The valedictorian at Portsmouth High School in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, pulled off one for the ages on Friday, when he ended his inspirational speech by saying, "all you have to do it shake it off." “The goal was to basically try to go viral and send a positive message, not about Portsmouth High School and the Class of 2015, but life in general,” said Yost, who will attend Princeton University this fall. Following his funny, touching speech about embracing your inner nerd and striving for perfection in anything you're passionate about, Yost started the dance alone, which was (purposely) awkward. "I've always wanted to do a flash mob and I thought graduation would be the perfect place because our class is very cohesive and doesn't really have a lot of cliques," Yost told MTV News on Monday morning, while taking a break from his job as an assistant in a cardiovascular operating room at a Portsmouth hospital.
– Parents who thought they were going to have to sit through a boring graduation in a stuffy gym got anything but at Portsmouth High School on Friday. Colin Yost, the valedictorian for the New Hampshire school's senior class, decided he wanted to shake things up—and off—during his commencement speech, so after his words of inspiration, he stepped out from behind the podium and started dancing, by himself, to Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off," eliciting laughter and some "oh gosh, what is he doing?" reactions, MTV reports. Soon, however, his intentions were made clear as the rest of his graduating class (more than 230 in all) stood up and joined Colin in a choreographed celebration of the end of their high school career. While Colin's flash mob surprised the audience, it was far from spontaneous. The senior posted a video tutorial on YouTube for his classmates to study and cajoled the school's administration beforehand into letting him use five graduation rehearsals to get the moves down just right, MTV notes. "As we practiced, the energy was just building and everyone was feeling how great it was to work together and send this positive message," he tells the station. He adds that the song-and-dance show played perfectly into what he had talked about in his speech on embracing your inner nerd, the Portsmouth Herald notes. But despite the Taylor-made two-stepping's success, we probably won't be seeing Colin—who admits he's never taken a dance lesson—on So You Think You Can Dance: He's headed to Princeton to study chemical and biological engineering, per MTV. (Hopefully no one got arrested for cheering.)