Naidely Gonzalez-Herrera

Every low point comes with a silver lining. For senior Naidely Gonzalez-Herrera, it was a bird pooping on her head in freshman year.

“A girl I had never seen in my entire life saw me struggling in the bathroom, washing my hair,” Naidely said. “She said, ‘Do you want me to wash it for you?’ My speech shows how important those little moments are, and how we didn’t get through high school by ourselves, but with a lot of help from our surrounding peers.”

As a member of Student Community Leadership (SCL) and Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID), and just in her personal life, Naidely exemplifies the kindness she loves about the senior class.

“Naidely is basically our AVID mom — she is always putting other people before herself,” AVID teacher Karen Dawson-Bowman said. “She’s always working behind the scenes to cheer everyone up.”

Small, caring details are never forgotten by Naidely: from gifting flowers on her friend’s mother’s birthday to leaving sticky notes on a hard day for her teacher, she shines as a reminder of the importance of helping others.

Naidely’s combination of both character and skill gives her the perfect opportunity to represent the senior class with a heartfelt speech.

“She will not only say something that’s meaningful, and reflects the class, but she’s going to do it in a way that will be lovely and poetic,” Dawson-Bowman said.

Her desire to become the graduation speaker came in two parts: first, she had found her love for English in highschool, and second, she wanted to represent the diversity in the senior class.

“My AVID teacher encouraged us to represent AVID, because it seems like the same kind of speakers talk during graduation,” Naidely said. “I wanted to show that there really is diversity throughout the school — I wanted to leave a mark.”

As the seniors grow closer and closer to their graduation, Naidely looks towards her class with nothing but love and pride.

“Congratulations to our class of 2023,” Naidely said. “We’ve been through so much and it’s been a crazy four years, but I’m really proud of us and everything we’ve done.”

Austin Liu

In middle school, senior Austin Liu worked with his friend to make a Minecraft server from eBay and Craigslist parts — all to avoid paying the ten dollar monthly fee.

To this day, this server is still up and running. 

By high school, Austin had moved past Minecraft servers and fully leaned into this idea of hands-on work, starting coding projects and leading the math modeling club. He took his passion for computer science and applied it to solve the problems he saw around him.

“Austin’s a risk taker,” senior Ritam Saha said. “He’s always willing to break out of his comfort zone and try something. He’s always looking to improve himself.”

Austin’s peers believe he was chosen as this year’s graduation speaker because he embodies the bold initiative of the class of 2023. Austin has dedicated himself to improving the world around him — from his summer research on predicting COVID-19 spread to his volunteering through StreetCode Academy to his role as the tech director of Los Altos Hacks to make computer science education more accessible across California.

“Our graduating class has lived through significant worldwide turmoil and has not only adapted to overcome it, but also mobilized to help the surrounding community,” senior Victoria Yu said. “I think Austin was chosen to be a graduation speaker because he represents our graduating class’s commitment to social good.”

In his graduation speech, Austin plans to mention specific achievements of the class of 2023 such as the robotics team and girls cross country. He wants to highlight students who used opportunities to pursue their passions. He believes that he and his peers were shaped by the many challenges they encountered, and that their newfound tenacity defines his class.

“My graduation speech is about the theme of transformation and change that the class of 2023 has gone through,” Austin said. “So much has changed in the past six years and this kind of resiliency, the adaptation required to kind of push through that and to come out stronger is something that really sets the class of ‘23 apart.”