Great Valedictory Speech (not mine)

It is an honor and a pleasure to stand before you as valedictorian of the class of 2012, and the student with the highest grade point average in our class of 173. I would first of all like to thank those who have helped me arrive at this point. I thank my father, who made sure that I always did my very best. I also want to thank my mother, who always reminded me that I was capable of great things. I want to thank the rest of my family, especially my older sister, as well as my teachers and friends. I must say our class is one of the most intelligent and capable classes. Any number of us could have achieved this valedictorian honor. But this is also one of the classes where students have the habit of leaving things for the last minute, and I must confess that there is a bit of that same spirit in me. I apologize for having left the preparations for this speech for the last minute.

Even so, I wanted to do something that no one else had done before in their valedictorian address, and so I chose to give my speech in Spanish. I won’t bore you with tedious details about all my four years in school, but I want to share with you some of the things that have had a major and lasting effect on me. Don’t take me wrong, there were many valuable lessons I learned during the four years at school, and some of them were captured in sayings that we used as students.

“Be like a boss,” is my friend Jesus’ favorite saying, because when you are the boss, you stand for something worthwhile in whatever you do; you are a leader. This saying captures one of the qualities that I’ve seen in our class: we have tried to do the very best in all that we have attempted. We have tried to lead in our studies, our service to the community, our participation in school clubs, in art and many other things. At some point during the past four years, each of us has brought our very best in something that we have done, and in doing so, have lived out this saying. And tonight as we graduate, we stand