 Next, I would like to present Stephen Giordano, who is here for you. Thank you, Karen. Welcome to the Luther Burbank Class of 2012 graduation ceremony. Today is a momentous day for everyone present, not just for those graduating. We have all depended on support and encouragement from our family, friends, and teachers in the past four years. This moment is just as special for them as it is for us. It is an honor to be able to speak in front of such a brilliant and successful class. Still, practicing a speech that will inspire and keep your interest, it is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks I have ever been faced with. Rather than focusing on memories for the past, I would like to share the lessons that I have picked up from high school. Hopefully, some of the words I speak will resonate with you and guide you along your path in life. Do not allow yourself to be miserable. Do not do something just because it will enhance your resume or lead to opportunity in the future. Passion is important in everything we do. It pushes us to accomplish the goals we have and dig deeper in what we love. Is success still success if passion wasn't present in the journey to the end? We, as humans, are social creatures. We live to form friendships and interact. Even so, we cannot base our lives around others and live to make them proud. While many good people exist, not everyone has your best interests in mind. They may aim to beat you down and keep you to the dumps. Don't allow anyone from these people to your best friends to become the arbiter of your emotions. They be chained through you. Be your own person. Push for your own happiness. If we live with others in mind, we will always fall short of reaching our full potential. While we shouldn't base our lives around making others happy, we shouldn't only live solidly our lives by them. There is much to learn from the people around you. Everyone in this room has something to teach you. Our friendships with many people, even if they aren't close friendships, wisdom is impossible to achieve alone. Pick the brains of those around you and learn more about yourself than others. Sometimes we must face hardships. Things can easily become too much and can force us to break down. It may seem like nothing is going your way. In these times of struggle, don't allow yourself to be consumed by your anger or sadness. We all have those weakness, where we need to vent and take time to think. Even if you think you're strong enough to brave life alone, there will always come a time where the problems of life will pile up on your shoulders. Let others help you and live to help others. Life after school may seem competitive, but it doesn't need to be. We're all humans, aiming for the same common goal, happiness. Without the help and support of others, we are ignoring a crucial part of the human experience. Don't let failure change anything about you. It's perfectly fine to ask you to pay for disappointment and vent when it first occurs. However, as time goes on, we must stop looking forward, looking to the past and look forward, learning from our mistakes and fixing what caused them, not simply ignoring them. The worst thing any of us can do is conform to failure and allow it to change us. Even in defeat, you must keep yourself intact. The worst thing anyone can take from you is your pride. While giving this speech and being the salutatorian is an honor, it is not a title that should apply any sort of superiority. My one regret in my school is living with grace. Everyone in the graduating class is bright and unique. There are many in this crowd that are smarter than I will ever hope to be. Instead of living to push their numbers higher, they woke up with a smile, happy to affect the school and do what they love. In my pursuit of a high rank, I distanced myself from passion and became a robot without a sense of accomplishment. While it is important to aim for the best, don't lose yourself in the process. Don't allow any sort of ranking system to control you or define you. Instead, love for your qualities, love your imperfections and always be proud of who you are, how far you've come and what you've accomplished. Thank you, members of the audience, for being here tonight to support each and every one of us. As are my fellow graduates, I wish you all the best of luck in your lives. I know that you will all be successful and hope that we live for happiness, not for status. Thank you. Thank you, Steven. Next, it is my pleasure to introduce our 2012 Senior Class Salutatorian Christopher Goldberg. Thank you, family. Good afternoon. I want to first start by thanking the teachers, administrators, families, parents and friends for showing their support for all of these students as they move into the next phase. I want to give a special thank you to my friends and family, specifically my father, my mother and my brother. I want to thank my teachers for being here, whenever we get hope, our projects sin work, so that we are college ready. I thank God for his aid, for the majority of what I have accomplished will not be possible if it was not for him. Now students, friends, it has been a long time. It only seems like yesterday I was in this next kindergarten class. The days are long, but the years are short. I have known many of you ever since great elementary. And others, since my days, have known a calendar. Throughout the years, I have personally seen what we have been doing and accomplished as a class. In the third grade, we had to do a class for the first time in our lives. In middle school, we had to do a part of classes, along with two others. It was there, in middle school, many of us found talents, sports, music, and the arts. We carried those talents up to high school and learned to develop a passion. Every year, there will always be some new award, trophy, or medal to add and put by name. My message to you is if you are passionate about your athletic skills, talents, or academic abilities, I encourage you to continue your activities in college, during your spare time, or throughout whatever you can to do with your life. It does not matter whether you took music, doctor, tennis, basketball, agriculture, chess, art, theater, or the cathedral. Your abilities make up of who each of you are and what you know decides what the textbooks told you. We also had a long way in high school to see which colleges accepted us and where we would be going. I ask many of you about which schools you are going to and I am impressed. You are all together. There is millions of scholarship money that other classes and schools have now. Not only does this benefit your future, but it also honors your family. Here we are, the institution between high school and the path ahead of us. My friends, here is where we reflect and remember our own personal memories with family and comrades. Wonder of time, each of you shall stand on that X to have the whole community see where you are going. It is the moment that each of you has worked for and the time where everyone shall congratulate and recognize you for who you are and what you shall become. Look at me. You will see inside me that not everyone from freshman year was able to make it to this point. The reasons for the departure from our tasks could be financial, personal, or other circumstances. But I want to point out how fortunate the rest of you are able to come to this sport. My friends, as soon as we receive our diplomas, the world will recognize us as adults for adjusting to high school and are now part of the real world, unchanging the innocence we want to have. We might be afraid to live on one day be a few miles away from home while the others several hundred miles away. We hear the media talk about how it is becoming harder for students to pass diplomas. How difficult it is to find a job and how the economy is going deeper into its sinkhole. I ask you not to be discouraged by such news. For this is the type of headline which stops us from taking the chances and holds us from seeking the possibilities available in this free market system. Both nations cannot resist, may not be as weak. The opportunities of the real and successful future still exist as part of the American dream. Depending on where you go, there may not be anyone to help you get started immediately with your life. But through the work ethic and determination that brought you here, you can survive and live up to the expectations of society. Thank you for your time. And thank you for this morning's speech. God bless you and may God bless the United States of America.