The small audience of judges was silent as Alisha Beltramo, a
fourth-year communication studies student, spoke her piece. She
spoke with great emotion of what she felt her experience at UCLA
had given her, which she would be able to employ in her life beyond
the proverbial campus walls.
Her audition, however, pales in comparison to College
Commencement this Saturday, when her own family, not to mention the
estimated 2,500 graduating students and their guests, will crowd
Pauley Pavilion, waiting intently for the glimmer of hope she is
traditionally expected to give.
“At a school as large as UCLA, I feel it’s a huge
responsibility,” Beltramo said. “(The speech) has to be
something that all students resonate with.”
The difficulty for speech writers lies in finding the perfect
combination of personal anecdotes and generalizations, while still
standing out from all the graduation speeches that have come
before.
“Graduation Speech Inspired by Dr. Seuss,” written
by engineering and applied sciences graduate student Genevieve
Fernandez, is one example.
Using her experiences as a woman in a male-dominated field, and
taking cues from the book “Oh, the Places You’ll
Go!” Fernandez plans to give students inspiration for the
real world, while reminding them of the people who helped them get
to this point in their lives.
“Young people today have forgotten about gratitude,”
she said. “We not only need to acknowledge our
accomplishments, but also those who have been there since the
beginning.”
UCLA School of Arts and Architecture speaker Biddy Tran, a
fourth-year art student, started out with a typical speech, but she
wasn’t satisfied.
“Forget all the formal stuff,” she said. “I
felt it was meaningless. … My goal is to get people fired
up.”
So on Friday she will talk about the necessity for students to
get involved politically and to reinstate the arts as a part of
public education.
Voicing opinions took on a whole new meaning for arts and
architecture graduate student speakers Liam Clancy and Iddrisu
Saaka.
As representatives of the world arts and cultures major, the two
plan to present a message of tolerance and togetherness through
dance.
“We are dancers,” said Saaka, a native citizen of
Ghana. “Instead of just going up there and talking, we want
to show the uniqueness of the WAC department and our willingness to
work with other cultures.”
Clancy reiterated the sentiment, adding undertones of their
cross-cultural friendship.
“We come from different cultures and have different dance
styles,” he said, “but we can still dance
together.”