GRADUATION SPEECH

Good morning respected teachers, administrators, parents and the amazing Class of 2021. Before I start,
I would like to thank all the teachers for coming through for us this year and therefore I ask all the
graduates to stand up and join me in giving all the teachers a round of applause.

Congratulations! We’ve done it, all the hard work has finally paid off and we’re all ready to take the next
big step in life beyond high school. I was lucky enough to be chosen to speak today before all of you and
reflect on our collective journey in this school, and if I were to think of one word to describe this journey,
it would be: Unprecedented.

Unprecedented is defined as never done or known before, and I’m sure all of you have heard this word
countless times over the last year, being normalised into a word that correlates directly with COVID-19.
But here, my intention is to connect this word with all of you; you are unprecedented, you are a high
school class that has done something never known before. You see, all of us have had a roller coaster
ride; from week-long quarantines to distance learning, masked classes to countless pending Google
Classroom assignments, brunch check-ins to Monster-fuelled all-nighters and numerous other things.

All of our crazy roller coaster rides have been unprecedented, never seen before in the history of
education, let alone at EF Academy, because let’s be honest, every batch that graduates from EF
Academy is a special one. Maybe not the underclassmen we so lovingly dislike.

Living in such unprecedented times made us cherish the small yet important aspects in life. Leaving the
campus for field trips felt like freedom to us; and somehow breathing the polluted Manhattan air felt
unusually fresh. Snow days felt like gifts from heaven since the term snow day apparently doesn’t exist in
Dr. K’s dictionary. We love you Dr. K.

Countless Uber Eats orders were the closest glimpses to tasting the outside world, but we arguably
valued such glimpses higher than our own IAs. Most importantly, we formed relationships with the
people we love, people we care about, people that went on this crazy journey along with us, the journey
without any exams, yet being stressed out over countless deadlines and mock exams. Unprecedented.

We have now learnt how to foster relationships through these tough times, quite literally finding the
meaning behind the saying “through thick and thin” at a much younger age than other older folks, like
the teachers here. Unprecedented. We were thrown into this thunderstorm of uncertainty and
irregularities throughout the year, but we fought through it through ways we could’ve never imagined;
be it through Vietnamese cooking sessions in the lounges or the Spanish and Russian parties with
insanely loud music that we claimed to hate but never actually stopped tapping our feet or bopping our
heads to. Unprecedented.