Bard College at Simon's Rock: the Early College
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Mallie Prytherch BA Class Speaker

Mallie Prytherch delivered the Bard College at Simon's Rock Bachelor of Arts Class Speaker Address on May 21, 2016. Below is the full text of the speech.

Thank you, Ian, for introducing me. My name is Mallie Prytherch, and I am about to be a Simon’s Rock graduate.

Before I start this speech, I too would like to take a moment and thank everyone who has been a part of all the graduates successful time here at Simon’s Rock. Our parents, our friends, our professors and staff who have contributed their lives to making ours better.

Please join me in thanking them with a round of applause.

I’d like to begin by sharing a memory of my very first day at Simon’s Rock. I was 16, with hair that looked like a triangle and an awful khaki dress, standing in line to get my freshman ID photo taken. (A picture, might I add, that would haunt me for four years straight on my ID card.)

I was naïve, I was young, and I was about to cry. Being the wonderful, trusting people that they are, and in a move that I’m sure caused them a great deal of anxiety down the road, my parents had brought me to the airport and sent me off on my own path. And at that moment, when the photographer asked me to smile, I was absolutely miserable. Thus, the horrible ID photo. But Simon’s Rock is a place of change. I’m not the person I was four years ago, and neither are any of us that (will/have) graduate(d)* here today.

Still, I believe that we are able to retain some of that naiveté that allowed us to think big. Without it, I doubt any of us would have even considered the idea of dropping out of high school to attend college early. Our ability as young people to see possibilities that others have been taught to ignore is invaluable. Our generation is growing up in a dwindling middle class and many of us are graduating with considerable student loan debt. These problems are widespread and aren’t going away anytime soon. And, for better or for worse, it’s our job to fix them.

So I’m glad that the wide-eyed child with an incredible imagination is still part of me, and I am confident that Simon’s Rock has taught us to retain the parts of ourselves that have not yet been constrained by the realities of the world.

Hopefully, we have learned a few things at Simon’s Rock beyond technical skills relating to our majors. Most importantly, I believe we’ve learned how to fight with fairness and compassion. We enter Simon’s Rock in the throes of teenage-hood, with our own ideas of right and wrong, and a passionate need to defend them. Simon’s Rock allows us to make mistakes and forces us to learn how to move on from them so that we can become stronger, more aware, and more considerate human beings. We’ve learned how to negotiate and how to compromise. We’ve learned that nobody’s ever changed someone else’s mind solely by winning the argument. Simon’s Rock has taught us how to meld our turbulent enthusiasm into dedication and persistence.

My fellow students at Simon’s Rock have challenged many of my deeply held beliefs and that hasn’t always been easy. Many times it’s been uncomfortable and even painful. But through this process of arguing, getting upset, and restructuring our thoughts, I hope that we’ve learned how to be both critical and caring. We’ve become aware that what we have to say may not be as important as how we say it.

So often, people talk about college as if it is divorced from the real world. I would like to contest this assumption; we are all living in the real world every day. Just because our dialogues and interactions are more passionate, more sympathetic, and more connected doesn’t make them any less real. It simply means that we have been given the chance to learn and feel things that are not typically taught. This gives us an advantage, but it also gives us a responsibility to carry our insights into other parts of the world and try and make them better.

I’d like to share a passage I read recently that has been the inspiration for this speech.

We exist in the real world: we all carry scars, and we all have caused wounds. This space seeks to turn down the volume of the world outside and amplify the voices that have to fight to be heard elsewhere. This space is and has not been perfect. It will not always be what we wish it to be. But it is ours together and we will work on it, side by side.

What we take into the next part of our lives is up to us. What we learn from our time here is up to us. We don’t know what will happen, and we must depend on our luck, our best efforts and connections that we will make to others. I hope we all step into the outside world with a little more passion for life, a little more empathy for others, and a willingness to always keep trying to make the world a better place for those who come after us.

Thank you, and may I say, congratulations to the AA and BA graduating classes of 2016.