Good evening families, teachers, faculty, and friends. Thank you for coming tonight. To the Bishop Brady High School class of 2010—welcome to June 11th.
We did it. This is our graduation. Before I turn my attention back to my fellow seniors, I would like to thank everyone—present and absent—who has led us to this moment. Parents, you especially know that this ceremony isn’t just for us. This graduation represents everything it took for us to get here, and it’s impossible to deny the simple fact that we did not do it alone. To teachers, family, friends, and others, as well as parents: even if don’t entirely realize it now, all of us will understand one day how much we have been given. Thank you. Now, seniors, it’s our turn. I don’t know if you realized this… but high school graduation is kind of a big deal. Please, enjoy it, because by the end of the night it’s going to be over.
We went through a lot of uncertainty coming into school as seniors. We narrowed down a college list, ran around to get forms signed, stayed up late working on essays, and finally, finally, applied to college—only to sit and work and wait and take midterms and just generally deal with not knowing where we’re headed. That has been solved though, and if you look right outside this gym you can see a wall full of the choices we finally made. Very soon, we are going somewhere.
Even sooner though, you’re going to get up and go for a little walk down this aisle. You will shake a hand and be handed a diploma and then walk back to your seat—and somehow this will signify the fact that you haven’t wasted the past four years of your life. We have done something important here. We have gotten through four years of college preparatory high school. Fewer people than you would think are able to say that. I can’t even begin to talk about what we have experienced since 2006. We went through roughly the same sets of classes and the same set of rules, but we are still such different people because of it. To anyone who sees us, it is obvious that we are not a homogenous group, and when this night is over we will leave to head in very different directions. High school has changed our lives. Right now, though, right here, we are in the same room, once again experiencing the same thing. For just a little longer, we are a class. And guess what? We have earned this. We stuck it out. We went to class and did what we needed to pass, and after that we went above the requirements and earned success. We were pushed by our parents, our teachers, to do better because they realize that this was not an easy thing to do.
Soon, you will get up as individuals and, one at a time, take that little walk down the aisle. There are two ways we can do this. We can walk up and shake a hand and accept a diploma that is being given to us; or, we can walk up there and accept a diploma that has been earned. Each one of us has worked for that right. Once we get out there in the world—wow. We could really go places. We could really do something.
When we take that walk up the aisle, let’s understand ourselves, understand why we are accepting responsibility for al the lessons we were supposed to learn these past four years. Understand why we applied to colleges, why we didn’t just quit after sophomore year, why, at some point, we stopped living for our parents and started living for ourselves. No one can tell us why we are going to accept our diplomas. Each of our reasons will be our own. When we officially graduate from Bishop Brady High School, we need to do just one more thing: know why we’re doing it.
Welcome to June 11, 2010. We did it. This is our graduation.
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