The Class of 2026 graduation ceremony will be June 11 from 2-4 p.m in Rockefeller Chapel, where Stephanie Horton, a 1989 alumna who is now senior director of global consumer marketing at Google, will be this year’s commencement speaker.
Student speakers will include Senior Class president Elspeth LaCroix-Birdthistle, all-school president Daniel Chang and Light Dohrn, whose speech was chosen by the graduation committee to be delivered at the ceremony.
Two groups of seniors will perform musical presentations. Hannah Blanche Bueno de Mesquita, Davin Moser, Ruben Heyrapetyan, Sara Park, Whit Waterstraat, Rachel Xiang and Sofia Ybarra will perform a Cyndi Lauper song. Misha Duda, Rafa Garrido and Miles Wilczak will additionally perform a musical selection.
To select the commencement speaker, members of the graduation committee performed research on potential speakers, using suggestions from their classmates, faculty and staff. They looked primarily for U-High alumni before deciding together who would be best as a speaker.
“As it relates to their goals for the speech, the graduation committee usually looks for someone who has the Lab experience, someone who maybe didn’t always take a direct path after school, showing sometimes you can land where you should be, without really knowing where you’re going,” Ana Campos, dean of students, said.
Since her time at Lab, Ms. Horton has been focused on fashion and technology. She is the co-founder of Fashion Tech Connects, a career development and networking program dedicated to increasing the number of women in fashion and technology roles. She is also a member of the Board of Advisers for the fashion and luxury MBA at New York University.
As the selected student speaker, Light hopes to emphasize what it means to have gone to Lab and how so many of the seniors have known each other for such a long time.
“I want to do justice to how well my grade knows each other, in ways that we don’t always think or talk about,” Light said. “Even if everyone always says ‘Oh we’ll never see each other again after this,’ and that might be true, it’s a very specific kind of knowing someone to have gone to school with them for so long.”
Elspeth believes her speech is an opportunity to reflect on her deep engagement with her class.
“I understand the weight that is representing my whole grade,” Elspeth said. “In that way, I have tried my best this past year, and in my speech, to keep all of my classmates in mind and to reach out to them, as individuals and a fellow senior, as much as possible.”
Daniel looks forward to highlighting Lab’s academic diversity and individuality in his speech.
“I think what makes Lab such a special place is that there’s so much intellectual curiosity,” Daniel said. “There are so many different people that are interested in their own niches, and so I really want to make sure I mention that when I speak.”
