Families and friends of the Class of 2025 gathered at the Mountain Winery last week for the 2025 graduation exercises, where the senior class celebrated completing their journey as Harker students. After walking to their seats during the processional (with the strains of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” provided by The Harker Chamber Orchestra), the grads and audience members were treated to a rendition of the “The Star-Spangled Banner” by the 2025 Graduation Chorus, conducted by graduate Luke Zeng ’25.
Upper division head Paul Barsky then welcomed Emily Mitnick, this year’s Senior Mission Award speaker, who spoke about often-narrow views of success and how it feeds into anxieties about being “good enough.” Remembering a particularly memorable experience during a summer program at West Point, she found herself unsure and worried about her future career prospects, and spoke with a cadet who volunteered her only free hour to discuss Mitnick’s future goals. She later found herself in a leadership position and, at the urging of her mother, devoted her time to help a struggling team member.
This became a major theme of her life going forward. “Let’s rewrite the impossibly big standard of being good enough to a standard of being kind, selfless and giving of our time and energy to others,” she said. “Instead of asking, ‘Am I good enough?’ Let’s ask, ‘Am I being good to the people around me who look up to me and who need me?'”
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After Mitnick’s speech, the Graduation Chorus, conducted by upper school music teacher Susan Nace, performed Jonathan Reid’s “Measure Me Sky,” and assistant head of school Jennifer Gargano introduced 2025 graduation keynote speaker Anita Modi ’04, co-founder and CEO of Peer AI. Modi offered a series of perspectives she gained in the more-than-20 years since she was seated where this year’s graduating class now sat. She urged the graduates to continue nurturing the friendships they made while Harker students, remarking that her Harker friends “are the only group whose phone numbers and birthdays I still have memorized.”
She also encouraged the graduates not to be shaken too hard by setbacks, recalling her own experience spending her high school years trying to get accepted to her “dream school,” only to be crestfallen when she wasn’t accepted. She later wound up on the east coast, which she said was the best outcome for her in retrospect. “Life will throw at you moments that shake your confidence and make you question how you define yourself, but trust that you are any more than one moment, and you will grow in ways you never expected,” she said.
The Graduation Chorus then performed its final song of the evening, “The Harker School Song,” before head of school Brian Yager issued this year’s farewell to the graduating class.
Yager opened with a reminiscence about the parent-made senior collages that sat in the upper school campus’ Main Hall, one of which contained a photo of a student and their loved ones at the pyramids in Giza. This photo reminded him of a childhood trip he took with his father and brother to that same location. These photos, he said, “reflect what matters” and urged the graduates to remember the importance of these moments as well as the tougher moments that make them sweeter.
“The quality of your life will be determined not by chasing those things that make life easier,” he said. “Rather, the quality of your lives will be determined by pursuing those things that matter. While it is up to you to determine what those things are, I’m fairly confident that they will include those things that we see most often in the collages in Main Hall: Friends, family adventure, learning, growth and the love and the kindness that accompany them all.”
Following the awarding of each graduate’s diploma, the newly minted alums of the Class of 2025 celebrated with a toss of their caps, and a flock of doves was released into the crisp evening air to bring the event to a close.
