Graduation Speech : High School Diploma

A higher education has been an important priority in my life. While I realized a high school education was important, my parents expected more. They said if I wanted to succeed in life, a college education was something that I could not live without. What they don’t tell you is how exhausting and confusing the process is to get even into.

So far, all throughout high school, I have done my best in school. I strive to get the best grades I can. There are many opportunities out there, college related, that many people out of high school don’t have. I make sure I take advantage of these opportunities because all the hard work will be very rewarding in the end. During my sophomore year of high school, I had the chance to get into a four-year program that would have me take college classes while still in high school. Also, I would be able to job shadow different careers, practice interviewing skills, and get an internship. By the end of this program I would have an associate’s degree and have developed very useful skills necessary for a career. This whole program would be free.

Throughout life people go through so many adversities. Whether it be good or bad there is always something that arises out of the situation. One of the most thrilling, but yet frightening events to take place throughout someone’s life would be graduation. For many people, graduating from high school is an objective. It takes a lot of time, effort, and determination to accomplish that goal. For others graduation is the end of high school, and the beginning of a new chapter in life. When graduated people feel as if adulthood has begun. In the long run, graduating opens a lot of opportunities for people to thrive.

Receiving a high school diploma is essential to today's society. More and more jobs are requiring a high diploma for basic jobs. As for now, a college degree is becoming more common. Now more jobs are requiring a high school diploma and a college degree. This makes it harder for those who choose not to go to college to find a job to help support their families. School’s have strongly encouraged students to pursue a college degree because of the increase job requirements. Student’s need to attend college to have an average job making $10 to $15 and hour. By students going for a bachelor's degree there making around $20 to $40 and hour based on what type of career they're going for. Due to the rising cost of college and the negative effects that student loan debt has on American families today, the question of going to college or not is not an easy one to answer. On the other hand, the opportunities that college provides along with the personal enrichment that a student can receive make it worth the time, effort, and the price one pays in order to pursue a college degree.

Students who had earned some sort of college degree receive $36,190 per year. High school graduates earn $27,380, and high school dropouts earn $19,540. Overall, students who have a four-year college degree earn about $27,390 more than high school dropouts do. If students were required to stay in school until graduation, most of them would eventually earn $7,840 more in income than dropouts would have earned.

“Congratulations! You have been accepted to Bentley University for fall of 2015!” Words could not express how ecstatic this message made me. As soon as the acceptance email popped up on my phone, I screamed, dropped my backpack, and sprinted over to my track and field teammates to celebrate this triumphant occasion. After years of challenging AP courses, eleven seasons of tiring school sports, and countless extracurricular clubs, I finally felt like all of my hard work had paid off. At that moment, the only thought in my head was “I’m going to Bentley!” My dream — an aspiration I’ve had since my freshman year of high school — was becoming a reality.

“I had been enrolled in a math resource classes from the ninth grade, and was instructed at a slightly lower grade level than my classmates. Despite this, I was repeatedly administered the TCAP on a higher grade level than the one at which I was taught. As a result, I was unable to pass the math section by the end of the senior year” (page 73).

Over the last few years of high school I feel like I changed in a positive way because in the beginning of my freshmen year of high school, I didn’t really think of how much my grades would affect my chances of graduating and going to college. I didn’t think I would make it this far and it didn’t matter to me because dropping out and getting a GED seemed like an easy way out for me at the time. But I realized that life could be hard out there when all you’ll have is GED that gets you little job opportunities when you could just finish school, work on getting your diploma and maybe go to college to study for what you’d want to do for a career that can get you tons of job opportunities because of the experience you have.

In the spring of 2014, I graduated from a small high school as valedictorian. During my high school career, I maintained status on the high honor roll and received the title of Student of the Month the first month of every school year for four years. In 2011 and 2012, my sophomore and junior years of high school, I was selected both years to attend the Youth Leadership Institute as a delegate for the Chatham School District. There, I met many other high school students from all over Alaska where we exercised our leadership skills in fun icebreaker games and group activities. We also learned about our own unique leadership styles, and how we can apply them in various situations back home or anywhere.

I had always done really well in school. High school I managed a 4.0 all four years. Not that this was any major feat for me. I didn’t even have to try. Show up to class, take some notes, and then pass all the tests with flying colors. I do have to thank high school for making school seem so incredibly easy, and for it making me think I was smart without even trying. Heading into college I thought I would ace though all of my classes no problem. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

Many students enter high school with a pessimistic mindset that is on the verge of rupturing in a total disaster. Fortunately, I was not one of those students. Ironically, I was just the opposite. I entered the walls of high school with much more than a faint feeling of trepidation. I entered, rather, with an indefinable desire to seek opportunities beyond the basics of what I was already capable of doing. The huge new school was both frightening and exciting for a 13 year old girl who was ready to make an impact on the world. That same 13 year old girl is now beyond the fears, beyond the anxiety, and beyond the anticipation. She has now surpassed 3 years of high school and is one step closer to achieving her dreams.

I was sure when I graduated high school I was ready for college. My senior year in high

Have you ever wondered what changed and remained the same about yourself, mentally and physically, during your high school career? Change in mentality throughout high school is such a popular topic that terms such as "senioritis" exsist in attempts to explain the change in mentality throughout the start and end of a student 's time during high school. Also, on the physical side, many people find the changes that happen to their bodies in the duration of the four years extreme. For example, some people might start Freshman year around five feet tall with little to no muscles, but they may graduate high school around six feet tall and find themselves benching 275 pounds. In high school, many things change and stay the same such as your mentality towards academics and your physical body.

After graduating college, many aspects of your life start to change. For example, now you have to find a full-time job within your degree, your social life starts changing, you are no longer able to afford the same luxuries as before, and lastly you are learning how to live independently without the help of your parents. Now is the time to move to the next phrase in your life, away from everything you once knew.

On average about 50 million kids are expected to enroll in elementary school of those 50 million only about 3.3 million will actually graduate high school whether it will be from a private or a public high school. That means there is 46.7 million kids that will not graduate high school who go straight into the workforce, of those students graduating about 65.9% will immediately go to a college in the fall (“Institute of Education Sciences” n.d.). The fact that more than half of high school graduates are going to college is staggering especially considering that 34.1% are not going. The 34.1% not going to college are the people who are not in debt and working, compared to students studying at a college and not making money because the