After he gave his graduation speech, Brian Xu quietly walked back to his seat on the front row. It was only after he sat down that the crowd in Humphrey Coliseum burst into applause, eventually rising to a standing ovation for the Starkville High School valedictorian.

“Now that I think about it, I probably should have waved or something,” said Xu with a laugh. “Honestly though, I felt kind of awkward. I kept asking myself, ‘do I stand up for my own standing O?’ I wasn’t prepared for that, so I kind of just looked at the ceiling.”

Xu recently found out that the crowd of family and friends at the graduation ceremony weren’t the only ones who admired his final words as a Yellow Jacket, when the Huffington Post published his speech on the Teen section of the world-renowned news aggregate.

“I had a couple of friends that told me they were gathering speeches for their senior snapshot feature so, I was at the beach at the time and I came back and had nothing to do and sent it in and said, ‘why not?’ Then they published it a few days later.”

His lack of surprise shouldn’t translate as apathy, Xu should be used to this kind of success by now. Along with being named valedictorian, Xu picked up a few other awards over the past year. The 18-year-old was named a National Merit Finalist, a Presidential Scholar Semi Finalist, a Lindy Callahan Scholar Athlete and the list goes on. There was one award, however, that Xu said caught him off guard when he received it this past April.

“I got voted prom king,” Xu exclaimed as he threw his hands in the air. “I wasn’t expecting that one at all. I think I might have gotten it because my name is at the end of the ballot.”

Xu, who also played basketball and tennis at SHS, said around a week before graduation he received an email from his counselor saying he was selected as the class’s valedictorian and that he needed to turn in the speech he would be presenting at graduation by the next Friday. The counselor also told Xu he needed all of the SHS English teachers to sign off on it.

“I was like, wow,” he said. “I finished it pretty quickly though, but after the English teachers proof-read it the first time I ended up having to cut about a page and a half.”

When he got the speech back the second time, Xu said the teachers really liked it and thought it matched his personality, but they had cut a lot of his jokes. Xu said that didn’t really sit well with him.

“I printed out the copy they gave me after they edited, so I saw they took out a lot of my stuff, so I compared them and then the day of (graduation) I got a pencil and started writing them back in,” he said. “I just kind of like they can’t stop me, I am graduating.”

Xu said SHS principle Keith Fennell was sitting beside him and saw the pencil marks Xu had made on his speech.

“He just kept saying stuff like, ‘this is your one shot, this is your only graduation, your family is in the crowd, behave yourself.’ I don’t think I crossed the line though,” Xu said

Xu may owe a lot of his success (or at least his compliance) to his mom, a professor, who has a focus in elementary education.

“She advises a lot of the student teachers that go through the Starkville School District, so she always had tabs on me,” he said. “When I went third through seventh grade I always had one of those student teachers and she always knew everything that was going on.

“I would come home from school and she would immediately ask me about something bad I had done that day. She has eyes all around the SSD.”

The New-York-City-born teen has lived in Starkville since third grade, when his family moved from Cookville, Tenn. because his father, who works in education research, got a job at Mississippi State University. In the fall Xu will be attending Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He said, for now, his major is economics, but undergraduates don’t have to declare until the end of sophomore year so he plans on trying to feel things out.

“I am a little bit anxious but I think every college student is,” Xu admitted. “I think once I get into it, I will really enjoy it.”

To read Xu’s graduation speech go to huffingtonpost.com/news/senior-snapshots

The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.