Continues Journey The
Salutatorian: HOLLY HUNTER ’26
Two years before Commencement, Holly Hunter walked into her kitchen after a long night at dance and found her parents looking at her grades. They jokingly asked what she would talk about if she ever had to give a graduation speech. Holly knew immediately: “I would probably just read off a love letter to Gilmour.”
Two years later, that’s essentially what she did.
Few students embraced life at Gilmour as fully as Holly. She was the student regularly called upon to give prospective families a tour and served as a resident ambassador. Her involvement stretched into nearly every corner of campus. Gilmour requires 60 hours of service for graduation; Holly completed 170. She finished Gilmour’s entire French curriculum by the end of freshman year, then taught herself Spanish over the summer and placed into Spanish III. She eventually completed that curriculum, too, earning the Dual Language Award, an honor achieved by very few students in Gilmour history. Over four years, Holly earned 14 departmental awards across five academic departments. She was named a National Merit Scholar and Governor’s Merit Scholar, received the Harvard Book Award, was inducted into the Cum Laude Society and served as treasurer of the National Honor Society. She also earned a 5 on every AP exam she took. There was plenty happening outside her classes, too. Holly co-led Baking 4 Rainbows, which raised thousands of dollars annually for the Rainbow Babies and Children’s Foundation, and co-founded Courageous Connections to serve those affected by injustices in the justice system. She became the first female leader of Gilmour’s Investment Club, served as co-editor-in-chief of the yearbook and was a Kairos leader. Away from Gilmour, she studied ballet for 14 years with City Ballet of Cleveland, performing soloist roles including the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker . This fall, Holly is studying biomedical engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a member of Honors Carolina. She received a full academic scholarship covering tuition, fees, housing, food and study abroad, along with guaranteed membership in an accelerated research program. Yet when Holly stood before her classmates at Commencement, she wasn’t interested in recounting any of those accomplishments. Instead, she went back to the freshman pit and football games at Weber Stadium, sophomore retreat in a torrential downpour, Kairos, teachers who became mentors and classmates who became best friends.
Those memories carried particular weight for Holly. Before coming to Gilmour, she had moved states and attended four different schools in four years. She said she arrived without feeling that she had “a place, people or a purpose.”
Gilmour gave her all three.
By the end of her speech, the love letter Holly had imagined writing two years earlier had become something bigger. “Maybe this speech really did become a love letter to Gilmour. But Class of 2026, I hope you can realize that it was also a love letter to you.”
Gilmour | FALL 2026
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