This Friday is also a big day for the 1570 high school graduates in the Munich district: they will receive their high school diploma in the presence of their family and friends. At the same time, it is also the day on which the departing students look back on their school days. High school graduate Nils Kühn does this in his high school graduation speech at the Höhenkirchen-Siegertsbrunn high school. He told the SZ in advance what he would be talking about.
In the graduation speech you can finally be honest – who will you take on?
I will not pick a specific person. In my speech, I want everyone to think and reflect a little. If I were to talk about a teacher that I might have had a conflict with, it doesn’t represent the whole grade.
They want to encourage self-reflection. What are you going to talk about?
There are two major points that all students have gone through in the past two years. I’m talking about loneliness and socializing – to have or not to have.
An emotional topic.
Regarding social contacts, I will go into the four months of online classes. You could meet friends there in your free time, but only in a limited number. At that time, our class chat was very active – there were sometimes 200 to 300 messages a day. Regarding loneliness, I will go into the fact that it is a gift that we were able to experience this at such a young age and learn for our lives to teach ourselves something without outside help and also to allow ourselves quiet moments. That is not always so easy in our meritocracy. Incidentally, the word Corona only appears once in the speech, because at some point it became exhausting for us young people to hear the word. I want to show that the virus has played a role, but there are other things as well.
Did you know you were going to give the speech for a long time and had it in the block quickly?
It wasn’t actually planned for me to give the speech. The high school graduate who is also organizing the prom actually wanted to keep her. But since there was a lot to do, she asked if someone could help her. I then offered to write the speech and quickly knew what it was about. I’m interested in psychology, I want to study that too. The issue became clear very quickly. First we wanted to perform them together, then we decided that I would do them alone. When I was at school, I always enjoyed giving presentations and speaking in front of people. There will be 400 people there.
With lockdowns and digital lessons, you and your classmates had a comparatively difficult time in upper school. Did you get on reasonably well with the help of school?
When there were online lessons for the second time, it was another challenge for our school. Everyone had hoped things would continue as normal. So there were a few technical problems initially. We had a school cloud in which the teachers placed lesson assignments and when lessons were scheduled. It didn’t work initially. Neither does the Mebis platform. But the school reacted very quickly. For example, teachers wrote an e-mail to a student and he forwarded it.
How is the mood with you and the other high school graduates now? Are you happy that school is over, or are you worried about the future in view of the Ukraine war, the climate crisis and the ongoing pandemic?
We are glad that we have the Abitur, also to have a break and to calm down. Some of the high school graduates I’m in contact with are a bit afraid of the unknown. We have learned in the two years that sudden changes can come. We also know that other major conflicts can arise again, through other wars or other viruses. Many of us travel the world to try something new.
What are your personal plans?
I’m going to New Zealand for nine months for “Work and Travel” in November, also to get some distance from what’s here. Then we continue as before.