Fox Lane Salutatorian Ava Shuster: Showing up is the bravest thing we can do

Fox Lane Salutatorian Ava Shuster. (Jim MacLean Photo)

Good evening everyone. Faculty, families, friends, and most importantly, my fellow members of the Class of 2025. It’s a great honor to stand here today as your salutatorian. Thank you all for being here to celebrate this milestone with us.

Just over a week ago, I finished up my ASPIRE internship — something a lot of us did after AP exams were over, when the days became a strange blur between finals and freedom. Some of us shadowed doctors. Some returned to our elementary schools to help teach classes. I ended up in the woods of Pound Ridge.

I was planting trees and restoring habitats, which sounds peaceful, until you’re sliding through mud in a poncho, trying to dig holes in what turns out to be solid rock, and somehow getting super-itchy poison ivy through your sweatpants. There were moments I genuinely questioned whether I was helping nature or just mildly irritating it.

So, it definitely wasn’t glamorous. But even in the mess — hiking through thorns, pulling weeds, putting in one tree at a time — I felt like I was helping something grow. Slowly. Quietly. Even when it didn’t look like much.

Because sometimes progress just looks like showing up, getting dirty, and trusting that it’ll add up.

I got another reminder of that during my science research project in junior year — the thrilling world of phytoplankton. I basically had to record how many organisms there were in a sample, and I started with a very official, science-y method to measure their biomass …  until I realized that my fancy microgram scale wasn’t just imprecise, it was wildly and terribly wrong. It kept telling me things weighed negative grams, which, it may come as no surprise, did not make it into my final data analysis. 

So instead of being able to take one quick measurement, I spent hours every Sunday counting tiny green algae one by one under a microscope. In silence.

The process was slow, repetitive, and borderline absurd. At times, it felt like a very niche form of punishment. But eventually, it worked. And somehow, the chaos made the end result more meaningful. After all that time, I finally saw what I’d been chasing: this fragile, often-overlooked form of life, quietly sustaining entire ecosystems.

And honestly, that felt familiar. Because so much of the growth we’ve done here — the friendships, the resilience, the slow process of figuring out who we are — didn’t happen in the moments that went smoothly. It came from the pivots. The do-overs. The times we had to figure it out as we went, or just keep showing up when things felt uncertain.

Some days, the biggest accomplishment was coming to school on four hours of sleep and pretending you understood what was happening in calculus.

Some days, it was helping a friend through a crisis while pretending you also weren’t mid-crisis too, at the same time.

Sometimes, it was making it through a tough game or practice when every muscle was tired and your mind wanted to quit — but you pushed yourself anyway.

None of those things go on a résumé. But they matter. That’s the kind of growth that doesn’t always look impressive — but it’s real. And it lasts.

And the thing is, nature doesn’t rush. And neither should we. I know it can feel like we’re supposed to have it all figured out by now: our majors, our careers, our futures. But nature doesn’t demand certainty — it demands persistence. The best things take time. So will we.

And I hope we carry that lesson with us. That we don’t need to have everything figured out right away. That trial and error is still learning. That changing direction isn’t failing. It’s called adapting. Nature is great at that. So are we.

So to the Class of 2025, I hope we keep choosing growth, even when it’s uncomfortable. I hope we stay curious — like scientists, like explorers, like the kids we used to be in our backyards turning over rocks just to see what was underneath.

Because showing up — messy, tired, uncertain — is the bravest thing we can do. And each day we do it, we get closer to becoming the fullest version of the people we’re meant to be.

Class of 2025, this is just the beginning. Congratulations, and thank you.

Due to a production error, this speech was not printed properly in the June 27 edition of The Recorder. A corrected e-edition of the paper has been posted online and the full speech will run in an upcoming print edition.