We asked Dan Cluchey, the senior class speaker at the 2008 commencement, to choose two other student commencement speakers and explain why they nailed it. He chose Noor Qasim ’18 and Amir Hall ’17. Here’s his take on their speeches.

A Simple, Clever Structure

A young woman wearing a cap and gown speaking at commencement
Jazz musicians can improvise beautifully, stepping away from the rote and the ex-pected, because they’ve mastered the scales—they’re free to venture out because they’re tethered to a strong home base. The same is true of a speech with a well-defined structural device. Noor’s device is simple and clever: the speech is presented as a rough chronology of the times she cried at Amherst. She stakes it out with a quotable line—“Sadness and joy are next-door neighbors”—then proves the wisdom by poignantly walking through the sadness and joy reflected in each cry. The ballast of that structuring device allows her to venture off into unexpected places and hit interesting notes — it works because the device keeps bringing her home. Funny and smart and all held together in the same key.

Watch Noor Meloy Qasim's senior class speech

An Ebb-and-Flow Cadence

A young man wearing a cap and gown speaking at commencement
One of the most important things to calibrate in any speech is something I think of as zooming out and zooming in—when do you speak broadly, universally, thematically; when do you speak intimately or anecdotally instead? Amir’s speech zooms out right away by asking two big questions of the audience: “Where do you come from? And how did you arrive?” But he doesn’t linger at cruising altitude. He immediately zooms in to tell a personal story of a small moment—falling asleep in a car ride with his parents—that smuggles in so much meaning and warmth and addresses those mammoth questions with pinpoint answers. It’s incredibly effective, and the ebb-and-flow cadence of zooming out and zooming in between universal landscapes and intimate details lends a rhythm to a speech already profound in its content.

Watch Amir Denzel Hall's senior class speech