June 16, 2025
Gavin Hewitt was one of the keynote speakers during the Meeting Street Scholarship Fund Celebration Summit. The full text of his remarks to incoming Scholarship recipients is below.
Good morning, everyone! My name is Gavin, I recently graduated summa cum laude from the University of South Carolina with a degree in computer science and a minor in mathematics. I’m incredibly honored to have the opportunity to share a little bit of my college experience with all of you today.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t start by thanking Mr. and Mrs. Navarro for creating this Scholarship. I remember, in 2021, looking at my first semester bill and trying to figure out how I was going to pay for it. This Scholarship gave me the chance to go to college without a huge amount of debt, and college has changed my life. Thank you for giving me this life-changing opportunity.
Over the last four years, I’ve seen my fair share of tests and challenges, and I’m very grateful to have experienced them. The most difficult points of my life are the ones that have helped me grow the most. They’ve taught me invaluable lessons, and I’d like to share two of them with the Scholarship recipients in the room.
The first of those is challenge yourself and never give up.
My first semester of college wasn’t what I expected. I started as a biomedical engineering major but my classes were at odd times, sometimes going as late as 9:45 at night. As many of you will find out, clubs often meet later in the day, so I wasn’t able to make any meetings.
In my dorm, I was the only non-ROTC student on the ROTC floor – and how I ended up there is another story for another day – but it made it difficult for me to meet new people. I felt isolated, and even though I was doing well in my classes, I wasn’t happy.
When I went home for winter break, I knew that going back to school in the spring wasn’t the correct decision for me. I decided to officially change my major to computer science, something I enjoyed doing in high school. After a lot of conversations with my family and college advisor, I decided to stay home and take a reduced course load online to maintain my enrollment and scholarships. This gave me the time and space to work on myself and figure out what I wanted. I didn’t want to give up on my college education.
When I returned in the fall for my sophomore year, things were better, but I still didn’t feel at home. I wanted to give USC one last chance, so I started looking at organizations to join in the spring and one caught my eye: Theta Tau, a co-ed professional engineering fraternity. It’s a group of engineering and computing students that have fun, volunteer, and focus on becoming the best young professionals they can be. To put it simply, we’re nerds who can talk to people.
The idea of putting myself out there and rushing this fraternity was terrifying but I did it anyway. And it was one of the best decisions I have ever made.
Through this fraternity, I found what had been missing at Carolina – a sense of community. They took the same classes I took, and they wanted what I wanted, which was to fully experience college while not losing focus on the future and preparing for their professional careers. I put my heart and soul into the experience, and I fell in love with my fraternity and, in turn, my campus.
My confidence grew exponentially, and I was referred to be an ambassador of my college and encouraged to participate in research.
As I went home for the summer, I was genuinely sad to be leaving Columbia, which was something that I never thought I would be able to say.
And that brings me to my second lesson: Go beyond the classroom.
Back home, I found a job as a server at a local pub, Dog and Duck. One slow day at lunch, I was waiting on a customer who, as it turned out, was an IT Manager at Nucor Steel, one of the most successful steel manufacturing companies in the country. He asked me what I was doing in school and after talking for a bit, he gave me his email. I was shocked. I never thought a long summer of serving chicken wings to strangers would lead me to the start of my professional career, but it did.
I updated my resume with my new campus activities and emailed it to the Nucor Steel manager.
Months later, he called me to tell me that my strong resume and how I presented myself as a server really impressed him, and he offered me an internship for the following summer.
This internship was my first true experience within the tech industry, and I learned so much from my time there. I wasn’t just getting coffee and writing meeting notes, I was developing real web applications that helped other employees and drive the company’s profitability.
I got to learn from my coworkers, all of whom were 30 or more years older than me. I even led a team of nine other interns across the country in training a machine learning model that forecasted expenses for Nucor’s business technology sector. The broad industry exposure that I gained during my internship gave me the space to learn what I liked and didn’t like, but most importantly, it taught me how to function and excel in a corporate environment.
Joining and holding positions in organizations, working on-campus jobs, participating in research, and generally being involved on campus are vital. College students need it and employers want to see it. The experiences that came from joining my fraternity and the skills I honed as a member are what helped me land my internship and thrive there, too. Going beyond the classroom can develop you professionally and bring you life-long friends who will make you wonder how you lived a day without them.
Earlier, I mentioned my graduation from Carolina. Now, I want to talk about what’s ahead of me and how the lessons I’ve learned have prepared me for what’s next.
In just a month and a half, I’ll be moving to the DC area to work as a software engineer at Capital One. Computer science is a challenging field these days, and I applied for more than 60 jobs before I landed this one. College isn’t easy, and neither is the real world. Challenges are going to continue to arise, and you have to persevere.
My new job is one that I dreamt of having for years, and it’s one that I heard about through my best friend, whom I met in Theta Tau. If there is one thing that I’ve learned in the last four years, it’s that the people who you meet and surround yourself with can impact you and your life in more ways than you can possibly know.
None of this would’ve happened if I only went to class and stayed in my dorm room. Making the effort to get involved on campus, no matter what it is, can completely change the trajectory of your life and help you find everything that you’re looking for.
To the newest recipients, congratulations again on earning this Scholarship. It’s been an honor to share a small part of my college journey with you. I wish all of you the best of luck, and I know each and every one of you will accomplish wonderful things!
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