Hi everyone.

My name is Dominic Needham.

I’m from Veazie, Maine, and I’m a microbiology major in the Honors College.

And I’m your Class of 2025 co-salutatorian.

The thing I’ll miss most is probably the community here. I came here in my second year as a transfer student.

I found, you know, the Molecular and Biomedical Sciences department.

Right from the go, I’m like, these are my people.

Just everybody is so supportive, all the time there.

Your classmates, the grad students, especially the faculty.

And seeing all of these people care about your success motivated me to do what I do.

As you might have guessed, I enjoy what I study, microbiology.

It’s always been really fascinating to me.

There’s these microbes everywhere.

They’re all over the ground; they’re all over your skin.

My first year here, I took a class called Phage, and, that was really fundamental in getting me involved in research.

Now I’ve TA’d that course for two years.

I kind of just wanted to replicate sort of the experience I got as a first-year and hopefully provide that to another student.

Help them find what they love.

I love volunteering because I’ve found a mission that I really believe in.

For the past couple of years with Partners for World Health, I’ve been able to save thousands of pounds of medical supplies from landfills.

I remember one of the first nights I volunteered I got this big trash bag, and I split open, and outpours just like all of this expensive equipment and devices and tools that would have all otherwise gone in the trash.

You have people who don’t have access to medical supplies, and, you know, you got a bunch of stuff over here and nothing over here.

Put them together, and stuff works out.

One piece of advice I’d have for anybody interested in the medical field is: to not box yourself in.

A lot of people will say, you know, you need to get this experience at this time, you know, check all these boxes.

And for me, college was a really cool time to instead explore what I want to do.

And there’s so many things that I would have never guessed that I would be able to do in college.

I never expected to be working with all these viruses and bacteria, working in a pathology lab, and and handling human tissues and organs.

So yeah, that’s my piece of advice: is explore your own interests. And don’t always listen to what people say.

I’ve had a lot of fun here over the last three years, but it’s time to move on.

It’s been my dream to be a physician for as long as I can remember.

And finally, this summer, I’ll be applying to med school.

And I’m really excited to see where that takes me.

Goodbye and good luck, Class of 2025.

And wherever you go, be proud to say that you’re from the University of Maine.