Hillary Clinton Commencement Speech Analysis

Commencement Speech

This past fall, I took a class that assigned a commencement speech instead of a final. (Good practice right?) While trying to understand purpose of the assignment (by which I mean, trying to understand how to get an A), I asked why colleges have students speak at graduation. A classmate expounded on my question. She didn’t see why we should have one at all. After all, it doesn’t make that much sense, especially when schools invited extraordinarily accomplished adults to make a speech at the same event. I mean, who can compete with that?

I am the 49th Wellesley student who has addressed her classmates at commencement. As some of you know, Hillary Clinton, then Hillary Rodham was the first student to speak at a Wellesley Commencement. Her class had spent the previous semester lobbying the administration to allow a student to speak at the ceremony. I know some alumnae from the class of

I’ve noticed that we carry the habit of the criticism without reconstruction into our lives outside of the classroom. We deride the overwhelming stress culture on campus, yet continue to perpetuate it. We complain about the workload our professor assign us, but rush through our SEQs at midnight without providing suggestions for improvement. We criticize the state of mental health resources on campus, but don’t share our concerns with anyone in the administrators who are able to do something about it.

And while we ought to be critical of our community, Wellesley, this beautiful, magical institution, with all of its problems and all of its faults, is in much better shape than the rest of the world. We can’t go out into that world, and continue criticizing our surroundings without following up on it.

Now, as much as the Wendy in my soul wants you all to think that I’ve got this figured out, that couldn’t be further from the truth. There are plenty of reasons why we don’t try to fix everything that needs to be