During our senior year, the Dover-Sherborn athletic program witnessed a renaissance. From our football team beating Medfield on Thanksgiving to our boys' basketball team winning the Tri Valley League title, to our lacrosse team's success in the state tournament (*knock on wood*), we took Raider sports to a level unfathomable only a few short years ago, and our athletic prowess gave way to a powerful and palpable rise in school spirit. For many years, teachers, administrators, and coaches had long decried Dover-Sherborn's lack of student pride, but starting this fall, driven by the intensity of the senior class, we recorded stellar and unusually boisterous fan attendance at our athletic events. During spirit week, the class of 2005 claimed and, as tradition dictates, desecrated the Spirit Cup for the third consecutive year. Under our leadership, I am happy to report that Dover-Sherborn spirit is at an all time high.

In the classroom, we are a group of thinkers. AP courses were consistently filled to capacity, and we garnered genuine admiration from our instructors through our academic performance and our insightful opinions and in-class contributions. Our hard work and intelligence paid off in the college admissions process, as the class of 2005 put more students in top colleges than many area private schools. When a public institution can make that claim, the teachers and counselors have clearly done an exceptional job, but the students have to have been talented to begin with. As a representative of that group of students, I can tell you firsthand that we are that good.

During our tenure at Dover-Sherborn, we have also made great strides in the areas of community service, school leadership, and class unity. Members of this class have put in thousands of volunteer hours, we have been praised as outstanding leaders and role models for younger students by the administration, and we have grown closer to each other as a group.

Perhaps most importantly, as we have bonded with each other and compiled this impressive list of accomplishments, we have had fun. And, equally as importantly, we have kept our arrest records remarkably short while doing so (*knock on wood*). Yet, despite our laundry list of achievements, we stand before you with the realization that all we have done up until this point in our lives is fairly insignificant in the long run, just the first few strides in the long marathon of life.

We are here today, just like every other graduating class across America, as a group of fresh faced young men and women that are just as confused, apprehensive, and maybe even a little frightened of our looming entrance into "the real world" as you would expect us to be.

With this in mind, I felt that we needed some parting advice, to ease our worries and arm us with some valuable knowledge as we depart high school. I began thinking about this in the middle of the winter, racking my brain as I tried to decide who would be an appropriate source of inspiration to a group of such exceptional individuals. Then, as I tossed restlessly in bed one night, I realized who our muse should be. Despite the differences that the members of our class have, many of us do have one thing in common; our absolute, undying admiration for one man: Tucker Max.

If many of you in the audience haven't yet been touched by Tucker's greatness, I don't blame you. He is what some would call a cult icon, a quasi-celebrity who has gained a large and ever-growing fan base by posting his hilarious stories on the Internet. Despite the fact that Tucker is on the verge of hitting it big and receiving mainstream fame and recognition, he had his share of questions surrounding him as a graduation speaker. As brilliant as Tucker is, being a graduate of both the University of Chicago and Duke Law School, his gifts and popularity were overshadowed by his extensive and well-documented history of becoming obscenely intoxicated and ruining charity events. Thus, Tucker Max was not able to be here with us today. Even though we do not have him here in the flesh, I hope I can impart Tucker's fiery spirit to all of you.

During my communication with him, Tucker offered many insights, and even has a section on his website dedicated to advice for high school students. As a seasoned veteran of "the real world" now in his late twenties, Tucker has many astute observations to lend us.

He said, "The main question that I get from virtually all teenagers who write me is 'How do I become you?' The answer: you cannot become me. You can only be the best version of yourself possible. Your goal through the next decade should be to come back to your ten year reunion and say to your friends, 'I am happy with who I am. I have done things that make me proud of myself.' All the stories about drinking and hooking up are fun, but the idea that you need to find out who you are and be that person is the most important Tucker Max adage that you can take with you.

"When you are a teenager, you have no idea what you're all about, so you go from one thing to another trying to figure out how to define yourself. That's natural, and part of finding yourself is putting on other 'identities' to see how they fit. This is fine, but always come back to who you are.

"If you are unsure about how to do this, pay attention to those around you who are successful, and do what they do. As novel and advanced as my game may seem to you, I probably only invented about one percent of it, if that. Almost everything I know I learned by watching and imitating people older and more successful than me. In high school, you learn how to act like a senior by watching the seniors when you are an underclassman. In life, you learn how to be successful by watching the people who achieve success. Figure out what they do that the others aren't doing, isolate their successful behavior, and imitate it. You won't become them, but by trying to implement their actions you will naturally develop your own style.

"A corollary to this is to READ. A LOT. Humans have been recording history for about 10,000 years. You won't be the first person to go through anything that you go through. My grandfather told me: 'an idiot repeats his mistakes. A smart man learns from his mistakes. But a genius learns from the mistakes of others.' The more you read, the more you learn. The more you learn, the more you can figure out how life works and what to do and what not do without having to screw up first. "Even so, go live life. Go out and experience everything you can. Do everything that you have an opportunity to do. Wisdom is most often earned and not learned, and the best way to get earned wisdom is to experience as much as possible. The more you see of the world, the smaller and more understandable it becomes."

As outstanding as this advice is, Tucker was justifiably excited to present it to our class, especially because it would have been his first opportunity to speak in this kind of forum. He has been offered the chance to deliver speeches at many high schools and colleges over the last few years, but his visits have always been cancelled due to last minute objections from either administrations or overly politically correct student groups, sometimes in the form of mass protests. When I told Tucker that we were not able to have him, he had this one final gem to lend me: "I hope that you learned something from this. Your whole life, other people are going to try to crush your dreams, and the only thing you can do is fight them. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but the day you give up the fight is the day your soul dies." Truer words were never spoken.

As we stand here on the verge of departing from everything familiar to us, and leaving the towns we have grown to know and love for institutions of higher learning scattered across both America and those other countries, or service in the armed forces that will see members of this class defending our great nation around the globe, or even entrance directly into the workplace, we prepare to go with the confidence that we all have what it takes to succeed. We are truly privileged individuals, and have been given opportunities from the moment we were born that many in this world will never see.

As members of a such a rare community and graduates of such an academically outstanding school system, we have the sacrifices of our parents, and all that they have worked for, as well as the diligence and dedication of our teachers and administrators to thank for putting us in the position that we are in today. We have learned much and grown immensely through our first eighteen years, and leave today prepared for wherever we are headed to next with knowledge, passion, work ethic, and a hunger for being the best that we can possibly be. I know each and every member of this class, and I think that everyone here will agree with me that we are all ready to make our mark on the world outside of Dover-Sherborn. As we head off today, with all of the success that we have already had, I can assure you that there is only more of it to come for the class of 2005.

That being said, I have been instructed to leave you with one final thought. In the eloquent, immortal lexis of Jen Siegel, "what's up, homeboy?""