Live life and do what you love.
That’s the key message this year’s Princess Margaret Secondary School valedictorians say they’re planning to push at the graduation ceremony.
Cassidy Lindsay and Reece Haberstock were selected over a dozen other students to represent their graduating class, and say the competition was tough.
“Everyone in it wasn’t just like some really smart kid,” Haberstock said.
Lindsay agreed, noting that the valedictorian ballot, for which seven boys and seven girls were short-listed, was full of extra-curriculars.
“They were looking for people who could show something from all aspects,” she said. “Like leadership or band or athletics and stuff like that.”
The pair have been working on a speech together, and they say they want to inspire their fellow graduates to forget monetary wealth — go for experiential wealth.
“What we want to get across is that life is more important than money and that just do what makes you happy,” Lindsay said.
Following graduation, neither is putting on the brakes for long. Lindsay plans to head to the University of Victoria to go into elementary education, while Haberstock heads to Montreal to take mechanical engineering and swim for the varsity team at McGill University.
While the two say they’re excited for a bit of change in scenery, they don’t intend to become strangers to the community that brought them up.
“It’ll be cool to see the mountains, again, after a little while,” Haberstock said.
Speaking for their generation, the two listed off a few qualities they said define them, including acceptance of people, social, technology-based and awareness.
“We know what’s going on in other parts of the world, whereas other generations might have not been,” Haberstock said. “Especially with social media, we’ll just see what’s happening.”
Some of those qualities may be part of why their generation is looking to take on the grander issues facing today’s society.
“Save the bees,” Lindsay said with a laugh. “I think our generation has done a really good job to break down some of those barriers for the LGBTQ+ group. I think we’re very accepting of everybody.”