As the countdown-to-commencement clock continues to tick away, auditions for the end-of-senior year activities have begun, and picking the graduation speaker was one of them.

The graduation speaker has almost more recognition than the valedictorian.

The valedictorian only gets to speak at Honors Convocation, an event that only students with a 3.0 or higher GPA can attend. On the other hand, the graduation speaker gets to speak at commencement, which is where every senior and family member will be.

The graduation speaker works hard to get the position as well. The student has to prepare a speech and present it in front of judges in order to be selected. The valedictorian automatically gets a speech just for having the highest GPA.

Any senior can apply and try out to be speaker. The speech needs to be between six to eight minutes long.

This year’s candidates were Teagan MacDonald, Joseph Dever, Dylan Brewer, Mitchell Judd, Aaron Haack, Jacob Miller, and Rebecca Barringer.

Miller and Dever did not audition for the position because of the competition and unfinished speeches.

“I felt that I could have made an impact on the competition,” Miller said. “I just suffered from bit of writer’s block in my conclusion and could not wrap it up perfectly enough.”

MacDonald’s mentioned how the Class of 2015 “grew up together for a long time,” and how it can be considered a “huge family.”

She explained the ups and downs and how everyone came together to become great leaders in the community.

Barringer’s speech explained how seniors have gotten knocked down in the past few years but have always managed to pick themselves back up.

She also said all of the little assignments that seniors dread and complain about help them in the long run.

Brewer’s speech alluded to a lot of movies and celebrities.

For example, he mentioned Michelle Obama’s dietary restrictions on the pizza at school and quoted a few lines from the movies “Mean Girls” and “The Hunger Games.”

He gave out thank you notes to high school memories and explained how the lessons the graduates have learned will help them in the future.

Haack put his own spin on his speech. Instead of doing the cliche, “What seniors have learned and where they are going to go now,” he talked about how great the Class of 2015 is.

He brought up the fact that the boys’ and girls’ bowling teams won back-to-back state championship titles, and two seniors are going to intern at the Capitol with state Rep. Pam Faris (D-Clio) this summer.

Because of how great the seniors are, Haack said “the future should be afraid” of them and, hopefully, they will be “rolling in the Benjamins.”

On the other hand, Judd talked about the impressions the teachers gave the graduating class over the years.

He said he felt like he was in a “Star Wars” movie his freshman year because Mr. Tim Phipps, his physical education teacher, was Chewbacca.

Every year he pointed out specific teachers that had the most influence on him. Some of the teachers he included in his speech were Mr. Scott Lints, Mr. Andy Nester, and Mr. John Hall.

The beginning was humorous, but toward the end Judd explained his true feelings about senior year.

About 20 teachers were in the audience, judging these candidates on a rubric. The criteria consisted of eye contact, performance anxiety, content, organization, stance, pace/pauses/pitch, inflection/articulation, and time.

Each category was on a scale from one to five, five being the best.

In the end, the judges voted, and after tallying the results, it was close between Haack and Brewer. But Brewer came out on top with a score of 677 and will be the speaker for this year’s commencement.