Schools

PCHS Valedictorian Tells Class to Embrace New Beginnings

The Port Chester High School class of 2013 graduated on Friday, June 21 at the high school. Valedictorian Anika Krause told her class to focus on new beginnings as they let go of the past. Read her full speech here:

Good morning and thank you friends, family, teachers, principal, school board members, superintendent, fellow graduates, crying babies, tired underclassmen prom dates, and the always effervescent Goldie Soloman. Thank you all especially because you willingly chose to sit on uncomfortable bleachers listening to long speeches for these brutal hours.

It is strange to be standing here before you today. Strange not to be in the bleachers sweltering as I watched older friends graduate. Stranger still not to be developing mild sunstroke while playing Pomp and Circumstance with the band, internally groaning every time we reached a repeat. And even stranger not to be in class, resting my head on my hand and tapping my toe as I wait for the bell, wondering when it will finally be my turn.

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And now it is my turn, or, as I should really say, our turn, and it is strange. These past few weeks have been heavily bizarre, simultaneously flying at the speed of light and crawling at the speed of the students in the freshman hallway. There is a strange sensation of the ephemeral as our days at PCHS melt into memories, and our lives shift and change.

 But today is the day that all these changes become concrete. Today is our commencement, a word that, I admit with some shame and a splash of good humor, I long thought to mean “end” (yes, even valedictorians make mistakes!) 

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“Commencement” certainly has the grim finality of an ending word, with none of the lyrical lilt of “beginning.” Commencement is a hard word, thick with consonants that trip your tongue into silence. And it is rarely heard beyond the context of graduations, which, to a youthful mind, seem like the ultimate end. 

Graduations are characterized by tears, hugs, and goodbyes, with none of the excitement and nervousness that permeated our first day at PCHS. The squashing embraces communicate a desire to hold on, if not just for a little while longer, to the safe, the known, the home that our school has become.

So you can imagine my surprise and silent embarrassment when one day, in Spanish class, my teacher scrawled the close cognate “comenzar” across the board and announced that it meant “to begin.” It seemed so wrong, to see the word in dry erase red, mocking me with its straight, clear letters. How could a day that marks a completion be labeled a beginning?

We have begun many things over the course of our high school careers. We began friendships. We began to build our identities. We began projects only to put them off until 2 AM on their due date. And today we begin something new entirely.

College beckons with a tantalizing sensation of newness. The new comes with adventure, and also an enormous anxiety. But nothing is ever entirely new. Every city in the world has a McDonalds and a Starbucks, after all. Our time at Port Chester High School has given us the knowledge we will need to tackle a new beginning. We learned tidbits like how to derive the natural log of 4x squared and the timeline of the French Revolution, and important facts like the names of the cast members of the Jersey Shore, and when the best time to go to Chipotle is (by the way, NEVER go during the lunch rush! 12:30, 1ish, it’s bad). These beginnings have built great skills in each of us, skills which are absolutely essential, since, as Napoleon Dynamite reminds us all, “Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.”

But, in all seriousness, we’ve done much with these skills! Collectively, we have passed thousands of tests, won countless awards, fundraised tens of thousands of dollars, and worked, laughed, and pushed through four years of high school. A select few of us completed one of the most daunting tasks of all time: creating the world’s most delicious and simultaneously disgusting sandwich, the Seniors 13 (a sandwich that only those with the greatest willpower and emptiest stomachs can complete). Needless to say, we have all tasted greatness and stomached much success.

These astounding accomplishments have now come to a close, but our achievements are far from over. In the words of the prolific songwriter and acclaimed poet Nicki Minaj, “Greatness is what we on the brink of.” 

Graduates, if think that these have been best years of our lives, you need to rethink. That is what today is the beginning of, a span of great years that stretch as wide as the solar system and as long as some of our parent’s hair in the 1970s. We are beginning life in the “real world” where lunch does not cost $1.30 and your life isn’t chopped into 37 minute periods. 

We each spread across the country in search of new opportunities, new cities, new people, and new careers. We are a beginning a life with the cords severed from a town that has nurtured us many of us for 18 years of our lives. Most importantly, we are beginning to think in new ways, greater ways that will help us shape the unmolded years that lie ahead.

There is much that we leave behind. We abandon a downtown that smells of fresh bread every morning, and roast chicken every evening. We leave friendships and homes that were ours since the days we wore pampers. There will be no more bus rides to soccer games with faces painted blue and white, no late night band competitions, no hallway high fives, no morning announcements. Even those that stay locally will feel the shift, the holes left by those that have spread in search of the great perhaps. But in these new beginnings, people will find ways to fill the holes until they return home, heads heavier with new knowledge and shoulders pushed back with new confidence. Yes, there is much that we’re giving up, and even more that we are gaining. And of course, when times get tough, one can always look to the words of a great valedictorian, Daria Morgendorfer, who argues that, “there is no aspect, no facet, no moment of life that can't be improved with pizza.”

The days that lie ahead may call for a number of extra-large pies, but I am confident that they will be packed with happiness and wonder. For though we are unsure of exactly what lies ahead, in terms of what we can accomplish, everyone’s favorite Mean Girl Cady Heron phrases it perfectly when she states that “the limit does not exist.”

Now, in these closing moments, is the time that I should pester you with unending clichés about soaring on the wings of an eagle and force loads of teary eyed advice, but in all honesty, few remember what their valedictorian said at graduation. So, if I can leave you with one thought, one sappy piece of advice, it is this: Live each day as if it is a commencement, a beginning, because you never know what ends you might reach.

 


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