YOLO: Students Go Nuts Over Drake-Inspired Commencement Speech

Schenectady High School students got a lesson on their generation's lingo when filmmaker Jason Pollock recently gave the commencement speech to the graduating class. Pollock schooled the seniors on his favorite rapper Drake's three popular catchphrases: "YOLO (you only live once)," "No new friends" and "Started from the bottom, now we here."

From the 5:30 mark to the 11:30 mark in the video, below, 31-year-old Pollock peppers his speech with Drake vernacular, framing the infectious lyrics in a positive manner.

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"For the kids who may understand what he's saying to you, I'm going to try and clarify it a little bit," he said, saying that kids often use the three phrases "as an excuse to do bad stuff."

Pollock is one of the masterminds behind social media-driven education web series and documentary Undroppable. Schenectady is one of 18 schools participating in the Undroppable campaign, which tells the story of students battling against dropping out of school. Schenectady's dropout rate fell 26% this year.

Pollock's parting words focused on the importance of social media and the Internet:

To you all who are wondering what you should do, I have two words for you: computer science. You laugh but the people who are learning this language are making so much more money than the people not learning this language. As we evolve in this society with social media and all the Instagrams, Twitters and Facebooks and all this stuff, computer science and the Internet is becoming incredibly important today. To me, the Internet is the great frontier of the world right now. Everything that has happened to me in my life, really in the past four years, is because of Twitter. I started Twitter in the end of 2008. I had zero followers. I have 100,000 now. Ashton Kutcher reached out to me through a direct message and offered me a full-time job in Los Angeles because of Twitter. I'm here today because of Twitter. So the Internet is amazing. I encourage each of you to get online, and I know you're all online, but use this online world we have created to learn more. Nobody taught me social media. There wasn't a class for it in 2009. I just became obsessed with it and taught myself. And I want you guys to remember education is like that. It doesn't just happen in school. It happens at home, too. With the Internet we have all these tools to research and know so much more. And that's why in some ways you guys know a lot more than your parents about a lot of stuff now because you are connected to the Internet and the Internet is a gateway to the world.

Image: Theo Wargo/Getty Images for ESPN