Hailee-Jean Lindgren

After the first mandatory graduation meeting, I decided right away that I wasn't going to nominate myself for Valedictorian and the only way I would run for it would be if someone I didn't know or wasn't friends with decided to nominate me. In my opinion, the Valedictorian is supposed to be someone who is able to represent the graduating class as a whole. As a result, I thought if I was meant to be Valedictorian, someone would try to nominate me without me asking them to. At the end of the day of the deadline, two girls I didn't know tracked me down and asked if I would sign the nomination form accepting the nomination.

 

Once I was officially nominated and made it into the top three, I had to prepare my potential speech. In creating the speech, I approached it with the questions: If I never saw or spoke to any of these people again, what would I want to leave them with? What would I want my last words to be to my fellow graduates, teachers, support staff, and of course the parents in the room? The hardest part was trying to figure out a way to address the death of a fellow graduate from cancer without brushing the topic off too quickly while also not dwelling on it too much. My proudest moment from this experience was all the people who I didn't know making a point to find me in the crowd of graduates to tell me the impact my speech had on them.