Upper School to host annual Baccalaureate ceremony

Efrey+Noten+14+was+last+years+Baccalaureate+speaker.+This+year+Ethan+Ma+%2812%29+will+speak.+

Mariam Sulakian

Efrey Noten ’14 was last year’s Baccalaureate speaker. This year Ethan Ma (12) will speak.

Baccalaureate, a ceremony which honors juniors and seniors, will take place on May 21 in the Quad.

Ethan Ma (12) and Upper School Mathematics Teacher Mary Mortlock will address the the junior and senior classes and the seniors’ families.

“I’ll try to speak about my impressions on the last four years, what it means to be moving on to different stages in life and reflecting on what that means to me,” Ethan said.

Ethan Ma (12) is this year's Baccalaureate speaker. Baccalaureate will occur on May 21.
Raveena Kapatkar
Ethan Ma (12) is this year’s Baccalaureate speaker. Baccalaureate will occur on May 21.

Baccalaureate symbolically represents the seniors passing the mantle of being leaders of the school down to the juniors. In previous years, the salutatorian, the student with the second highest GPA acted as the speaker for the ceremony, but since 2013, the senior class has voted on one of the members of the seniors class as its own speaker, along with deciding who the faculty speaker will be.

“I’m very honored and I think the fact that the students voted for me is a really nice thing for them to do,” Mortlock said. “I teach a lot of seniors, so that’s why.”

This will be Mortlock’s final year at Harker before her retirement. On the morning after the ceremony, she will travel to Grass Valley, California to attend her daughter’s wedding.

Junior Aarti Kheskani commented on what she is looking forward to most about the ceremony.

“I am excited for baccalaureate because I feel like the [speakers] will have some really good insight, and the senior speaker will probably have some very good advice for my senior year so that I don’t make egregious mistakes,” Aarti said.

Head of School Christopher Nikoloff will also be giving a brief speech to the students.

Ethan voiced his thoughts on last year’s ceremony.

“When I went, it was just nice to be around my peers,” he said. “I think it was a nice time to have the parents and juniors and seniors together before graduation.”

Senior Class Dean Diana Moss reflected on her opinion of the ceremony.

“For me, I think it is the calm before the crazy — it is a very intimate ceremony compared to graduation, which is really all about the family, and this is really just about the students, and usually the speeches are directed to the students — talking about them and to them,” she said.

Traditionally, baccalaureate used to be a religious ceremony, which was performed in church. Recently, however, high schools have adapted it to be a general ceremony to honor the senior class.

Families of juniors and seniors are welcome to join the event, which will take place from 6:30 to 8 p.m. in the quad.

This piece was originally published in the pages of The Winged Post on May 13, 2015.