Graduation

The following is a speech I wrote for my high school's commencement ceremony. If you have speeches that you'd like to guest publish, get in touch with me! I figure that no one speech can capture the experience of an entire graduating class, so I'd love your help in consolidating some, as a goodbye to the blog, to the pandemic, and to our class.

Thirteen thousand, six hundred nasal swabs. One thousand, three hundred and seventy-nine absences. One thousand, three hundred and sixty complimentary masks. One hundred and sixty-three confirmed cases. One hundred and twenty days of Zoom classes. Twelve weeks on campus in our junior year. Three doses of the vaccine.

These are the numbers that even we, at a STEM-focused school, never wanted to have to calculate. We’ve come out of a high school experience in which most of our learning, socialization, and self-actualization happened behind a screen. But standing as we are now, maskless on a beautiful spring morning, it’s easy to forget what our attending this school during the pandemic has given us. We’re adjusting to the sweetness of seeing each other in-person. We’ve gone from Zoom fatigue and isolation and phone calls to soccer games and soft-serve. We’re starting to see each other as people, rather than faces on screens. To me, the imprint made by our time apart holds the key to the most important lesson of our class— to treat others with gentleness, and to honor difference in ourselves and in others. To change, and look for those who will change you.

And how do you calculate the incalculably good? I have hallmates who live four hours away from me in opposite directions and bring wildly different perspectives to my life. One of my closest friendships developed online over a year before we ever met in person. I came here looking for a depth of connection I didn’t feel at my home high school, and I met people who combine kindness with passion to write free-flowing stories or create new chemicals to cure diseases or code algorithms for justice. There is no metric for the connection and inspiration that we’ve found, despite all odds.

My favorite professor has urged us to deny what tries to define us. I think that applies to the labels we put on ourselves here, too— Triangle kid. Woman in STEM. Engineering hater. Even calling ourselves the best and brightest can create pressure and distance between us. But here, we’ve redefined not just our school’s traditions in the wake of a pandemic, but ourselves, and we can only hope to keep changing.

What will we be when we move out for the final time and lose our labels? At our new schools in the fall, will we hunch over Facebook typing furiously? Or will we keep teaching each other? My friends here have taught me so much. They’ve taught me that solar panels can be transparent, that dead poets can speak, and that even in the loneliest times, companionship is just two doors down. We make mistakes and lose people, and we’ve all had a catty online exchange or two, but we’re all moving forward. You, my classmates, are so smart and creative and amazing, and this school has helped us become more ourselves. Because we, the student body, are what define this institution.

A school can mandate that we learn essay writing and proper physics problem solving procedure. But in between the assignments, there were hours-long library conversations, roommate conflicts, unexpected bonds. It’s been up to us to learn how to treat each other, to seek differences in our friendships and to make our choices with kindness and compassion. That’s been harder for our class than others. We lost the chance interactions of most of junior year and made our longest friendships over Facebook Messenger, of all places. We’ll forget the details of our time here— the first Mexican lasagna, the second Physics quiz, the seventy-sixth time walking through the breezeway— but it's less hard to forget that our education here made us smarter, and as long as we keep it true, our classmates made us kinder.

Despite the number of hurdles we faced, we 319 individuals did it. We are now graduating as one beautiful class of 2022.