Nearly 50 student graduate in eclectic ceremony
Nearly 50 students graduate in eclectic ceremony
Santa Fe Preparatory School’s Class of 2017 marched in style Friday morning through the open-air courtyard at the school’s east-side campus. Instead of a cap and gown, the graduating seniors wore white dresses and dark suits personalized to the extreme. One young woman wore a wedding dress, another a traditional Native American dress with moccasins. The young men sported decorative ties and hats decked with feathers. One had teal hair.
The ceremony was as eclectic as the nearly 50 graduates. Head of School Jim Leonard quoted Thoreau. Mayor Javier Gonzales choked up in a salute to his graduating daughter, Cameron. A student delivered a speech that one woman described as a “shamanic journey.” And just before the ceremony’s end, a senior announced that his family was donating a vintage firetruck to the school for use as a scoreboard.
“We’re a very out-there class,” new graduate Sage Crosby said.
Crosby, who is from Pojoaque Pueblo, said one of her favorite experiences at Santa Fe Prep was having the opportunity to study Tewa for a language credit. In the fall, she will attend Stanford University to study environmental science or math.
“In a place like [Santa Fe Prep],” said senior Oliver Hillenkamp, “you’re able to have passions and just explore them. There are a lot of really smart people, but people don’t brag about how smart they are. People do cool things, but they don’t have to talk about it.”
On Friday, Hillenkamp received an award that is annually presented to a student who “approaches life with a sense of wonder.” His interests include everything from studying fungi to surrealism to quantum physics. This summer, he will travel to France to work on an organic farm, and he plans to attend Reed College in Portland, Ore., in the fall.
Hillenkamp delivered a speech
in which he invited members of the audience to walk through a “mind palace” he had built to store memories of the senior class.
He asked listeners to close their eyes, and narrated for them a journey from a sundrenched hill through a sentiment-filled cave back to the school’s graduation ceremony.
At the end, he thanked his classmates for being kind, humble, inquisitive and “marvelously weird.” He got a standing ovation.
After the ceremony, classmate Elizabeth Whiting thanked Hill-enkamp for giving a speech “that wrapped the whole class up so well.”
Whiting says high school taught her to learn from the var- ied interests and personalities of the other four dozen or so students in her graduating class.
“You want to learn from other people, not put them down and compete with them in a negative way,” said Whiting, who is headed to Dartmouth in the fall. “We all realize how lucky we are here.”
Members of the senior class also say they were drawn together by tragedy.
Just before the start of senior year, 17-year-old classmate Quincy Conway died at his home while working on a science experiment. He was a rock climber, an aspiring physicist and had spent the summer interning at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He had been experimenting with electricity and suffered fatal injuries during a project.
After the accident, the senior class developed a sense of unity, knowing that everybody was “mentally there for each other,” said senior class President Lucas Smith.
“As the year went on, people came together more and more,” Smith said. “[Graduation] is like the climax. I think people going their different ways are going to feel strong connections back to this place.”