CAMPUSPEAK

Making good decisions and keeping friends alive is our first priority.

Erica is nominated for “Speaker of the Year” and “Female Performer of the Year” for the annual Readers Choice Awards at Campus Activities Magazine. Student Life professionals and students, click here to vote.

• Keynotes

• Keep Friendship Alive

Keep Friendship Alive

In 2000, a popular student named Joey Upshaw died of a lethal dose of the drug GHB and alcohol. To many, Joey had seemed like the perfect student: good grades, popular, fraternity leader. By everyone’s estimation, he was a good kid. But like many “good kids” in his social group, Joey spent his weekends mixing recreational drugs and large quantities of alcohol. He and his friends figured they worked hard, so they had the prerogative to play hard, too.

Joey’s sister, Erica, attended the same school, the same parties, and took part in many of the same activities. Two years younger than Joey, Erica was also a member of a Greek chapter and partied alongside her brother. Looking back, she realizes that the high-risk drinking and drug abuse in which she and Joey engaged was incredibly dangerous. In the months and years that followed Joey’s death, she has had to come to terms with the reckless attitudes she and her friends had about drugs and alcohol. If it could take the life of her brother—the All-American guy next door—it could happen to many other students who casually abuse substances on the weekends.

Now in her mid-20’s, Erica does a fantastic job of speaking to students from a point of view close to theirs. Using videos, first-hand stories and talking about her and her brother’s risky behavior, she helps students realize that a party-centric attitude in college can be deadly. She reminds them that 1,700 college students die from alcohol related deaths each year in the U.S., drawing on the stories of other young men and women whose harmful choices led to the most frightening outcomes. Erica empowers her audience to take action, talk to each other and question abuse of alcohol and drugs in their campus community.

This keynote isn’t simply a story of personal loss. It’s a challenge to today’s students to openly question behavior in their social scene that many know to be abusive and potentially fatal. She doesn’t preach, but she lends a young, relevant voice to the plea for reason and self-control. She urges students to question the normalcy of wide-spread abuse of alcohol and drugs at every campus.

“Everyone deserves to have a good time in college,” Erica says. “But making good decisions and keeping friends alive needs to be our first priority.”