You have spent the past four years, and in some cases five, putting in late hours studying, joining clubs and organizations, participating in various extracurriculars and overall making the most out of your college career. Now it is all over and you are prepared to walk down the aisle toward college commencement and the start of the rest of your life.

Decked out in your cap and gown you await a powerful speech filled with enough motivation to rocket you into the real world. There is just a slight problem—you have never heard of your commencement speaker, so you spend the rest of graduation distracted by the need to figure out where you may have seen this person before.

So the question is left to linger in the air: why are students not included in the commencement speaker selection process?

The students are the ones who stand to benefit from the commencement speaker. It is their lives which are about to change, so why are they not allowed at least some form of a vote in who gives them those final pushing off words?

We here at The Saint believe the students deserve the right to pick their commencement speaker. Instead of alienating the students from the process, why doesn’t the establishment form a committee to give the students a voice?

At the very least, allow the students who are graduating to give some form of input on the commencement speaker. It could be something as simple as putting a survey on The Moose.

It wouldn’t take much—just a little effort and a lot of consideration—to take a student’s graduation from a scrapbook memory to an extraordinary event permanently ingrained in their memory.