Just before heading to Orange County for the senior trip, the Class of 2025 was joined by the juniors, faculty and their families at the upper school quad on Friday for this year’s Baccalaureate ceremony, where Harker formally bid farewell to the seniors ahead of this week’s graduation ceremony.
Prior to the speeches by faculty and student representatives, chosen by the senior class, attendees were treated to a performance of a selection from Robert Schuman’s Piano Quartet in E-Flat Major by members of The Harker Orchestra and Capriccio’s rendition of the traditional song “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”
After being introduced by upper school head Paul Barsky, faculty speaker Caren Furtado, who joined Harker in 2022 as a math teacher and will begin serving as Harker’s director of alumni relations in June, identified in her speech the many ways she found the Class of 2025 inspirational during the process of writing her speech. “You have shown leadership compassion and inclusivity that make you special,” she said, mentioning how they campaigned to change Harker’s dress codes after returning from the COVID-19 lockdowns. “We were kind of stuck in the past, but you led oust of that past, and after the discussion with diverse groups of teachers, administrators and students, we decided that not only males need to wear tank tops,” she joked. Listing some of the many accomplishments of the senior class during their time as upper school students, Furtado made special mention of their many service efforts during the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service, the diverse array of speakers they invited to campus and songs from various cultures they performed during concerts.
“Through your thought leadership, your compassion and inclusivity, you, the Class of 2025, have won so much that everyone else was tired of your winning,” she said, before continuing to mention several of the many behaviors that also made the Class of 2025 special. “I could be the student who got detention and then was late for the detention because they were playing Brawl Stars,” or “one of the group of seniors who went to the beach right before the AP calculus exam,” or the one “whose partner almost did not go to prom with them because they could not solve polar equations.”
Concluding her speech, Furtado said, “You have already developed the courage to carve your own path, show your own leadership, show compassion and be engaged. You also have the humility to avoid taking yourself seriously.”
After the applause subsided, Barsky introduced this year’s student speaker, Shreyas Chakravarty. “We made it,” he began, acknowledging the road he and his classmates took from weathering the COVID-19 pandemic until their graduation. After listing the bona fides that made them “the most spirited class in Harker’s history,” Chakravarty also noted some of the many other accomplishments of the Class of 2025. “We have Young Arts award winners. We have people doing work in legal aide clinics. We have people published in the Concord Review. We have DECA presidents and right here, we have the largest concentration in America of non-profit founders who are about to dissolve their non-profit,” he remarked. “We are spirited, we are accomplished, we are amazing.”
A passionate advocate for sustainability, Chakravarty emphasized the importance of tying one’s actions to their values. “For example, you might believe that a politician should build more renewable energy, but you won’t prioritize that in your time to make the phone call that puts that value into action,” he said. “Connecting [values and actions] means bounding over the reticence and self-awareness and contrived urgency that are obstacles between connecting our values and connecting our actions.”
In order to help his fellow graduates and the juniors forge that connection as well as reconnect with their communities, Chakravarty recommended framing their actions as service. “You might call yourself an artist. We might say you communicate emotion, which is valuable for expressing yourself. You might call yourself a tutor, or say that you help children learn math, which is valuable for helping the young. You might say you’re a hiker, or that you exercise in nature, which is valuable for communing with your environment,” he said. “This may seem subtle, but it is the difference between defining yourself by the abstract social hierarchies we create to rank ourselves–artist, tutor, hiker–and defining yourself by the substance of your values and the way they affect the people around you, defining yourself by the community of peers that you affect.”
