rate this speech: 	Good afternoon family, friends, faculty, and of course, the graduating class of 2023. 
	Before I begin my speech I would like to thank everyone who helped me get to this point. My teachers and counselors for guiding me, my friends for always being there, my sister for being a role-model and also indirectly pressuring me to live up to her title of valedictorian, and my parents for their love and support. Without you, I would not be standing here today. 
	When we first stepped on the campus of Orange High School, we had no idea what we were in for the next four years. We didn’t know that freshman year, the “2 weeks of no school” would turn into a life-changing global pandemic. We didn’t know that sophomore year, on Zoom, we would transform from a face to half of our face to our ceiling to a black square. We didn’t know that junior year, to sit outside for lunch was also a death sentence to the millions of bees living inside the benches. We didn’t know that senior year, we would be robbed of even a singular snow day in our last year. 
	On a more serious note, we didn’t know that some of us would experience anti-semitism simply playing a sport and that we would have to go through a serious lockdown and bag search. We didn’t know that on top of all of that, we would also have to deal with a global pandemic, a polarized nation, an ongoing war, and a struggling environment. Our high school experience has been filled with nothing but fear and unknowns. 
	Yet, through all of the unknown, what we now do know is that we survived. If we learned anything from high school, it’s how to persevere. Our class has been challenged physically, mentally, and emotionally at every step of high school. But despite everything, we are all standing here today, stronger than ever, prepared to take a step into the real world. 
Our perseverance and hard work has clearly not gone in vain. Our class has been the home to many achievements: back-to-back sport state titles, research publications, olympiad achievements, and numerous others in public speaking, leadership, volunteer work, and more. 

When I was notified a couple of weeks ago that I would be giving this speech, with the study habits of a valedictorian, I wrote this speech with the same grit and dedication that I put into many of my English papers. So at 9:00 PM last night, I began. I pulled up a blank Google Doc, split-screened it with ChatGPT and graduation speech examples, and off I went. 
In all of the examples I read, now would be the time in the speech where I giv