Edited excerpts of Woodring's full remarks are below:

The search for insight about student life at Harvard took me into the wonderful world of film. You all might be familiar with Legally Blonde, but let me give you a little tour of the lesser known offerings.

• In the movie With Honors, released in 1994, a hard-working Harvard student, played by Brendan Fraser, accidentally drops the only copy of his thesis in a sewer. It is picked up by a homeless man, Joe Pesci, who then proceeds to dissect the thesis and tell Brendan and his friends the true meaning of life. Pretty epic.

• Or how about Harvard Man, from 2001, where a student trying to raise money for a tornado relief fund, ends up in big trouble with the mafia. Action-packed chase scenes ensue, across Harvard Yard, as the student and his girlfriend, Sarah Michelle Gellar, find a way to thwart the organized crime bosses.

• Finally there’s How High, also from 2001, wherein Method Man from Wu Tang grows a magical herbal substance that makes him inexplicably say smart enough things to get into Harvard. He ends up falling in love with the girl who played Lisa in Saved by the Bell. Once his grades start slipping, though, it takes nothing less than the ghost of Benjamin Franklin to visit the university and convince the ad hoc committee of professors and administrators that Method Man should indeed be allowed to stay and prosper at Harvard. A happy ending.

So these are Hollywood’s stories for Harvard — at times exciting, other times gratifying, sometimes scary, sometimes hilarious. I hate to tell you, but I have yet to come across any dissertations dropped in the sewer, or mobsters on campus, or colonial-era phantasms. But I have experienced all of those emotions — excitement, fear, gratification, and laughter — in my own way. It was my own story, and Hollywood would never be able to capture that just right. Like the time I watched my professor do a hands-on dumpling cooking demonstration during a conference on Asian literature and history, discoursing the entire time without missing a stride. Or the moment my advisor told me that I had reached a crucial point in my studies, moving from a reader to a contributor, from a student to a colleague. Or the crisp sunny morning I met my future wife when my department asked me out of the blue to give a Widener Library tour to an incoming GSAS student.

You too will write your own story at Harvard, and it will be amazing.

I came to Harvard’s Graduate Student Council at the end of my first year here. Now, many might think, Why bother with student council when you are in graduate school? Well precisely because the council is about advocacy — it looks to push for things on your behalf: whether academic, financial, personal, or social. It’s a way to help you control your own destiny and make sure you are writing and living your own story, and not someone else’s.

The GSC awards travel grants for research and conferences. We fund over 45 fun and diverse graduate student groups. We sponsor mini-courses in January where you can learn from your peers about an entirely different subject than your own. And if that weren’t enough, we give you a free pizza dinner every month, at our open meetings.

I have the GSC to thank for some of the best moments from my ongoing Harvard story: like when I look out at the faces of GSAS students as they gather to honor their advisors with a Student Council Mentoring Award —they are beaming like proud parents, and they have great tales about how their professors went the extra mile for them, pushing them when they needed pushing, helping them relax when they needed affirmation. Or at the Ivy Summit, when graduate students from our peer institutions set foot in Dudley House, and are wide-eyed with shock, telling me how envious they are of our very own thriving student center for graduate students—something most schools aren’t able to muster.

It’s now your turn to write your Harvard narrative: something no school, no department, and no professor can do for you. It’s up to you. Welcome to Harvard!