Natalie Busher is the voice of Rosemount's graduates

• Photo: Senior speaker

Natalie Busher is the senior speaker for the class of 2012.

Talk about it

Natalie Busher has had 13 years to experience everything Rosemount schools have to offer. She started at Shannon Park Elementary, moved on to Rosemount Middle and is getting ready to graduate from Rosemount High School.

Now, she has eight minutes to sum it all up.

When the RHS class of 2012 wraps up its high school career, Busher will be one of the last people to address her classmates as a whole. Selected through an audition process as the student speaker for this year’s graduation ceremony, it will be Busher’s job to take years worth of memories and experiences and condense them into a form that will hold everyone’s attention and, she hopes, keep them entertained.

Busher heard about the student speaker opportunity from one of her teachers, and she liked the idea. She likes speaking in public, and she feels like she’s good at it.

“I like to share my ideas with people,” she said. “I always have a lot of ideas in my head.”

Busher started working on her speech two weeks before this month’s auditions. She struggled at first to find what she called her tie – a theme that would bring everything in her speech together – but once she had that, things flowed pretty quickly.

Busher doesn’t want to give away too much about her speech before graduation day, but she feels like she found a good way to make sense of the high school experience without resorting to the things student speakers have been saying for as long as there have been caps and gowns.

“You always hear people talk about how your high school life is a journey,” she said. “I wanted something that would symbolize that, but not be cliché.

“I was trying to think about things that would relate to everyone as a whole.”

Busher has had plenty of good experiences at Rosemount High School. She plays volleyball and is on the track team. She is a co-leader of the RHS chapter of High Schools Against Cancer, a National Honor Society officer and a member of the RHS band. She plans to attend Winona State University next year to study nursing and Spanish. She also plans to be on the track team there.

Busher has spent a lot of time since she won her spot fine tuning her speech. She’s gone over it with family and friends. She’s taken out jokes that turned out to be less entertaining than they were in her head, and she’s added things here and there. The speech is currently about seven minutes long, but Busher hopes to get it close to her eight-minute limit by the time graduation arrives.

She’s got things nearly how she wants them. Now she just has to wait for her chance to share.

“I’m really looking forward to it,” Busher said. “The nerves haven’t hit yet. I’m sure they will when I walk up on that stage.”

Tags: school district 196, high school, education, rosemount