After choosing to attend St. Xavier as an eighth-grade student, I remember seeing a shirt that read “tradition unequaled.” While this phrase left me perplexed at the time, I have come to understand how perfectly it has defined my four years as a St. Xavier Tiger.
In the classroom, we collaborate. Teachers work with students to comprehend abstract concepts and apply them to the real world. Students pose opinions. We disagree, we discuss, and, most importantly, we learn from each other. Our school community learns to value and respect the opinions of others as our viewpoints of life continue to change.
When the school day is over, we continue to achieve. We run sprints, we play instruments, we recite lines, we paint and we write programs. We exercise our passions while working with other students and faculty who share common interests, forming lifelong relationships along the way.
However, our gifts are not restricted to our campus alone; rather, they exist all over the world. We seek to help those who are not blessed with the same opportunities as we, and we take action. Students travel to Jamaica to help teach in an underprivileged school, we provide proper funerals for homeless men and women, and we package canned foods to help the local Dare to Care food bank. In the technology department, we create 3D-printed prosthetic hands to help children around the world and make 3D-printed masks for medical staff in the time of a global crisis.
As a school, we gather together. Nearly 1,400 of the wildest students packing the Rage Cage under the Friday night lights, juniors attending the Christian Awakening Retreat and making friends with other students they never thought they’d come to know — our school community is an atmosphere of collaboration and togetherness.
Through everything we do, faith comes first. Our four years are about learning what it means to recognize our blessings, and give thanks. We take time out of our daily schedule to pray and celebrate our Catholic roots, and we incorporate that into every aspect of our school community through reflection and commitment.
Tradition at St. Xavier is not defined by our successes and our failures, but how we grow from our experiences. The tradition is about learning from our classmates, teammates and peers. We learn from a faculty of adults who strive to see us grow and who act as role models for each and every student. Our four-year journey is not one that is walked alone. Through mutual support with the members of our community, we join a legacy of 19,000 alumni that represent that tradition.