Becoming You - 2024 Head of School Commencement Address

This morning, I will ask you all to think for a few moments about this related question: Do you have an essential self? Or more specifically, “Are you the same person you were when you were a child?” Think back to elementary school, middle school, and now high school, Class of 2024, or for adults, that might include college, work, grad school, and being a parent. Have you been a consistent self or have you evolved so much that your child self is a bit of a stranger? 

In 2022, Joshua Rothman wrote an essay for The New Yorker titled “Becoming You,” and, in it, he states that “people have strong, divergent opinions about the continuity of their own selves.”  He continues by commenting that some people are “simply more ‘episodic’ than others; they’re fine living day to day, without regard to the broader plot arc” of their lives. Some people have little sense of their lives as a “narrative with form, and little interest” in their own past. That would be very American in some ways with our individualism and pragmatism, our tenacious hold of common sense, and stoicism in the face of challenge.  

An interesting and humorous simile developed by a group of authors of a book titled “The Origins of You" is that, “Human Beings are like storm systems. Each individual storm has its own particular set of traits and dynamics; meanwhile, its future depends on numerous elements of atmosphere and landscape.” The fate of any given storm is shaped by “air pressure in another” locale, and it picks up moisture and heightens before making landfall. Here is where the humor comes in. Realize that my example is not political. I am just illustrating by sharing what the authors wrote… “Donald Trump, in 2014, told a biographer that he was the same person in his sixties that he’s been as a first grader. In his case, the researchers write, the idea isn’t so hard to believe. Storms, however, are shaped by the world and by other storms, and only an egomaniacal weather system believes in its absolute and unchanging individuality.” I thought that was funny anyway!

Truly, Class of 2024, you are about to be creating the narrative of your future, and you are taking your experiences at Vermont Academy, putting them in your pocket, and using them as fuel to build your confidence and direction. Yet I want you to know that it is worth it to be at least partly conscious of building your story – of who you are and how you want to have a positive impact on our world. In an existential way, you now have the agency to make more choices, to take responsibility for yourselves at college and in work. To consider how you will be perceived based on your actions and words, and to shape your world.

I want to give you four cameos of recent graduates and let you hear how specifically they defined their careers after Vermont Academy. I would argue that their parents got the best value from the dollars spent on higher education because most of our graduates step foot on their college and university campuses with clarity about who they are and what they want to focus on. There has been a steady refinement of this in high school and they take that refining process with them in the understanding of how to select a focal point that will elicit not just knowledge but something to contribute, something that will make a difference for others. Caitlin McDermott, Seth Buchanan, Lauren Eppinger, Davon Johnson.  

At Vermont Academy, Caitlin McDermott studied languages, and worked in theater tech and robotics.  She went off to Oxford University and focused on data analytics. Now she is in graduate school studying to become a Formula One pit crew analyst who gives the driver the key data and the mechanics the updates that are needed to make that one-minute pit stop transformational. Seth Buchanan, a student at California State University, majoring in biochemistry, just got accepted into Stanford University’s School of Medicine’s Racial Equity to Advance a Community of Health - Postbaccalaureate Experience in Research. Lauren Eppinger recently graduated with high distinction from Worcester Polytech University with a double major in Environmental Engineering and Gender Studies and a minor in International and Global Studies. One of her final projects was to work with a team to develop a new process for microplastic separation to improve the plastic recycling process utilizing froth flotation. Davon Johnson, a postgraduate at Vermont Academy, recently graduated from the University of Albany with an Economics Major and a Minor in Financial Market Regulation, and he has an internship with Berkshire Hathaway Insurance, and he continues to be an ambassador for Harlem Lacrosse.

Class of 2024, you cannot continue a story of your life without first writing one, and you are about to begin that process. Whether you have an episodic, live-in-the-moment life, or you see a continuous fabric to your existence, you are in charge. Make good choices, take care of yourselves, and have enough self-respect to be aware that how you conduct yourself – both in the classroom, in your extracurriculars, and in the soon-to-be social extracurriculars – is paramount. Be respectful of others but also of yourself.  

No self-respecting English major like me would take up this topic of selfhood without mentioning the great thinkers and poets who considered the topic – Wordsworth and Whitman. Wordsworth wrote that the “Child is Father of the Man,” and he would “wish [his] days to be bound each to each by natural piety” – that his childhood and adulthood could be connected seamlessly. Well sometimes when we go home for the holidays or back to school for reunions, we can step into our past selves – old friendships resume, old in-jokes resurface, and old crushes reignite. But the time travel ceases, Rothman writes, “when you step out of the safety and security of memories [and the mythical “quad” of green grass and play]. It turns out that you’ve changed, after all.”  

Whitman declares in “Song of Myself,”  “I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”  Well, if that isn’t a diatribe for college fun, I do not know another. But eventually, he also says something that is good for us to think about in closing:

“The last scud of day holds back for me

It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any

on the shadow’d wilds,

It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.”

Class of 2024, your spirits are now going to be one with other graduates of Vermont Academy, and we, the faculty and staff, will think of you often and sometimes unexpectedly. Other faces will come and stand where you have. The morning mist will swirl with memories and smiles of what you brought to our community until we see you at reunions or coming back for a visit. You are forever an active and current part of this community and do not forget that. Parting is “sweet sorrow,” and as we hug goodbye in a few moments after you receive your diplomas, just recognize that you have been known here. That your authentic self - even if you do not have an “essential,” consistent self” - is something we have deemed worthy and valuable, and that we send you off with pride and affection as you craft the story of being true to your best self. In closing, I will share these beautiful well-known words from the poetry of 1 Corinthians 13:11.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, and I thought as a child: but when I became an adult, I put away childish things. For now, we see in a mirror, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love. Let’s spend the remainder of this whole day in the spirit of what Tony Gao ’24 conveyed in his capstone project:

Peace and Love!