Ashley
Evans '98 - Cum Laude Speech

I have been asked to speak today to those who
graduate with the praise of this school, and I hope in so doing that
I speak to those who have been welcomed up here today, and that I
address also those in the audience who receive plaudits for your
performances on the stage, on the playing field and courts, in your
community service activities, and in our art and dance studios. I
thought about what I could possibly say to you, just in the midst of
your senior spring and approaching your freshman fall---looking back
to last year and forward to next, with, I imagine, some trepidation
and some relief, a good dose of glee, and maybe a little bit of
sadness.

I thought about what must be your wide array of
interests, achievements, and ambitions, some of you particularly
skilled in the sciences, I'm sure, some in languages and some in
lacrosse, some in music and some in mathematics, some in friendship.
I thought about what, ten years ago, when I sat in this place with my
own classmates, who are now lawyers, actresses, psychologists,
songwriters, businesswomen, political activists, teachers,
mothers-when we sat in this place, what we would have liked to
know.

I thought about this ceremony-this acknowledgement
of all those varied interests, achievements and ambitions; this
offering up of praise for your commitments to your talents-and I
thought about all the other ceremonies of the coming spring at GA.
With these ceremonies, the school takes time away from the good
activity of educating you, to praise you. And these ceremonies of
praise set off you graduates as if the laurels bestowed here are
armor to protect and help you on your next adventure. Are they? Isn't
praise more a salve than a source of protection? Is this praise just
a carrot, a way of compelling us, headlong, into the next challenge?
A method of encouraging the Gatsby in us to run faster, stretch out
our arms further, until one fine morning….  Is our praise
today designed to exclude, to separate, to distinguish?

I don't think it's any of these things. You have
done some outstanding things at this school: some of you started here
fourteen years ago with the alphabet, and since then you have learned
whole languages; you started with adding and made it through
calculus; you unsludged the sludge in your sludge tests; you read
some of the great literature of all time and wrote your own
poems and stories …….the list goes on. And you have done
these things, many of you, when there have been other distractions,
appealing alternatives. You have taken seriously the fact that you
are a member of a fine academic institution, and you have gotten down
to the business of getting educated. You have had at your fingertips
dedicated teachers as committed to your development as they were to
that of students who preceded you by ten, twenty, thirty years in
some cases, and as they will be also to the members of the classes of
2018, 2028, 2038. You have done what your teachers have asked you to
do, and you have done it well.

But again, the school is not, and the society is
not, praising you because you've followed instructions. Rather, the
school and the society praise you today because, in doing these
things, you have done what is right.

This is why, then, the motto of the cum laude
society does not stop at mentioning that it recognizes academic
achievement in secondary schools, but rather, as you heard from Mr.
Fout, that it recognizes academic achievement, "for the purpose of
promoting aretê excellence; dikê justice; and timê

honor." And similarly, Greenwich Academy's purpose is not just to
prepare us for college, but to prepare us for living, putting us
through our paces here, toward the end of ingenium faciendum,
building our characters, or, to parse the etymology a bit, making or
shaping that which has been born inside of us. I believe that the
praise that the society and the school want to bestow upon you today
has a moral purpose: we want you to know, and feel, inside of
yourself, as your own source of strength, that not just our laws but
our lessons too can be wise restraints that set us free. When I found
this out for myself, about five years ago, five years after I'd sat
in your chairs, I was at Cambridge. It was the year after college,
and I'd set out, partly from inertia, to pursue an academic track. I
realized there that academia wasn't the right place for me-it wasn't
right for my personality or my set of mind. I remember going running
that year, for the first time since GA, along the gorgeous River Cam.
I exhausted myself with running---I didn't know what else to do-until
the day I found I was stepping in time to Robert Frost:

Until we found that it
was ourselves

We were withholding from
the land of living,

And forthwith found
salvation in surrender.

I left Cambridge that spring and I didn't start
the PhD program that I was supposed to start at Princeton the
following fall. But it wasn't just a poem that set me out on midtown
Manhattan looking for a job, highly educated but without any relevant
skills---it was my understanding, from the Emerson reading I'd done
in my junior year here, that: There is a time in everyone's education
when we arrive at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that
imitation is suicide; that we must take ourselves for better, for
worse, as our portion…. The power which resides in us is new in
nature, and none of us knows what that is which each of us can do,
nor do any of us know it until we have tried. I'd reached that time
in my education, and I had to be brave in that moment, and bold, to
set out on a life and a way of living I hadn't imagined for myself
before.

I went to work at a small consulting firm, first.
The one other woman at the firm took me out to lunch before I started
and told me, as if this were completely ordinary advice, to be
careful not to show my toes, or my shoulders at any time; to make
sure I walked a wide circle around the floor rather than directly
past the CEO's office; and, above all, never to wear perfume or any
other scents in the office. The CEO didn't like scents. But I have to
say it was a good place to work. It was a busy time in the market and
a small place, so I had opportunities to learn, and I had a manager
who taught me the lessons in statistics and financial analysis that
most of my colleagues learned in college. And that was how I learned
lessons in patience that I will not soon forget.

I remember the day we finished our first project.
We had been at the office through the night, my manager, another
analyst named PJ, and I taking comments first from a partner in
Seattle and then from one in Australia, having the production staff
show us why we couldn't move those PowerPoint boxes around in the way
they had wanted us to. We had a printer break down the hour before
the meeting, and as my manager took the faulty cartridges apart, the
other analyst and I taught ourselves to bind the books that had
already printed. We hurried out to Madison Avenue and when we
couldn't find a cab, I took my high heels off, and the two of us ran,
with our piles of books, to that meeting. I love the memory of that
day, where I learned again every lesson about teamwork, and
persistence, that I'd first learned at Greenwich Academy. I enjoyed
the work of my new job, and the analysis it required, but I saw then
that I really enjoyed also the shared efforts, the dynamic learning
from others, and the presentation of a final recommendation, which
would be objectively judged against the business realities that
would, over time, come to pass.

I moved to Morgan Stanley's investment banking
division after some months, because I knew I would have a more
thorough and rigorous training there. It was another difficult
transition - I did not know if I could do the work at first, but I
also knew-again remembering Emerson-that I wouldn't know whether I
could, until I tried. And, as I tried, again through many long
nights, I found that once I was through the raw intellectual
challenge of understanding this new industry, the real difficulty was
in maintaining my distance from it, and my sense of self.

I remembered what Ray Maguire, then the chairman
of the mergers and acquisitions department, had said when he welcomed
our assembled group of starting analysts. He told us, with the bit of
bluster that is typical of the industry, that he had in his time seen
a lot of analysts succeed and more analysts fail. But he thought one
thing distinguished those who succeeded it was a bean of strength, a
seed of separation from all the hub-bub and the busyness of what we
do. For me, that bean has been comprised of the lessons I've learned
in my education, at Greenwich Academy and beyond, the perspectives
I'd internalized from these learnings and made my own. There was
Frost and Emerson, and there is also Paul: Do not neglect the gift
that is in you, which was given down with prophesies when the council
of elders laid their hands upon you.

And what a council we
have here. Mrs. Wasserman, Mrs. Dixon, Mrs. Cragin, Ms. Hyman, Ms.
Schmidt-Fellner, Mrs. Guggenheimer, Ms Hudson (now Finch) we had so
many classes together, and you gave me so many gifts. Let me recall
in particular the lesson Mr. Murdock used to repeat: that it is
always your choice whether you do your homework or not; and that,
while girls may learn better in single-sex mathematics
environments-if we do do our homework, we certainly will learn better
than the boys do, and we'll show them that, by beating them in the
competitions, every time. It is not that infrequently, now (in fact
it happened yesterday) that I'm the only woman in a board room, and
very often when I am, I remember the first year that Greenwich
Academy went to Math Counts, in our kilts in the spring of 1992:
though there were middle school boys laughing at us, and
middle-school teachers who looked askance at Mr. Murdock: we were the
ones laughing and clutching our trophies on the van ride home.

Do not neglect the gift that Mr. Schwartz gives
us, every year, by spending endless hours after school, guiding us in
our discussions of piles of students' poems and prose, helping us to
think carefully about what the elements of these pieces are that
touch us, and to decide which to share by publishing them. This
spring break as I understand it, will be his twentieth, spent
splicing text and PhotoShopping pictures; I fondly remember the
decisions and revisions of Daedalus X, and I have enjoyed
reading eleven to nineteen. Mr. Schwartz, Mrs. Tamalonis, Fay, Caity,
Jordan, Caroline: I look forward to number 20. These are beautiful
books and a testament to a great dedication and a great number of
lessons learned.

I often remember the gift of confidence that Mrs.
McKinley gave me, when I was a very shy sixth grader and very eager
to avoid her public speaking classes. I am not so sure that I
deserved to deliver my speech to the whole of the Middle School, but
she presented this to me as an opportunity. After that, presenting to
my homeroom didn't seem so bad. Mrs. Berman also gave me an important
gift of confidence, after I penned a history paper that was far too
ambitious for its scope, which ended up being just about the worst
document I have ever written. When she took me aside after class to
discuss it, the first thing she said was that, when she read this
paper, she knew what paper I had tried to write. She looked me in the
eye and told me that she was glad that I'd "stepped off the curb,"
and taken the intellectual risk I had taken. She also gave me some
advice on how, the next time, I might make it across the street.

And
I hope that every time we run, we'll remember the gifts of Ms.
Meiklejohn. When I was a student, Ms. Meiklejohn joined the
cross-country team not because was our coach but because she wanted
to run. She loved to run. I think she was the first person that I
knew who did. I remember hearing her come up behind us on the course,
running two steps to my every one, offering words of encouragement,
and then passing us by. I've started to love running too, and I'll
run my first marathon later this spring. I will imagine, as I run,
that I can still hear her behind me, and then ahead.

Thanks
to Meredith FitzPatrick, I'll remember too the words Ms. Meiklejohn
shared with Devan: "We are capable of far more than we think. Limits
are discovered only by going all out with no thought of failure." Let
us go all out. The gift that we have been given, which has been born
inside of us, is now our character, which it is our responsibility to
protect, and develop, and with which we can bring forth good in the
world. This gift can be a source of strength and of courage as we set
forth on our next adventures. As you set out if you'll forgive
just a little more Frost-you're likely to find that the land
before you is unstoried, artless, unenhanced but, if you go
all out, you can, such as you are, give yourselves to it,
outright. And that is how you'll find that it is not today's
praise that is your armor, but the reason for the praise, which is
this gift, which is something like a star and which no one can
take away.

Thank you, Class of 2008, Mr. Fout, Mrs. King,
Greenwich Academy, for having me here today. My good wishesto all of
you.

NOTES