On Tuesday, May 26, The Guardian ran the unanticipated headline, "Dog shoots woman with shotgun at Nebraska convenience store." We would likely not, however, encounter the headline "Man shoots dog." In many journalism classes, students will encounter a similar comparison: while "Dog bites man" rarely makes headlines, the extraordinary and unexpected "Man bites dog" will.
At Milton, however, the unexpected can begin to feel like the expectation. As students start their summer jobs, travel to programs, network in internships, and perform in athletic showcases, it can become easy to assume every moment of our lives should and must be impressive.
Milton is a community in which excellence is commonplace, and this excellence is indeed worth celebrating. Every year, we sit on the folding chairs scattered across the Quad to squint our eyes through the sun and watch as an esteemed alum with unimaginable accolades advise us on how to be—well—us. This year’s speaker, Patrick Radden Keefe, has published six books, one of which was named the nineteenth best book of the 21st century by The New York Times. He writes for The New Yorker and attended Columbia University, then Cambridge, and then Yale Law School. Even his side hustles are remarkable: he has moonlighted as a Hollywood screenwriter, a J. Crew model, and a policy advisor to the Secretary of Defense.
Keefe is not alone. Just last month on Seminar Day, Milton’s classrooms were filled with start-up founders, venture capitalists, CEOs, physicians, journalists, and policy experts discussing how they “humanized the future.” And there is nothing wrong with admiring these sorts of remarkable people. Head of School Alixe Callen herself explained, in an interview, that Milton “is a place where it is cool to be smart,” to be unique, and to be out of the ordinary. But when the people we celebrate, people like Keefe, have bestselling books, Ivy League degrees, and careers spanning multiple industries, the extraordinary can appear as the expectation. We forget that extraordinary lives are, by definition, uncommon ones.
This atmosphere inevitably filters down into student life. According to The Milton Paper’s 2026 State of the Acad, 80.6% of respondents participate in sports, 39.2% in Community Engagement, and 31.2% in student publications. While Noble and Greenough School publishes a single newspaper with a staff of roughly two dozen students, Milton sustains two competing publications with over 100 total staff members. We inhabit a culture in which we constantly admire and involve ourselves in the atypical, and therefore, the extraordinary has become the new ordinary.
Because exceptional accomplishment becomes so normalized, ordinary experiences can feel insufficient by comparison. Though “just” lifeguarding and “only” staying at home carry an air of disappointment, conversations around internships and athletic showcases dominate late-May conversation with pride—even if these sorts of opportunities are inaccessible to many students.
These “ordinary” opportunities may even offer more than the extraordinary. Jensen Huang, acclaimed Nvidia CEO, credits his work ethic to his time at Denny’s as a dishwasher before bussing tables. Michael Phelps worked as a lifeguard even as he trained to be come an elite swimmer. These activities are “ordinary” because we do them often. But we do them often because they hold value.
But this summer, not every valuable activity must be a newsworthy one. Most joyful afternoons will never appear in a Seminar Day biography or look particularly impressive from the outside. Still, this summer, we urge you to recognize the void at the end of some extraordinary pathways and embrace the ordinary: take an aimless walk, swim in the ocean just for yourself, dog-sit on the weekends without building an animal shelter. Be ordinary. For fun’s sake. And please, don’t bite a dog.