Class of 2025 Valedictorian Arjun Puri’s Commencement Remarks

The Valedictorian for the Class of 2025, Arjun Puri ’25, addressed his classmates and their families, friends, and teachers at Commencement on Sunday, May 18, 2025. Here are his remarks.

Good afternoon, parents, teachers, friends. It’s an honor to address you all today, and of course, the MICDS graduating class of 2025. Our year’s got a nice ring to it, the class of ‘25, doesn’t it?—it’s a perfect square and the first Pythagorean triple. For the less mathematically inclined, like you, Mr. Tourais, I understand if that one might have gone a little over your head; it’s a complex mathematical pun. Hopefully this one’s a little more up your alley: on the 25th line of page 25 of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway says, “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

Perhaps Nick’s words encapsulate how some of us are feeling today at the precipice of our high school careers: we’re enchanted by what’s to come these next four years and beyond. But at the same time, we’re repelled by the thought of starting over in a new place, of saying our goodbyes to the people that we’ll go from seeing every day, to once in a while, to not at all. Or, honestly, maybe you’re just repelled by having to wear a polyester suit or dress on a day this hot. I feel you, believe me.

Even as we all look ahead to what the future holds, it’s impossible not to look behind and reminisce, with nostalgia for the past and anticipation for what’s to come. Fitzgerald ends Gatsby with the sentence, “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Only now, a year and a half after we all finished SparkNotes—I mean reading—the book, does that line mean something to me: as we step off the stage and graduate into the real world, the rest of our lives are not dictated by what we achieved in high school. The experiences we have will stay with us—we can’t erase them—and our past is part of each of us, but unlike Jay Gatsby, we don’t need to relive it, chasing after what’s behind us in the search for fulfillment.

But we’ve all changed. The faces I see around me today aren’t the same as the ones who walked into the STEM building for the first time in August of 2021, when all I could really see were your eyes and your preferred type of mask. Since that day, we’ve grown—some of us have gotten a little wiser (or at least better at pretending to be), most of us, but not all, are taller, and all but a few of us (again, you know who you are) are better drivers than we once were.

Today, we are at the edge of a new period in our lives. The freedom of adult life, from what I hear, isn’t all sunshine and rainbows: I guarantee you that the hardest part of college will be even more difficult than that video essay on Gatsby that we had two days to do—shoutout to my partner for doing all the editing and letting me sleep, by the way. Here’s where I’m probably supposed to offer you all some profound advice about navigating the future, but the truth is I’m definitely not the one to ask, and even Google couldn’t help me out all that much. But this is what I will say: being confident will get us all much further than we expect—after all, we’ve been confidently pretending we knew what we were doing for four years, and look how far that has brought us. Oh, and I can’t remember where I heard this one, but make sure to call your parents at least once a month; they’ll appreciate it. They are still paying the phone bill.

Looking at all of you today, I see past and future artists, entrepreneurs, even a president or two in our midst, which would fit, since we have already mastered the ability to confidently answer questions we don’t know the answers to. But one more thing before we part ways. Graduating from high school is a double-edged sword, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t both excited and apprehensive for what’s to come, but it doesn’t mean that our educational journeys are coming to an end. Far from that. I opened with the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, so what better way to conclude than with the words of another great contemporary American author, Dr. Seuss: “The more you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

Congratulations to each one of you on making it this far, and I have no doubt that each of our journeys is far from over. Thank you, ChatGPT, for coming up with this last night. You saved me a lot of time, and thank you all for being here today to celebrate the Class of 2025.