Graduation Speech: Greetings, Class Of 2023

Greetings, Class of 2023. Today, we get to celebrate the culmination of our thirteen years of hard work in school with graduation, and I have been asked to deliver this year’s commencement speech. I would like to thank all of the people that have brought us here: family members, teachers, principals, and people who would go out of their way to encourage us to keep trying hard even in the midst of failure. Without you, we would not be standing on this stage today. I would like to start by defining the word “commencement.” Oxford Dictionary says that commencement is “the beginning of something.” We as a class today will commence our lives past childhood, a beginning of something that will take us places in our lives, a beginning of something that is somehow more important to the world than our childhood. In the rest of the years of our lives, some of us will travel the world, start businesses, or save lives through the medical field. Others will teach students who will take our places, predict the weather, or be paid housekeepers for other people. Some of us first will be off to large colleges such as Pittsburgh, Penn State, Harvard, Duke, or Dartmouth; others will be off to smaller ones such as Nyack, Davidson, …show more content…
It is not something that is for us to just enjoy. Rather, life is essentially a blank canvas that is waiting for us to paint. Our lives are something that we must shape ourselves, not something that we have for us. At any given point in our lives, we will have choices that we must make. They may be small ones, such as what to eat for dinner that night, or big ones such as deciding what job to pursue. But since there is no such thing as perfection, we cannot always know what lies ahead. Because of this, we may be known, or we may already have been known, as “super-smart,” “very shy,” or “very athletic.” We may even be known as multiple things in our