EPTMy speech wasn't as good so I didn't get valedictorian and I wasn't even considered for salutatorian. Idiots. Valedictorian and Salutatorian means NOTHING!!!
Critic my Valedictorian Speech Please! - Page 3
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mnm
United States4493 Posts
My speech wasn't as good so I didn't get valedictorian and I wasn't even considered for salutatorian. Idiots. Valedictorian and Salutatorian means NOTHING!!! | ||
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TruthBringer
United States578 Posts
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thedeadhaji
39489 Posts
It's a nice piece of work. I want to begin by saying that I never, until about six weeks ago when they told me, pictured myself standing here and speaking before this audience. I consider it one of the greatest privileges of my life. And thank you to the class of 2006, and to the faculty and administration for this honor. Frankly, though, this honor frightens me. Events like this tend to bring out the worst in my personality -- and as my friends would tell you, I get a little humorless and grave. When I was in high school I got to give a valedictory address, and I started out by telling everyone that, since we were all about 18 years old, and since everyone lives about 77 years in the United States, we could really all consider ourselves about 23 percent dead, give or take a few. I was really into the idea at the time, but I don't think the audience appreciated hearing it as much as I appreciated telling them. Today we are gathered for a similar ceremony, and, as time would have it, four or five years have ticked away since the end of high school. Now everyone's a little older but also a little wiser. But I don't want to repeat my role as some sort of fake insurance actuary -- I've already learned in the past four years that there are better ways to get people's attention than telling them they're going to die -- but I do want to do right by the occasion, and today's occasion, or at least a good portion of it, feels as weighty to me as anything I've ever known. I think for all of us, graduating from Princeton marks a moment of transformation that will continue to reveal its significance to us as we live out the rest of our lives, all the way until the end. Even without the interpretive aid of a few made-up statistics, it should be plain for anyone to see that this graduation ceremony is a mixture of celebration and holy dread, with all its sunny prospects streaked by moving shadows of uncertainty. Today is the commencement of our new lives in the wider world, and, at least to me, that brings on its own little heart attack of excitement and fear. Just look at us. I think I can say without bragging that today we stand together as one of the most capable, intelligent groups of people anywhere in the world. And it blows my mind to be a part of it. We've spent nearly half a decade together in the best University in the country, learning how to think for ourselves, how to criticize, how to solve problems for the greater good. Now we're ready to apply that education to the rest of our lives. And to that end, Princeton has been an incredible incubator: It has indulged our minds, and our minds have grown. Perhaps more importantly, it has kept us nestled away from the intellectually toxic culture of our time. This culture respects power more than ability, it respects answers more than inquiry and it respects naked opinion more than nuance. We should be grateful that Princeton has given us the safety to immerse ourselves in a rich suspension of people and ideas so that we could develop our intellect and our character uninterrupted. I think we should regard this moment of graduation, therefore, as a crowning moment, not just in the sense that we have achieved much in our time at Princeton, but in consideration of the more arcane sense of the word "crowning" that refers to the first moments of birth: Today we are delivered from this amniotic environment of campus life, vulnerable and untested, into a world that mostly reasons backwards. Let's remember that the receptiveness that we have to our lives right now is a beautiful and potentially catastrophic thing, so that when our surroundings try to change us, we know that we will always have the power to push back and change our surroundings. Now, I have a friend back home in Spokane who once told me that he once read somewhere that someone once said that the people in history who have truly changed the world all made the decision to become world-changing people by the time they were 25, or 23, or some uncomfortably low number like that. Now factually speaking, there's no way this is true, but as a concept, for us, a group of people at a decisive age, I find it terribly compelling. We are leaving behind not only the careful structure of campus life, but also the broader phase of our lives marked by a careful adherence to structure. For the most part, we students have only known time in two divisions -- school and summer -- and we've always had a neat latticework of expectations and rewards to fit over the surfaces of our day-to-day existence. This school structure has allowed us to grow and flourish, but it has always been external to who we are as people, and to what we might want out of life. Graduating from college traps us in an exhilarating and terrifying moment: On the one hand, we finally have the freedom to choose for ourselves the rhythms and the priorities that will guide us through life. On the other hand, the burden of commitment is now upon us, and it will always be easier to adopt someone else's idea of what life should be than to formulate our own. Of course, there's no arbitrary cut-off age that renders the rest of our decisions impotent -- time is usually more forgiving than I think we would allow it to be. But we also shouldn't wait for courage to appear out of nowhere. Let's recognize our loves and passions and values, and have those determine what structure our lives take on, and not the other way around. I think this is the choice that will make all the difference in the world. Now I'm not saying that I really have any answers here -- after all, I was a music major and I spent most of my time wearing headphones, hoping nobody would bother me with this kind of thing. But, while I was writing my thesis, I kept learning a lesson over and over again, as I'm sure many of you did, that I think relates to this moment of mixed emotion. You see, I came into the music department as someone mostly interested in writing songs, and for my thesis I got to write three songs and arrange them and perform them with a band I put together. The process went kind of like this. First Paul Muldoon, who advised me on the lyrics, would tell me, "Find good material and stick with the language of the material. Quit trying to write it into a song." Then Dan Trueman, who advised me on the music, would tell me, "Find the tunes and instruments and arrangements that will clarify the material that you have in the words." Finally, David Kellett, my voice teacher, would tell me, "Your job as a singer is to find the material that's already there in the words and the notes, and to make it come alive as music." By the end, what I had to say in my songs had a lot more to do with what lay dormant in the material I chose to write about at the beginning of the process than with how willfully I tried to manipulate this material later. For the members of the class of 2006, I can think of no more relevant wisdom than to find whatever it is that constitutes the source material of your life, and to keep extracting that material throughout the years. We are about to walk out of those gates and into adulthood in a world that keeps shifting underneath our feet, so we must be able to distinguish for ourselves between the surface and substance of who we are. Personally, I'm glad I can count Princeton among the experiences that have changed the substance of my life undeniably for the better, and I hope you can, too. And, please, before too many years tick by again, let's all remember that we are young. I know, this is Princeton, and there are plenty of 57-year-old men trapped in 22-year-old bodies out there. But let's all have the presence of mind to do stupid, bold things with our lives, and to never take ourselves so seriously that we can't toss everything we've learned out the window if the time calls for it. Congratulations, Princeton University class of 2006, on your crowning accomplishment, thank you for your friendship, and good luck with the next 69.444 percent of your lives http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S14/96/15A46/index.xml?section=announcements | ||
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Tsagacity
United States2124 Posts
 Gotta maintain composure for a speech like that :p | ||
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SaNteria
Canada487 Posts
Your speech even tastes like nerdy asian kid. =( | ||
MightyAtom
Korea (South)1897 Posts
don't take this speech lightly, sit down with it, spend time with it, your presented speech is a good first draft, but its likely just your first thoughts. think about yourself first and what has inspired you, what has been the most important thing in your life, for your future; then think about your audience; then just pretend you're in front of the students and just speak, and when you're able to really speak with an authentic and genuine voice, then you'll make a great speech. i'd say yes, keep it short, but 3 mins is fine, yours would be like 45 seconds right now. if you speak from the heart, then the 3 mins will go by so quickly. if you need a guideline, just start with a quote; what it means to you as a graduate and for your and your classmate's future. then when you end, give a big smile and say, good luck. | ||
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Casper...
Liberia4948 Posts
b) your speech is terrible c) Finally, thank you God for giving me this opportunity to wave my GIGANTIC E-PENIS in front of thousands. | ||
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Casper...
Liberia4948 Posts
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Casper...
Liberia4948 Posts
this is something that you'll need to figure out mostly on your own, and certainly not with the help of internet smartasses such as myself when you get up there, it's just you and the shit you wrote and whatever it is that you have with the people out there the actual shit you write ain't worth much. it's almost certainly gonna be more of that sappy shit intended to inspire and all that other crap so that these peons can go out there and gloriously fail in the effort and settle into mediocrity, so, don't put too much pressure on yourself. gooooood luck | ||
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SaNteria
Canada487 Posts
I'd like to start off this speech by blaming my classmates. That's right. I blame you. Perhaps if some of you females would have fallen victim to my obvious charm or maybe some of the guys would have asked me to go get high in the parking lot more often, I wouldn't have spent so much time in my basement studying and wouldn't be standing here right now - pissing my pants. But given that things are what they are, and I can't become as viciously handsome as SaNteria overnight, I'll do my best to make the next few minutes worth your while. This is typically the portion of the valedictorian speech where some pompous, self-righteous, book-nerd, gripped by self-satisfaction and a sudden feeling of justification for his wasted years in highschool stands on high and preeches down to the graduating class like the peasants that they are. Topics covered usually encompass but are not limited to: the future, growing up, some sort of vague 'transition' I don't quite understand. Apparently it's important. Through such a speech, we gain a sense of success and importance. Nothing makes a class of a few hundred average-joes feel better than having some chump who hasn't kissed a girl tell them that they're 'the brightest and best graduating class, holding the keys to the future or some thing.' Well, tough shit. Most of you will be lucky to be holding the keys to the Walmart electronics department in 5 years. We will all move on, that much is true, but in a society that has taught us that any child can be a lawyer or a doctor, we're also in for a big surprise. My point is that we should stop looking to the future and whatever mysteries it holds and start looking to the present. Highschool is not the big jumping-off point we all like to pretend it is. If it was that important, you'd think more of us would have taken it seriously enough to be standing on this stage. What highschool does represent is a time to have fun and make friendships that will last for the rest of our lives. So fuck the future. Look to the present. Look to tonight. Look to our last chance to get fucked up and make asses of ourselves while we're still young enough to get away with it. (cracks beer, drinks it, rips off shirt). Cheers! edit: As a side note, I gave a speech at my highschool grad many moons ago. It was fucking rad. It wasn't significant, it wasn't weighty - what it was was relentlessly humorous. People remembered it, people liked it, it got a good reaction. I spent my time making fun of myself and everyone else in our grad class. It was a good time. My point is that there is a lot to be said for not taking oneself too seriously, ESPECIALLY in cases like this when you're expected to be boring and uptight. Wooooo | ||
BroOd
Austin10833 Posts
What you need to do is come to terms with what this speech actually is. It's an opportunity for you to unite your class at the end of four years together. You can't get up to that podium and start doling out life lessons, or a sobering, heavy-handed sermon. Everyone in that audience sees you as an 18(?) year old kid. They're not going to take your advice on fear seriously unless you've actually overcome real world fear. I'm talking about the fear of not knowing if you have enough money for food, or if a family member will survive a crippling disease or accident. The fear of heights may be real to you, but to most of the people in that audience, it's just something made fun of in movies and TV shows. No one's going to relate to that, or that fact that you overcame it by riding a rollercoaster. You should stay away from all this somber fare. Your classmates don't want to remember their SATs. They don't want to hear you thanking God or your Korean heritage. You're making a valedictorian speech, not accepting an Oscar. My advice to you is to lighten the mood. You can be insightful, and impart good advice, but keep it upbeat. Open with a joke. It can be about a well-known teacher, some stupid assembly the whole class sat through, or even yourself, as long as the majority of the student audience will "get it". Pick a strong, uniting theme, and stick to it. Talk about how the last four years brought many of you together, or some event at the school the class will always remember. Remind everyone about the things that made your high school years great (preferrably without any drinking, sex, or rampant vandalism). I'm sure many people here, myself included, would be willing to help you with a final draft of this, but you really need to rework what you have altogether. | ||
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BrutalMenace
United States1237 Posts
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DarK]N[exuS
China1441 Posts
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Casper...
Liberia4948 Posts
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RowdierBob
Australia13295 Posts
It sucked. Far too informal, and it's all superficial with no depth, interest, insight or orginality. Quit life asap. | ||
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jacen
Austria3644 Posts
someone put it pretty nicely: "if you have nothing to say: stfu" ... and yeah, your speech doesn't really say something and is in fact ... wait ... i'm not gonna say that. | ||
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l2ealization
Korea (South)44 Posts
On June 12 2006 19:28 IntoTheWow wrote: Me: dronebabo saw what I did there. Ladies and gentlemen, now is not the time for false modesty; I am really good at the internet. I rock at the internet, I could kick your ass at the internet. To give you an example, no more than say, half a dozen of you know what a swarm of ninjas is . Or how unexpected a Jinjo can be. You don't know what Mass Carriers entail, or that they are an instant win. I'm not gonna go into an anecdote about how this is a story all about how my life got flipped turned upside down and I'd like to take a minute just to sit right there and tell you all how I became the prince of a town called Bel-Air. I digress. This speech is serious business and I know that some of you are expressing doubts as to how the hell i got selected for doing this speech. Few of you know this, but when it comes down to serious business, I can be very down to earth. I can be very down to fire. I can be very down to wind. I can be very down to water. I can be very down to heart. I can be very down to GOOOO PLANET. I can be very down to BY YOUR POWERS COMBINED, I am Captain Planet. The power is yours. Have fun. *standing ovation* *clapping*" ROFLMFAO By the way your speech blowed harder than a dirty whore in las vegas. (Interesting fact: prostitution is actually illegal in the county las vegas is in) | ||
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ROOTheognis
United States4482 Posts
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Deleted User 3420
24492 Posts
On June 13 2006 02:40 l2ealization wrote: ROFLMFAO By the way your speech blowed harder than a dirty whore in las vegas. (Interesting fact: prostitution is actually illegal in the county las vegas is in) omfg lmao | ||
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nitram
Canada5412 Posts
- if i were you, id leave korea out of it so u dont alienate every1 else!. - if i had to sit through that fear of heights story, id punch u in the face after. j/k.... - Too korny - dont talk about yourself but every1 in general; you arent the only 1 graduating! - you dont talk about anything important, noone will remember it. | ||
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