Aaron Dane, Amal Haque and Hannah Tatem will join keynote speaker Senator Ben Cardin to address students at graduation June 3.

A panel of administrators, teachers and senior SGA officers chose the three seniors from 14 contestants who presented three-to-four-minute speeches. Selections were based on delivery and content.

“We look for someone who’s engaging,” English teacher Todd Michaels said. “We look for focus and clarity. We look for poignancy.”
The winning speeches will mesh well together, assistant principal Kathy McHale said.

“They all did something that related to the senior class,” McHale said. “They all had some connection that the kids could identify with.”

The speeches will cover a range of emotions, SGA member Katie Sullivan said.

“I don’t want to give it all away, but some are more funny, and some are more sentimental,” Sullivan said. “None are super serious.”

Haque, who has dreamed of speaking at graduation since kindergarten, wrote a light-hearted speech, which will describe the little lessons students learn from the Whitman community.

Until the ceremony, the speakers are refining their speeches with teacher mentors. Haque has been working with social studies teacher Susan Olden-Stahl on her pacing and tone.

Dane’s opportunity to speak is of special significance to him, as he has only recently become passionate about public speaking,

“Through middle school and a lot of high school I actually struggled with a speech impediment,” Dane said. “The fact that I actually got the position is really amazing. It’s crazy to think I’ll be speaking in front of thousands of people.”

After spending weeks trying to come up with an idea for his speech, Dane was finally inspired while sitting at Starbucks. His speech compares Whitman to a cup of Starbucks coffee.

“The speech is really about finding out how you can best contribute to create our generation’s perfect cup of coffee and taking every opportunity you can to make that cup of coffee the best it can be,” Dane said.

Tatem’s speech recounts her high school experience through anecdotes and advises students to be bold as they face the future, she said. She is working on her delivery with Michaels, who has made only minor edits to her speech.

“The teachers don’t want to have too much of an influence on us,” said Tatem. “They said, ‘We want it to be 100 percent you guys.’”

Tatem initially had stage fright, but it didn’t last long, she said.

“I was nervous before the audition just because I saw a bunch of my peers and a lot of them were really smart and I knew they probably had really awesome speeches,” Tatem said. “But once I got in there, I saw teachers that I had before and two class officers, so it was a really easy environment.”

Most speakers breezed through the audition and the panel had a particularly hard time deciding the final cut, McHale said.

“We could have easily had six or seven,” she said. “There were a lot of great speakers this year.”