Good Morning Parents, Professors, Staff, Friends, Family, and of course, fellow graduates.

My name is Christopher Petrillo and over the past year I served as the student body president. In that role, I had the pleasure of seeing my peers work to better themselves and their community.

Some of you were members of sororities and fraternities, volunteering and raising thousands of dollars for charity.

Others did research to continue the academic traditions of the university and push frontiers of knowledge even further.

And this year, many of you took up the mantle of those before you to become activists working to create a more just and equitable world. There are so many stories I cannot mention today, but you should all be proud of the time you spent here, I know I am.

Now that we have moved past the hello’s perhaps we should cover the goodbyes that inevitably follow. And, although each goodbye is unique and difficult, this goodbye feels so much more difficult than the goodbyes that brought us here four years ago.

This Goodbye starts with the thought that maybe we will never be together in this place again. This goodbye is a testament to the Williams’ Fire Escape sunsets; the sprained wrist from the Naked Bike Ride that you shouldn’t have ran, and to the many, many late nights in the Howe Library.

This Goodbye makes you reflect on the ice cream dripping down your fingers from the Simpson dining hall ice cream, the many trips to the waterfront and Rasputin’s after exams to decompress and the noise violations from Residential Life and the Burlington Police Department for taking a step back to immaturity before taking on the world today.

But, as we say our final goodbyes, I challenge each of you to change just one goodbye, into a thank you.

Instead of saying goodbye to that friend who is leaving for their own adventures, say: “thank you for saving my life that night”; and instead of saying goodbye to that advisor who was at your beck and call; say “Thanks for making sure I stayed in school”, and instead of saying goodbye to that acquaintance you never knew too deeply, thank them for talking to you even when you were both awkward students in an ocean of strangers.

Say thank you to just one person who pulled you out of you own little world and into theirs and remember your UVM home, your UVM family, and the people who taught you how to be a person in this world. Each small, unassuming experience you’ve had here has taught you something useful—and you’ll pull it out of your tool belt when it matters most.

I would like to say thank you to my parents, Professors Petrillo and Petrillo, my mentor Dr. Ryan McGinnis, my fraternity, Pi Kappa Alpha, the Student Government Association, my fellow mechanical engineering graduates and to so, so many others that are here today.

And with that, I say to you all, not goodbye, but Thank you, and I cannot wait to say hello when our paths cross again.

Congratulations Class of Two Thousand and Eighteen, I wish you all the best!