Marple Newtown 2013 Keynote Graduation Speech

Keynote speakers Sabrina Pan and Madeline Gemma Conca spoke to their Class of 2013 at Marple Newtown High School's Commencement Ceremony on Thursday.

Pan will attend Cornell University in the fall and she plans to major in Biology. Conca will attend Swarthmore College and plans to major in neuroscience.

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Below are the speeches from Marple Newtown's top graduates. 

Sabrina Pan's Speech

Friends, family, teachers, and administrators, welcome. I would first like to start by saying thank you to the entire staff and of course to our parents for their unconditional support.

Today is a sad day, but not because we’ll no longer see our best friends or attend high school events. For that, we still have many summer nights to come as well as unforgettable memories from proms and soccer playoff games.

Instead, today is a sad day because we will no longer walk the halls of Marple Newtown with the people that, perhaps, weren’t our closest friends, but nonetheless contributed to our lives. We will be letting go of classmates that may not have spent Friday nights with us but never failed to make us smile in the hallways. We will be missing out on teachers that held exhaustingly long help classes but never failed to show us a true exuberance for knowledge.

Despite these losses, today is also a promising day. When we part our separate ways by the end of August, we will be entering the world as independent individuals, a daunting reality some of us hoped we would never have to face.

We often do not vocalize our hopes and aspirations because we fear our plans will not bear fruition—that we will ultimately fail. However, we are more prepared than we think. We each have the opportunity to do something amazing, and I am confident that our ambitious courses ahead, no matter how divergent, will bring meaning to us in our own ways.

Some of us will travel the world. Some of us will engage in innovative research. Some may even have their own families within the next 10 years. Wherever our paths take us, I hope that we will one day see each other again, that after 20 years, we will still greet each other with the same enthusiasm we did in high school and the same sentiment we do today.

Although each of us has a very different journey ahead, I hope that we will always think of Marple Newtown as a part of home and the classmates and teachers we have come to love as part of a second family.

Congratulations to the Class of 2013. Thank you.

Madeline Conca's Speech

High school. Those two words awaken a number of different emotions in each of us.

For some, there is sadness that this time is ending. Four years is a long time to be in one place. For others, it is joy that the doors are finally opening and we are being set free. But no matter how you are feeling today, nobody sitting here can deny that in the classrooms of Marple Newtown, we were given knowledge.

We were given the tools to construct a proper thesis statement, to speak a foreign language, to pass classes we never thought we could. We learned how to behave in a socially acceptable manner, to make friends, to make enemies, and maybe even to fall in love. We were shown how to survive in the real world, without being thrown into it alone. However, through these four years, there is one thing that we were never taught. We were never taught how to say goodbye. Yet that is what we are being asked to do now.

There are no rules for how to proceed, no guidebook which we can follow. Nobody can write on the SmartBoard how to hug your best friend for the last time. These days are unparalleled. But we aren’t going through them alone. Look to your left, look to your right. Whether or not you are friends with the person sitting beside you, you are family. And like family, there is a bond between each and every one of us that will never break, even if we don’t see each other after today.

We have faced more as a class than any before us. Through the construction workers interrupting our testing and the fire alarm going off every hour, we have supported each other. Forget the fights you’ve endured and the tears you’ve shed. That’s all in the past.

The future, a shining and brilliant future, awaits. So throw your caps in the air, because we made it.  Look back on this time in twenty years. See how far you have come. Beam at how bright your world is. Measure how much you’ve grown since you have left.

But, most of all, I hope you smile, because we’ve done what we thought impossible. So hold your heads high and walk out of here with pride, because as we let the doors close behind us for one last time, we are stepping into our future.

It’s our time now.

See More on Patch

• Marple Newtown Class of 2013 Graduation
  
• Farewell to the Marple Newtown Class of 2013
• Lighting Sparks Fire at One Grad's House
• Marple Newtown 2013 Graduates
• Marple Newtown 2013 Keynote Graduation Speeches

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