Allan Appel Photo
Brazilian native and future nurse Claudia Lima wore a gold braid indicating she’s a member of the academic honors society. She wore the golden scarf indicating she achieved membership in the Phi Beta Kappa society. She wore them as she and 870 other graduates of Gateway Community College promenaded amid balloons and roses at the school’s 19th commencement exercises held on Thursday afternoon at Woolsey Hall on the Yale campus.
Lima, who is bound for Quinnipiac University to finish her pre-nursing undergraduate work, said she used to attend Housatonic Community College but “friends told me the best science professors were at Gateway.”
So she transferred and was full of praise on a sunny late Thursday afternoon for the encouragement and guidance, as well as knowledge, provided by her Gateway teachers.
Of Gateway’s largest graduating class ever, 21 percent of the 870 in the class also graduated from New Haven high schools, according to college spokeswoman Evelyn Gard. Diversity was on display in every way at the graduation — in where students hail from, and in where they’re headed with the help of a community-college education. The class included many immigrants; many were the first in their families to attend college.
One of those New Haveners is Wilbur Cross graduate Maria Sosa. The liberal arts major is advancing to Southern Connecticut State University, where she is going to study psychology. “I know so many kids who are going down the wrong way and I’d like to help them,” she said.
“We’re bringing all these people into New Haven, with access to [the city’s] businesses,” she added, and that only will increase with the school’s new downtown building, into which students and faculty will be moving in late summer or early fall of 2012.
In his brief remarks to the graduates, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano said that while many commencement exercises take place this time of year, “No graduating class better reflects the diversity of New Haven than this [Gateway] Class of 2011.”
The mayor may have more accurately said “reflects the diversity of Greater New Haven” as well as the attraction of Gateway to students from as far away as Hartford and even Ireland.
Jonathan Casazola & Maria Sosa.
Sosa’s friend Jonathan Casazola moved to town from Hartford having begun his post-high school work there. His two sisters are nurses. His brother studies pharmacy. Casazola himself has worked as a nurse’s aide at an assisted living facility in Glastonbury.
So it’s no surprise Casazola’s sights are set on medical school. His next stop is the University of Connecticut. “I’d love to go to [medical school at] Yale or Harvard. But I’ll settle for UConn,” he said.
Another science-oriented graduate is Aidan Shine. He enrolled at Gateway in part because his aunt Mary Burns is a professor of English literature at the college. But Shine said all that fabulous Irish/English literary tradition is already taken care of in his family. His major at Gateway was electrical engineering.
Although he was able to take only one course in “Introduction to Solar Energy,” he said that’s the area he wants to pursue. Gateway has just introduced certificate programs in solar and green technologies.
“For a great country it [the U.S.] is so far behind Europe” in the development of these technologies and in the educational infrastructure to support it, Shine noted.
That said, Ireland has few scientific jobs these days, Shine added. His girlfriend, a bio-science major, and he are therefore thinking of going to Canada to find work in the emerging fields and to finish their educations there.
As black-robed faculty members lined up the students to enter Woolsey to the rising strains of Jeremiah Clark’s “Trumpet Voluntary,” at the head of the long blue line walked the Margaglione twins, Lakesha (left) and her sister Tanesha (who’s a full two minutes older and proud of it).
Originally from West Palm Beach, Florida, they now live in Wallingford and will both be attending Southern in the fall. Lakesha wants to be a social worker for children and Tanesha a speech pathologist, also with kids.
One of their favorite courses at Gateway was in human services taught by Professor Jonah Cohen. Speaking of the twins, Cohen said, “They’re the best. They add a lot to class, and they always sit together.”
Among the stirring charges to these young graduates, Gateway Community College Foundation Chairwoman Kathleen Shanley said, “Society exists only as a mental construct. There are only individuals. Be yourself.”
And Gateway’s beaming President Dorsey Kendrick said: “You graduate when there’s a demand in science and technology fields. Your outlook is good. Use your degree to increase virtue in the world.”
Gateway will have one more class of graduates taking courses at the Long Wharf campus before Kendrick and crew move to the new downtown campus in the fall of 2012. The North Haven campus will remain in use by Gateway.