I’ll always remember you

Good Afternoon, fellow graduates, faculty, and staff. I stand before you today as a survivor of highschool. I want to take a moment to congratulate my class of seniors for making it to this point. We are finally done with high school, and we are ready to embark onto the next chapter of our lives. It can be a scary and an fun at some times, but I know that we are all ready for whatever comes our way. 

Now, my experience in public education can be compared to a soap opera. There’s always some kind of drama going on, sometimes so much it’s hard to keep up. Like all of you, starting out young, naive, inexperienced, and for me also sheltered by coming from a tiny private school with about 300 kids total. I attended 4 schools in 5 years, which really states how indecisive I am. But hey, somehow I made it here, so I must be doing something right. Despite so many hurdles, through the years I emerged into the person I have become today.  There have been profound moments during which I have learned and grown as a person. Going from private school into a public middle school, my entrance and exit were definitely dramatic and some might say I even put up a fight…while learning right from wrong the hard way. Sophomore and Junior year were filled with achievements and disappointments.  Like many of you I got my license, my first job and my first car.  I learned that making food is definitely not in my future, inexperienced driving can lead to accidents, and driving fast can get you pulled over.  Or when we thought it was a good idea to sneak out of our homes and go to that party and end up getting caught red-handed by our parents. 

Looking at our pictures, It’s like a comparison of evolution, we went from awkward, insecure freshman to confident, accomplished seniors. It’s almost like we’ve grown four years or something. But it’s not just us seniors who have grown. Looking at the teachers, they too have grown. Their patience with shenanigans is comparable to that of a saint.  A saint with a strict classroom management style. These past four years have been quite an experience. We started our highschool journey as awkward teenagers who couldn’t even talk to someone who we thought was cute without sweating bullets or stuttering. Yet now, we are leaving as confident leaders who are ready to take on the world. I mean, we’ve even managed to master the art of procrastination. It’s like we have a black belt in it. So much so, that we wait until the last minute to do everything, including this speech. 

And yes, we may have been the class that is always loud and obnoxious at lunch, or assemblies, but we were also the class that never backed down from a challenge. Even though we’ve lost lots of events through spirit week…

So, to my fellow classmates, I say this, congratulations. We have officially come to the end of our road, the end of our highschool career, or the end of going to rustys before and after school, anticipating who we are going to see there, or who we are going to see working at fielders. We have all grown and learned so much . But it’s not the end of our journey yet. We now have to put our black belt in procrastination to the test, we will miss our teachers, our classmates, and our ridiculously hard math homework. In conclusion, I want to thank my parents for their endless support, my friends (fake or not) for their constant laughter, and my teachers for their guidance. I also would like to thank the lunch ladies for keeping the milk good enough to drink, sometimes. As we move forward, let’s never forget the horrible feeling you get when you hear keys jingling and heels clicking while you’re in the bathroom. And Having to roll over and wake up to your zoom call classes, and unexpected glitches in technology. Because when we look back on the years, we’ll just laugh and tell stories that start with  “remember when”. All we have left is high school is our memories to reminisce on. Now let’s go out there and conquer the world, thank you and congratulations to the class of 2023!

“Graduation Cap Cupcake” by clevercupcakes is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.