Graduation Speech

Introduction: Welcome students, faculty, teachers, and principles to graduation day, a blank page in the start of a book about our careers. However, there are those 15,660 hours wasted and never coming back from 12 exhausting years of schooling. That is just too much damn time lost that cannot be retained back. This is also equal to about 2,100 days extracted from underneath our feet. Piles of homework, loads of classes, trays of whatever the cafeteria has found, and rooms of disgraceful teachers engrossed these past dozen years. I bet we’ve tried foolproof ways to succeed in school: cramming our minds of too much information, memorizing just to forget the next day, and mastering the process of procrastination. But within those useless 15,000 hours or so comes the career which has become of those days in a desk. I’m not here to mimic the rulers of middle school saying “High school is what really matters” and the high school hierarchy saying “Make College what really counts.”
Body: From Kindergarten to our senior year, we have been trapped in a building of mixed corridors and connected rooms. Exhausted and exasperated, we’ve woken to the early hours of the morning and taken ourselves to one of these three schools, whether we wanted to or not. Those elementary years where we joined the band and chorus because “it was cool” or “because our friends did it.” The middle school years where we faced the drama of school groups and the grueling process of growing up. And, to the now, where we brace for the rest of our lives and prepare for the future to come. The information we have attained, or lack thereof, can only be used to better ourselves and it is our responsibility to capitalize upon opportunities that arise from this valuable information. Now, as we progress into the real world, whether it be the job workforce, military, or college, we embrace the difficult transition from our day-after-day routine of high school to a more adjustable and sustainable forthcoming.
Conclusion: In a nutshell, the last dozen agonizing years seemed too long, exaggerated, or useless, to be anything of importance. But, the legacy we bring as we advance with our cap and gowns, diplomas and certificates, awards and honors, we transgress from students to scholars into the real society of life. We as high school students leave the walls of routine life and enter the world where we are on our own with less guidance and no helping hands or overseeing eyes. However, the only aspect of high school life following us into the real world is our goal. The goal that has carried us to the college of choice and the career of which we pursue. And so, I leave with a word to the wise from Nelson Mandela, the iconic revolutionary of South Africa: “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”