A commencement speech is a genre of public spoken discourse performed at graduation ceremonies. Typically, US universities invite famous celebrities or great figures to give some suggestions or life lessons to the graduates in order to inspire them in this new stage of their careers, and usually the speech takes the form of telling their own personal stories. The purpose of this study is to analyze how commencement speakers construct and tell their stories in graduation ceremonies, exploring the generic structure of personal narratives in commencement speeches. For this, I have chosen ten popular commencement speeches from YouTube, exploring their generic conventions in relation to the four storytelling genres described by Eggins and Slade (1997). After analyzing the ten speeches, I propose a set of potential obligatory and optional stages and their recursive patterns, summarizing our own generic structure potential (GSP), which can be used to predict the discourse organization of future commencement speeches.