Julia Turner and Quinn Taylor were in the spotlight last Sunday during The Overlake School’s commencement ceremony.
The graduates not only received their diplomas and a well-deserved round of applause, they were recently voted by their classmates to address the crowd in the gymnasium on the Redmond campus.
TURNER
Turner will attend Amherst College in Massachusetts and is looking into studying law and jurisprudence and social thought — examining how the law affects people of different backgrounds and how people interact within the law.
On speaking at commencement, Turner’s eyes lit up.
“It’s great. I’ve spent six years at Overlake and I’ve absolutely loved my time here, so to be able to wrap that up by speaking at commencement means a lot to me,” Turner said last Friday following a student assembly. Her speech noted how Overlake has made students strong individuals who fit together well as a community.
During her time at Overlake, Turner was involved with a pair of peer mentoring programs, including one called Respect, in which she and others put on seminars about high school issues and situations to help incoming freshmen. Another club she started with a few other seniors was Bias in Sports Media — based on a club at Duke University — that tackled gender, racial and socio-economic biases and more. They also featured a We Don’t Say Project, which pointed people away from saying derogatory terms.
Turner’s time in the sports realm included playing basketball at Overlake and softball at Lake Washington High, since Overlake doesn’t field a team. The Kangs won a 2A state softball championship in 2014.
The best part about attending Overlake for Turner is the small class sizes — which allow teachers and students to interact in depth — and the welcoming school community.
“Our senior class is 72 people, and I may not be best friends with every single one of them, but I can say that I know them. I know a little bit of their story and I’ve gotten to interact with them over the years and they are all simply amazing,” Turner said. “I have no doubt that they will all go on to college and beyond and just be wildly successful because the teachers and the community at Overlake really do foster that.”
TAYLOR
Taylor will be attending Occidental College in Los Angeles and is set on majoring in physics. He’s into astronomy, as well, and owns a telescope — at Overlake, he had his sights set on participating in soccer, cross country, jazz band, theater and more.
Like Turner, the tight-knit Overlake community also had a major effect on Taylor and he’ll take great memories with him to college and beyond.
On his commencement speech, he noted: “I’m very humbled to be chosen to speak. I want to be truthful. For me, it’s kind of hard to offer wisdom to my classmates when I have lived the same amount that they have, although I do have different experiences. I have no idea what’s going to happen next year or the years to come, and because of what we’ve been given, the tools that we have been taught, it will help us tackle the problems that will come at us next year.”
Digging into his commencement speech was priority No. 1 — in the present.
It was a challenging task for Taylor, who considers himself a good public speaker but usually in the improvisational realm. In speeches in English and history classes, he’d start with a guideline and go from there. Since his commencement speech was set to be structured the whole way through, he assembled his thoughts and focused on the job at hand to lead his fellow graduates into the future.
Taylor would like to teach physics after college, sharing his knowledge and providing motivation to his students to not only succeed in his class, but in life and making the world a better place, he said.
