DEERFIELD — At the 218th commencement of Deerfield Academy, speaker Carrie Freeman Braddock had a simple message for the graduates from the class of 2017: Do well, but also do good.
She implored the students to not only be successful, but to help solve problems and do work of importance.
Freeman Braddock graduated from the school in 1992, and went on to earn degrees from Dartmouth and Columbia. She is now the director of the Centerbridge Foundation, which helps fund education initiatives in New York and London.
Freeman Braddock told the graduating seniors that with the education they have received they not only have opportunity, but a responsibility to help solve the problems of their generation.
She was among one of the first classes of women to graduate from Deerfield after the school made the decision to become coeducational in 1989. Freeman Braddock said part of the decision to go to Deerfield was because they had the chance.
“We invented our own version of the Deerfield girl,” she said.
She advised the students to seek out opportunities like that, where there is no road map and there may be several mistakes and failures before success.
Margarita Curtis, the head of school, gave remarks at the beginning of the ceremony, which was Sunday at 10 a.m., on the Deerfield Academy campus in Old Deerfield.
Two students from the school, Duncan Alexander Duff Mackay II and Lucy Bradford Beimfohr, gave senior addresses before Freeman Braddock’s remarks.
The following are local students in the Class of 2017 at Deerfield Academy.
Aiden Day, Deerfield,
Aliana Thomas-Adams, Deerfield
Lillian Beaubien, Montague
Lindsay Warger, Shelburne Falls
Owen Downie, South Deerfield
Robert Mollo, South Deerfield
Shane Graves, Deerfield
Shelby Scarborough, South Deerfield
Stephen Lively, Greenfield
William Morgan, Conway