

Ultimately it will be the students' own business to break the circles in which they are trapped. They are too young to be prisoners of their parents' dreams and their classmates' fears. That must be joked into believing in themselves as unique men and women who have the power to shape their own future

Answer 2

重点写大学的一个部分，寝室是大学生活的最重要的部分，可能太长了，你可以根据你的实际情况删减一写内容，

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
It’s my great pleasure to stand here to present my speech— My Dormitory Life
Before entering university, I never have this experience in staying with roommates day and night longer than one week. Look at my roommates, Windy, a born housekeeper, is good at housework and setting schedules for us. I do believe that she wil be an ideal wife in the future. As we all know, Snaky is an expert in computer. However, she is more efficient and capable than we realize. When it comes to fixing up instruments, she must be the first one you can turn to. Do you know who darned my uniform during military training? Skyli. undoubtedly,she is an attentive and passionate girl especially while doing knitting. Comparing with them, I amjust a learner like a layman standing togather with these gumptious specialists. What I can do is to contribute my share to my family --- we are used to calling ourdormitory as our family.

As all creatures, we possess diverse personalities and various ways of lives. Furthermore, we have cetain eccentricities or bad habits. Take me for example, I like to scratch others --- on their backs, on their arms and even on their thighs. Maybe some of you have experienced this before. Also, I am skilled in massage --- ordinary one or special one. Moreover, I am developing new methods of entertaining. Be careful! Have you ever noticed what Snaky will do when she is absent-minded? She will sing a tune --- La~. But her skilledest specialty except for computer is catching a mosquito,which is disturbing her using only one of her hands. When it comes to craziness, no one can surpass Windy because her QQ name is Crazy. In our dormitory, she often burst into laughter without any reasons.She has plenty of male friends in this university and we just call them "New Faces" because every time her male friend we meet is totally a new one. More, she uses "Do you want to die?" with great frequency in conversation with her male friends. Next, it's Skyli' s turn. Needless to say, skyli is the queen of telephone in my dormitory. We are accustomed to answer the telephone using "Do you telephone for Skyli?" In addition, she is so careless that many things fall off her bed. While we were having an english corner in our beds, here came a sound ---bang! Then Skyli cried out " oh, my cell phone!" Several minutes later, another " bang" came. This time her radio fell off her bed following her mobile phone.

Dormitory life is an indispensable part of college life. But sometimes the harmony in the dormitory will be disturbed in one way or another. For example, some members listen to music late into the night and make those light sleepers restless. Worse still, the smell of some students' socks is powerful enough to drive other members out of the room.
As is known to all, a harmonious dormitory life is important to college students and benefits all the members. On the one hand, we can have a good rest and put our heart into study. On the other hand, we will have a good mood and enjoy being together. In contrast, an unharmonious life will be depressing and counterproductive