AMHERST — Trevor Baptiste, chair of the Amherst Pelham Regional School Committee, told the students arrayed in front of him in their crimson gowns to “convincingly and unapologetically define yourself” as they go through life. Then he conferred 230 diplomas on the class of 2016.
This “pearl of wisdom,” as he called it, was a lesson he took from the life of Muhammad Ali, who was buried in Louisville, Kentucky, on the same day as the graduation ceremony in the Mullins Center on the UMass campus.
Baptiste told the students that moving forward they would get “accolades” as well as derision as other people try to define them. A lesson he learned from his grandmother was that what matters is not what other people call you, but what you respond to.
The commencement speaker was Reed Fox, a 23-year-old UMass graduate student in management who recently returned from Tanzania where he helped found a sports charity organization dedicated to promoting happiness and teaching life skills through soccer. When he was 18 and a first-year student at UMass, he interned with the Amherst Regional High School athletic director.
Fox had advice for the graduates as well. Don’t “friend” your parents on Facebook. “They say that our generation is hooked on social media, but our parents are much worse,” he told them. Though he did add that they should not take their parents for granted because “they are the keys to our success.”
Amherst has four valedictorians this year, students who achieved straight A’s through their high school careers. They are Brody John Lynch, Emilia K. Mann, Solomon Nory Rueschemeyer-Bailey, and Yasunari Watanabe. Each of them spoke briefly.
Rueschemeyer-Bailey likened the graduates to “cars leaving the dealership, trains leaving the station, and planes zooming down the runway.”
Senior class officer Akshat Dhankher told the class of 2016, which he called “weird and quirky,” not to “reflect,” but to “truly look forward.” He also encouraged them “to give back” in years to come by returning to the school to visit their teachers. “In many respects we are their life’s work,” he said.
Schools Superintendent Maria Geryk based her remarks on the idea of “letting go.” She asked the students to stand up and turn to face the parents and guardians in the audience and to give them a round of applause because in a sense they are letting go of the children they raised from when they were born.
Her words of advice were to try to cut through the noise and distractions of the world by always “finding kindness and compassion in your hearts for others and for yourself.”
Eric Goldscheider can be reached at eric.goldscheider@gmail.com.