Hello. I am Dr. Wood, dean of the Department of Extracurricular Feel-Goodery, Pretending to Like Opera Music and Other Miscellaneous Snooty Academia, and today is your graduation! (CLAP CLAP CLAP.) I’m so proud of all you graduates, moving out into the cold and scary world, away from the comfortable womb of grade-grubbing.

I’m not a real doctor, you say? Well, Dr.-ish Wood. I’m a year away from getting my bachelor’s degree in English. So you can all just nod your heads and smile and pretend you think what I’m saying is useful and interesting. You know. Just like you did for the last four years.

Speaking of undergraduate degrees, by the way, I hope you departing seniors aren’t under-excited to enter the great and global work force. Yours is a wide-open world full of possibility, free of the stresses of late-night essay-writing, irregular bowel movements caused by a steady diet of greasy fast food, parking tickets and paying someone to give you bad grades because you don’t like reading The Odyssey.

Actually, I’m lying. You’ll still have all of that, but at least you’re going to get paid to suffer through it. Unless you’re an English major whose only talent is making jokes about bowel movements, in which case you’ll still suffer, but no one will pay you for it.

OK, onto the speech-y part of the speech.

Oh, brave and noble scholars, ye who darest to embarken forthwith whilst courageously blah blah blah Oh, the places you’ll blah blah blah and so, Don Quixote marched valiantly on to blah blah blah be careful about investing in tech stocks blah blah blah be like the Giving Tree blah blah blah you are more special than other people graduating from other schools around the country at this exact same time.

Our admirable, distinguished graduates will go on to run corporations, cure diseases, hold political offices and figure out how to do that thing rich people do where they take money and make it into more money. We are so proud of you. Please remember your alma mater when those enormous paychecks start rolling in. Again, we are proud of you. Please donate.

To all you less-distinguished graduates, you who will go on to sell security systems to gullible elderly people, self-publish your volume of fanfiction based on the Star Wars franchise and come back to the school to cruise for vulnerable freshmen girls, we encourage you, please, to stay out of the “local crimes” section of the paper. And remember, everyone can see anything you post on Facebook. Anything. Including those photos you took of yourself with your cell phone while you were standing in front of a mirror with your shirt off so Lindsay would see your awesome six-pack and totally dump Kyle for you. We can all see that.

Go forth, and honorably represent this school, just like you we know you will.

In conclusion, if any of you are lying about having passed Math 960, we will hunt you down. Forty years from now, you’ll be sitting on the Supreme Court, and Dr. Preebles will march in wearing his sweater vest and demand your resignation because you never actually learned how to divide fractions.

Godspeed!