Valedictorian Harrison Foster ‘26 Addresses His Peers at Commencement

At the Commencement of the MICDS Class of 2026 on May 18, Valedictorian Harrison Foster ’26 shared his thoughts.

Hi everyone: friends, family, staff, and the Class of 2026. I’m Harrison Foster, and I’m honored to be here right now. More than anything, actually, I’m pretty nervous and almost glad that I’m not directly facing my class, ‘cause I am about to say a lotta sappy stuff. But truth be told, I am not that experienced in writing or giving speeches. So over the past few weeks, I’ve spent some time learning from the greats, watching some other speeches, and I realized that a ton of them begin with a quote from a famous philosopher or celebrity or whoever. I don’t know about you all, but I don’t know many famous philosophers, but I do know someone just as good. Some might call him our grade’s closest thing to a philosopher: my good friend Andy Zheng. He said, “The greatest privilege of MICDS was getting to see friends every day for four years.” He took the words right out of my mouth. Because in my completely unbiased opinion, our class is the perfect size. Any bigger and it feels hard to get to know everyone… but any smaller and it feels like you’re talking to the same people over again. Believe me, I’ve experienced the other side of this. There were only eight people in my middle school class. And I loved middle school, I really did, but sometimes it got…lonely. In four years at MICDS, I have not felt lonely for a single day. Our class, the class of 2026, is full of athletes, of academics, of artists, of future CEOs, of current philosophers, but above all else, it is full of kind people. I never imagined that I would be able to make a double-digit amount of friends, but there I was, sitting every day at lunch tables with so many people we had to pull up chairs. I never imagined that I would be able to walk through the hallways everyday, stopping about five times to say “hi” or fist bump different people. I never imagined I’d end up loving high school as much as I did.

So, thank you, Andy, for letting me borrow your wisdom. And now, if we continue to follow the outline of a lot of other speeches, here’s where I’d start to interject my own wisdom. But honestly, uh, I don’t have all too much to say in that regard. So instead, I’d just like to say thank you. Thank you to the teachers, faculty, and staff who made these four years so special. Thank you to my family who supported me all the way. Thank you to my friends from other schools who came here just to see little old me. Thank you to Lewis Adkins for asking me to include his name in this speech. And thank you to my friends in my class at MICDS, all 160 of you.

Well, actually, did you know that the average person can maintain around 150 stable social relationships at any given point? Apparently, it’s called Dunbar’s number, and I gotta say, I don’t really believe it. There are 160 people in our class, and sure, I know there are certainly some pairs of people who have never really talked. And maybe my definition of friendship is just loose, but for one reason or another, I’d consider us all, in a way, friends. We’re the class that came into high school right after COVID. In our freshman year ChatGPT released…and then, the same year, we all had a history quiz canceled. We saw the rise and very quick fall of Aux periods. We’ve seen dozens of teachers and students come and go. We all have so much in common just because we experienced so many of the same things, day after day. And I’ve always found it poetic that even as the years came and went, as we became sophomores, we blinked our eyes, and now we’re seniors. Throughout all of that, we’ve been the Class of 2026. And that’s a relationship that’s impossible to replicate.

If there’s one thing I want to leave with you all, it’s a word that I learned recently: ephemeral. Ephemeral literally means something that lasts for a short time, but, more poetically, it means something wonderfully short-lived. If there’s a word I could use to describe our high school days, it would be ephemeral. I’m sure there were points where a lot of us wished that time would just speed up, that we would just be adults already. But I’m even more sure that there were moments when many of us felt that time was going way too fast. Regardless of what we wish, though, we experience time at a constant rate, at a second per second. It’s fast. But that’s not a bad thing. Life is so wonderful because it is so short and because every moment counts. We just need to treat it like that. I can’t count how many times I’ve wished that a class would just end, that I could just go home and take a nap. But, looking back, there’s nothing I’d give to just have one more Dr. Hansen English class, to sit with my Euro table one last time, or spend one last free period in Hearth. I don’t really think graduation resolutions are a thing, but I’ve made one anyway. To take every day as it is. To stop wishing time away. We’re all about to go to college, experience so many new things, go new places, meet new people. We can’t let that time just pass us by.

But even as we go our separate ways and become the Class of 2030, I hope you all will never forget the four, wonderfully short-lived years we spent together as the Class of 2026. I hope you all will never forget that the Class of 2026 is a family of 160 people. We will always have a home to come back to, for those of us going all the way to Singapore and those of us who will live five minutes away. So that’s why I’m so proud to say that I’m graduating from MICDS. But, even more so, I’m proud to say that I’m graduating as part of the Class of 2026, and I hope you all are as well.