 Interim President Workman, President Designee Mialas, Trustees Marsha Morris, Arlene Violet, and Doris De Los Santos, Vice President Scurry, Dean Bianco, members of the faculty, staff, family, friends, and most importantly, all of you. The 2019 honorees and graduates, good morning and welcome to Roger Williams University, University College. We are live streaming for our distance learning students as part of our mission at University College. We try to serve as many populations as we can, so we do have people streaming into the ceremony, many of them being military. Today we are here to recognize and celebrate your academic accomplishments. Being that it's May the 4th, I've been asked not to reference Star Wars in any way, or to quote Yoda, in big trouble you will be, so I won't, and that doesn't count. In preparing for the ceremony, I could not help but reflect on the value of these milestones. Some people say we're born with potential. I think we're born with capacity. Throughout our lives, we choose the things that will fill this capacity and become our potential. We have capacity to work, to learn, to create, to love, and to do so many other things. As we grow physically, mentally, and emotionally, so does our capacity, and along with it, our potential. But what value is potential if it's not actualized? While we are here to celebrate these personal milestones you have achieved, I challenge you to convert the acquired potential into action. Exhale your capacity and share it with the world. Continue to set goals for yourself, and inspire others to do the same. It is not our potential that makes our lives better. It is the energy we create when we expend it, this potential that moves us forward. I would now like to introduce Vice President of University College, Jamie Scari. Good morning. How are you all? Good. So I too want to say welcome to our trustees, to Interim President Workman, to President Designee Mialis, to our faculty, staff, parents, family members, and your supporters, as well as a very big welcome to you, to our graduates, to our art and society inductees, and to our award winners. Truth be told, today is one of my favorite days on campus. And I have two of those, right? So one of my favorite days is the first night of classes. And it's my favorite because new students all share the same sort of look, right? On the first night of class, it doesn't matter if you're a high school student who's taking classes here in our dual enrollment program, or students who have decided to start their degree, or to return after a long hiatus, or if you're a military student who's looking to gain skills as you advance in your career, or a veteran student who's looking to gain new skills and knowledge as they start a new portion of their life. In each of you, in each of those faces, you see excitement. You see hope. You see a little bit of nervousness and a whole lot of courage, right? The courage to begin something new or to finish something that was started a long time ago. And most importantly, what I see in your faces is the courage to go after something you thought may not be possible. And today, right, today is a wonderful day because that nervousness, right, that apprehension about what am I getting ready to do, all of a sudden turns to what? Turns to excitement, right? Turns to a whole lot of relief and a whole bunch of happiness. So there's no nervousness today. Today marks the day that you've achieved what you set out to do when you enrolled or the day that you're honored for your accomplishment. Today is the culmination of your individual hard work, your dedication, as well as everyone coming together in partnership for each other's success. As a first generation college student, as a single mom, right, who worked full time and went part time to earn her graduate degree, I know what you've accomplished is to be celebrated and honored. I know you are more a full time student than your traditional counterparts. I know on this journey that you sacrificed, you juggled, and at times dug deeper than you thought you could to complete your course or semester. I also know the balancing out that's required to not drop a ball. I know what it feels like to say, God, please don't let my kids be sick the next day or gosh, please let my faculty member understand that I'm being pulled in eight million directions. Our high school students face family, school, work, sports, activity, and all their community responsibilities that's required to earn their certificates in community development. Our moms and dad face work, kids, family, and a slew of outside responsibilities. Our deploys students face filling their command assignments as well as being away from their families and their homes. No matter what, each of you had stunning moments of grace, right, that semester where you're like, God, did I do this so well, I'm brilliant. This is just absolutely beautiful, right? And then, as I know also well, you had that semester, right, where you did what, where you basically struggled to get across the finish line. You dug deeper than you knew you could, right? It felt like a flop across that finish line. But it's in those semesters that family, work, community, and other commitments collided and stress was very difficult. And whether it was a brilliant finish or a slow hard crawl across that line, you did it, right? And you did it amazingly well. And I could not be more honored to be here with you today to celebrate. During this time of celebration, I would be remiss if and I not thank you. I know you have a choice, right? You have a choice of where you enroll. You have a choice of where you decide you wanna take this walk and you chose us. So thank you for that. Though before moving to our next speaker, our interim president, I wanna ask one thing of you. Could you please take a moment to look around? Look at your colleagues. Look at this multi-generation, multicultural student body and audience. Regardless of what brought you here today, what sacrifice you had to make, you each persevered and triumphed. You did so in ways that supported each other. And when you leave here and you move on to your next journey, please remember what is possible when you do what can feel like the impossible and what happens when people come together from all different backgrounds and experiences to learn, grow, and make a difference. Anything and anything becomes attainable. And in today's world, we all need the good that comes from coming together. The stakes are high right now, right? We can argue about what those stakes are, but they are high. So please continue to make an impact in your current or chosen field. Go out and do good in the world. Give yourselves, your families, and now what I'd like you to do is give yourselves, your families, and your supporters a big round of applause. It's really wonderful. And unfortunately, you give a little inside joke. Tracy Pratt, I think you all know, basically said to me, can I come as Darth Vader? And I was like, Darth Vader, why are you coming as Darth Vader? No. She's like, may the fourth be with you. I'm like, what are you talking about? So it began as a big joke in the office about how out of touch I am. So the deal was, she gets to wear a Darth Vader outfit. Many people get to bring lifesavers. As long as I say, may the fourth be with you. So now what I would like to do is welcome our interim president to the stage so that he can say a few remarks. Thank you. Thank you, Jamie. And I'll join our earlier speakers in honoring our trustees and President Designate Mialis and our faculty and staff here. But mostly I'd like to also welcome the family and friends of the people who are receiving, or they're graduating or receiving certificates today because you know how important it is for you that your help was to get students across the finish line. I know that sometimes time had to be taken away from you. It really does take a village. It takes a community to help people to achieve as the students here have achieved. So thank you. Let's have a round of applause for the family. Now, it's great to see how many different kinds of students we have here. We have high school students from the MAJESAC working in their community development certificates. We have both traditional age and adult students working in their associate's degrees. We have people from the workforce who are getting credentials to improve their prospects. We have active duty military who many of whom are streaming in from places around the world. That's a diversity of learners. And it's very, very telling because that diversity of learners is what University College is all about. University College is designed to teach students in virtually every phase of their life. It's designed for students who have not necessarily had opportunities in more traditional forms of education to achieve. And that's very intentional. At Roger Williams, our core purpose, which we've embraced as a campus is to build the university the world needs now. You need to rethink the university in a way that works for students. We'll think about that a little bit. We have a university model that does educate lots and lots and lots of students, primarily traditional age students but increasingly students in other times and walks of life. But if you look at the higher educational system, it is filled with barriers. Sometimes they're visible barriers of cost. Sometimes they're invisible barriers. They're the very structure of the forms of education. Sometimes they're the barriers just of bureaucratic rules. And what I think is very, very impressive about UC and why I think it's really at the cutting edge of higher education is the vision of Vice President Scurri and Dean Bianco of creating an institution where those barriers disappear, smoothing the pathway rather than putting up further barriers in front of students. Now, Mary Beth, my wife and I were fortunate to host dinners for students from across the university this year and we did a couple of dinners for students here. I see folks in the audience who were at those dinners. And the stories of the students from University College told me were stories of again and again facing those kinds of barriers. They had been knocked out of earlier programs. Their programs hadn't worked for them and many of them felt bad about that, that it was their fault. It wasn't their fault. It was the system of education's fault. And the vision for University College is to overcome that. The vision for Roger Williams University is to overcome that. So we don't have to have a generation whose talents are wasted. Now, we've done a lot, we think, to make the university better and stronger and to make it possible for students to get through. But looking at students and hearing their stories, I know what it cost you. I know how hard you have worked. I know the challenges that you have faced. As Vice President Scurri said, it's more than a full-time job going to college and having a family and working as many as you have. That's incredible. You have shown tremendous grit as a kind of higher education jargon term that has gotten you to this place, that has made it possible for you to be here and to receive the degrees and credentials that you have. So, yes, we've done our bit and we've helped a bit, but this is really on you. This is what you have achieved today. Now, it's traditional to graduation address to charge students going into the future. I think given how much you've brought to this, that's a little bit presumptuous, but you don't need to be charged. You're charged up already. But I want to actually reflect a little bit on higher education and what it is and how it's really very different from a lot of other services and commodities that we buy. Higher education is not just a service you pay for and then you're done with, like going to a doctor or a dentist or a lawyer. When you come to a higher education institution, you become part of a community. And they're part of that community that is resting in many ways on the labor and the funds and the energy of not just the staff and the faculty, but the students who have come before you. You're part of that when you become an alumni, you become part of that community for all of your life. And if I have a charge for you, it's to embrace that role, embrace the role of an alumni. And there's all sorts of ways that you can do that and some of them are financial contributions, but that is in fact the least important, I think. The most important is becoming a mentor to students, helping us to understand how we can do our program better. Helping students that you see or prospective students that you see in the community, helping them to understand that they can move forward, that like you, they can achieve. In fact, doing all of those things that a community does to help the individuals in that community and to help the group as a whole. And so I don't have a charge for you today, but I have more of a welcome, a welcome to the Roger Williams University community. You're always part of us, you're always part of our family, and we hope to see you in the future. Thank you very much, have a great day. Thank you, President Workman. I would now like to introduce Assistant Professor Katrina Norvell, who will present the 2019 Thomas J. Carroll Outstanding Teacher Award. Thank you, Matt. I just want to take a moment to look out on all of you. And I want to ask you to take a look to your right and to your left. Look at that beautiful person sitting next to you and just take in the energy that you all bring today. We don't have sunshine outside, but we're going to create our own energy and sunshine in this room today. Okay, so just do that now. It gives me great pleasure to award today the Teacher of the Year Award for University College to Ray Nareks. And it doesn't surprise me that he's sitting in the very back of the room. Because I'm going to say some things about Ray, but I just want to start out by saying that this is a person who practices cultural humility in his professional life and his personal life. And I know that that is passed on to all of the students and all of us that he touches. So Ray, you don't have to sit in the back of the room. You can actually move up a little bit if you'd like to. Professor Ray Nareks is your textbook definition of what we at University College like to refer to as a pracademic. A pracademic is someone who seamlessly connects the real world with the classroom to provide the most profound learning environment and experiences for our students. Whether he's working with a student one-on-one in an independent study course or with a full classroom, Ray has a way of making every student feel like he's providing personalized teaching. Now, just let me stop for a minute and say, these are not my words. These are not Ty, who is the program director for community development. These are not his words. These are the words of the students who have nominated Ray for this honor. And many other students and staff who have had the wonderful experience of working with Ray over the past few years. So the students say he's that thoughtful of an individual learner while also ensuring and encouraging inclusiveness in class discussions and assignments. With Ray, you can always be sure he is incorporating actual cases of community development models of success or examples of critical social challenges. He has his finger on the pulse of the field of community development, which in turn ensures our students are getting the most relevant and industry-led content in his courses. As great as all of that sounds, what truly makes Ray special is his heart. He teaches for the love of teaching, for the love of seeing students excited about their communities and empowered to create change. And whether a student is enrolled or not, Ray remains a resource and a support system long after they've left this building. Whether you are connected to Ray, you have a connection for life and we are grateful to be connected to him. Congratulations now to two-time winner, Professor Ray Nerick. Julie, take a smile. Yeah. Thank you. I'll have to give you a little more. No, you can give some if you want. Thank you. Congratulations and thank you for your continued dedication to our students. I would now like to ask Dean Gina Bianco and Paralegal Study Coordinator Tracy Pratt to the podium to present the Lambda Epsilon Chai Honor Society inductees. As I mentioned earlier, we do service the military, specifically the Navy when it comes to this program. So some of the names that we're going to read are actually people who are live streaming and joining us from a distance. Thank you for your service. Thank you and welcome from myself. I'm Tracy Pratt and Dean Bianco. I am here to announce the inductees to Lambda Epsilon Chai Honor Society or LACS for short. This Honor Society recognizes the achievements of paralegal students who have or are conferring a bachelor's degree or a certificate, who demonstrate superior academic performance, which is evidenced by an overall grade point average of at least a 3.25 GPA and an average in their specific paralegal core classes of 3.5 or higher. To make membership in LACS a true and meaningful academic honor to Roger Williams University and recognizable indication of superior academic achievement to the members of the legal profession. When I call your name, please step forward and receive your certificate and pin. Lydia Bisbee, Caitlyn Collins, believe it or not here, with us via live stream is Ernestine Isso, Mara Henderson King, Benjamin Holmes, who's also with us via live stream as well as Alicia House, Ali Huerta's via live stream, Sonia Mills, Jennifer Pine, Joseph Pine. Okay. Okay. Okay. This is the husband and wife, so we'll be... Our next two candidates also via live stream, Angelica Rubio and Hannah Simpson. Andrea Sousa and lastly via live stream. Thank you for your service, all of our military personnel that are viewing via live stream is Linnea Walters. Thank you. Congratulations to all the inductees. Please welcome Dr. Palermo, an assistant director, Pereira, who will present the Alpha Lambda, excuse me, Alpha Sigma Lambda Honor Society inductees. Good morning, almost afternoon. Welcome. The Alpha Sigma Lambda Honor Society has many members for this particular graduation ceremony. I'm going to call your names if you can come up. Please do. Caitlyn Collins, live stream. Ernestine Isso, live stream. Jeremy Fegu, vague. Tori Franceschi, live stream. David Anthony Gallaghan, live stream. Karen Garcia, Mara Henderson King, Benjamin Holmes, live stream. Alicia House, live stream. Deborah Izzy, Kenneth Latterno, live stream. Johanna Macbeth, Jeremy McCoy, live stream. Makita Melvin, live stream. Janine Murphy, Mary O'Brien, live stream. Frank Parenti, live stream. Shannon Pazillo, live stream. Christopher Ruiz, live stream. Allison Raine, Andrea Sousa. Dana Sousa, live stream. And Ann TV, live stream. So you're actually going to be inducted now sometimes in a minute. We got the paddles ready for the induction ceremony. So on behalf of Alpha Sigma Lambda, I welcome you as candidates for membership. And we congratulate you on your academic achievement. Before you are given an opportunity to take the Pledge of Membership, it is befitting that the qualities expected of you as participants in our society, also its aims and ideals be explained to you. And so the Greek letters Alpha Sigma Lambda, which form the name of our society, have special meaning to us. Alpha is the first letter in the Greek alphabet. Therefore, it stands for first. The letter Sigma corresponds to the letter S and is symbolic of scholarship. Lambda corresponds to the letter L and denotes leadership. Thus, Alpha Sigma Lambda forms the framework for our model, which is first in scholarship and leadership. Qualifications for membership included, matriculating in a bachelor's or certificate program conferred in August 2018, December 2018, or will be conferring this May in a couple weeks. Students must have a minimum GPA of 3.2. Students must have conferred or will confer in the top 20% of their class based on the previously stated three confirmants. And students inducted into Alpha Sigma Lambda historically have a GPA of 3.8 or higher. Okay, so the big moment. Will the candidates please repeat after me. I promise to uphold the ideals and further the aims I promise to uphold the ideals and further the aims of Alpha Sigma Lambda. Alpha Sigma Lambda. Believing that by doing so. Believing that by doing so. I shall increase my value to my college and to my community. I shall increase my value to my college and my community. I welcome you as a member of the Alpha Sigma Lambda and I will call your names to receive your certificates. You may put your cords on. Caitlyn Collins is distance. Ernestine is distance. Jeremy, Tori. It looks totally different after you've been inducted. You have to prepare, contrast, and picture. It's totally different. Corinne. Corinne. Deborah Izzy. Jeannie. You have a lot of mailing to do. And that's everyone. Does everyone have one? Yes. Congratulations to all the inductees. I would now like to introduce Associate Professor Kelly Donnell. She will now present the President's Core Values Medallion Awardee. Good morning. It's my great honor to announce the recipient of the President's Core Value Medallion. The Core Value Medallion was established in 2007 to recognize the graduating student who best exemplifies the core values of the institution. The student awarded this honor has truly embraced the university's core values in meaningful ways. The university core values include transformation, engagement, experiential learning, inclusivity, and innovation. This year I'm delighted to announce that Allison Rain is the recipient of the university college President's Core Value Medallion. Please join me in congratulating Allison. Oh my goodness. I'm speechless. I don't often become speechless. Oh golly. So good morning everybody. What an honor to be here today. I think we're all just brilliant, all of us. I was going to talk today about values, about our core values, and also the values of Roger Williams University and all that they represent. And then Joe Biden mentioned core values in his speech to launch his presidential campaign. And I thought, I can't do that now. I don't want to plagiarize his speech. So I went back along and listened to it again. And I thought, oh, you know, actually I won't be doing that. So values it is. So I'm going to talk about values. So my personal core values include honesty, integrity, kindness, and respect. The Roger Williams core values include transformation, engagement, experience, inclusion, and innovation. For us to be able to uphold these values, we need to be able to pull from our experiences and values. Yet we are not necessarily aware that is what we are doing until we look back and see what we've achieved. For me, transformation means that after 28 years I went back to school to re-educate. My brain was like glue. I was good at math. But oh boy, math after 28 years was not fun. It was a struggle. But I did it through determination and I managed to win that first A. To make that transformation, we need to be engaged. This means being involved, invested in every facet of the work that we do, whether that work is based on a textbook or through integration within the communities so that we can gain experience from which to step forward and gain yet more experience. As adult learners, we all have a wealth of experience that we have earned through life. These life experiences allowed me to draw parallels between what I had done and where I wanted to go. But importantly, Roger Williams University allowed me to harness my experience in ways that I never thought possible so that I could realize my dream and bring about new experiences. To give me a glimpse of how we can combine our knowledge and experience and apply it to promote new ideas so that we can better understand the needs of the communities that we serve. These experiences promote inclusion. Roger Williams University invited me to work on a research collaborative that allowed me to harness my experiences and engage with community members and university staff that gave me a better understanding of what is needed to be innovative. To be mindful and creative as we work to harness all the elements of past and present to help build a positive future within our community. This all said, while values are vitally important, the one thing that all this points to is investment. As we invest in ourselves through education and community engagement, our professors have all invested in us, the students, so that we have the tools with which to build a solid foundation that will become the cornerstone of our successes as we move forward in our careers. For this, I will always be thankful because I never thought at the age I am I would be blessed enough to be able to take what I have learned and go from a stay-at-home mom to somebody who is now working in a community helping others and importantly being paid appropriately for what I do, which is rather nice. And the best part, I love what I do. And I know that I bring positivity into the lives of others. So on behalf of all graduating students today, to all professors and staff of Roger Williams University, especially Ty, for his guidance and encouragement along the way, thank you. We, the students, could not have done it without you guys. So thank you. I think you have yet another photograph. Oh. Thank you. Congratulations. I would now like to introduce Assistant Professor Dennis Rubello to present the University College Scholarship Recipients. Good morning and almost good afternoon. And thinking about these scholarship recipients struck me in reading and rereading their essays after the awards had been internally announced that much like you, everybody has a story. And much like you, the story is an inside job driven from within you to the outside world. These recipients are much like you, living that path, understanding their own self-authorship. Actually, there were three elements to each one of these applicants. Self-authorship was clear. That is to say, they picked up their pen and they made decisions in their life. They stopped, they took an operational pause and they dug in. Self-authorship. The second is they each embodied and still embody, I hope, right? A deep curiosity and eagerness to learn. And thirdly, each one of them absolutely had an impact on my decision to wear this bow tie today. You see, the bow tie says Meliora. Meliora has Latin roots and it means to ever better oneself. So I'd like you to think of self-authorship. I'd like you to think of curiosity. And I'd like you to think of ever bettering as you move forward as well. Our first recipient, make sure it's in order, of course, is Nicole Bonatati. As I congratulate Nicole, I'm going to lift a part of her story. Striking to Nicole's narrative is the fact that in a blizzard in 1978, she witnessed her mother, her mother's grit and determination to hold two jobs. And it's that embodied work ethic that I think influenced her to never give up to take hold of her pen and to drive forward. And she noted, and this is your self-authorship and your signature on your narrative, that hard work is not enough. Hats off to you. Our second recipient, I'm gonna call up and I'm gonna do a similar thing here for, okay. So Matthew Larson, could you join us please? We should give you this first. Thank you. Well earned. Striking in Matthew's narrative was that he saw in himself an opportunity to get better over time. It's something to be said for a late bloomer, right? That you got stronger in your sense of self-worth going from CCRI to RIC, and then getting into a 61st ranked law school. I'm sorry to say you won't be joining us here, but University of Arkansas is where you're able to get in. And I think that's tremendous. So we applaud that. But he took an operational pause and he said, part of his self-authorship, his curiosity, his ever better theme was this. He said, I'm going to stabilize myself and get stronger before I move into that space of law school. What I'm going to do is I'm gonna get post-bachelor certificate in paralegal studies. And so hats off for your decisions. Our third recipient is Charles Van Hoffer. Charles, join us up here today. I also have the pleasure of having Charles in a psychology class. So this is particularly awesome. Congratulations. Can I just say any of those terms in the last paper? This does not constitute as a replacement for your final assessment, so. As I rethought Charles's narrative and how it turned, I turned to two of his professors who, who quoted, I'm going to quote here, one Douglas White who said, Dr. White said, you know, he earned the highest grades in the class for five classes. I want you to know that's not a common occurrence in my class. So I thought, oh, that's pretty good stuff there, right? Ever better. And Dr. Hopper said that he is an unquenchable thirst for grave details. And that's that curiosity and eagerness. And I can tell you that he said this in his last paper, which wasn't your last paper, by the way, Charles, that the locus of control for ever bettering himself, I'm going to put in parentheses, for his educational journey has always been there, the inner drive. And that is that self-authorship that we talked about at the beginning. So hats off to you. You still have to do the final paper, but congratulations, Charles. Congratulations to all the scholarship recipients. I would now like to ask Vice President Scari and Director Palermo to once again return to the podium. They're going to be awarding the Juanita Sanchez Educational Complex certificates. So before we award the certificates, I just want to say a few words about this program and then turn it over to Ty. And I also want to acknowledge Shannon Rubello, who's standing in the back, who I wish would rise. And before I get in, I'll give her a round of applause. She's one of the most amazing teachers in the province, I actually would say in the state. We started this program in 2013. I think Shannon will remember sitting at 150 Washington Street with a number of teachers from your school, myself, and Eric Jacobs, who was the then Program Director for Community Development, trying to figure out a way to create the certificate program that would start with students taking a course in the high school taught by the teacher. Shannon was one of those teachers. The second course was actually taught here and then they would integrate into our regular courses. We had a student who actually integrated with you. These young people have done the most amazing projects and made the biggest impact in their own communities. And I think to date, we've had nearly 100 students who have been involved in some capacity in this program. We've had more than, I think, 30 or 40 earned certificate programs. And I just want to say thank you to Shannon for all the work that you've done to make this program happen. And most importantly, thank you to our JSEC students. They are incredible. They are making impacts and just really turning the dial on what it means to be a stakeholder in your community, what it means to be a leader. And you don't have to be welcome to the table or asked to the table to make a difference. You can actually pull that chair up yourself and start to do that. And you've done that each and every day and I thank you for that. So there isn't much to say after that. It's very true. Shannon's amazing. Shout out to Velay Orr, the principal at JSEC and our amazing young people, some of which couldn't be here today because of competing interests as many of our other students couldn't be. It doesn't matter whether they're in high school or they're overseas serving the military. Our students are pulled in a million directions. So to be here today is profound. And for these young people, I just want to draw a parallel. We have overseas military right now who are active duty in war zones. And our young Providence youth in particular lost one of their own the first week of school, okay? And so trauma hits us at all various levels. And I can't tip the hat enough to someone like Shannon because as a teacher in a classroom in an urban school, urban schools are typically the only place where it's safe, where they get meals, where they get love, where they can neurologically de-stress and put their guards down to learn because it's not about a capacity to learn. It's about over capacity of everything else in life. And so our young people have taken five college courses, started non-profits, stuff backpacks to feed their peers. And right now we're doing research projects on behavioral differences in black men based on their educational attainment. So these aren't slouches by any means. We didn't dumb down content for them. They rose to the challenge and some of them didn't make it, right? Some of them can't make it. And that's life. And so I just want to reiterate and emphasize the important of these young people here and if there's anything else for the adults in the rooms that the future is very bright. So let's call them up one by one and then we'll acknowledge them together. First up, Kyra Benson-McCarty. Yes, you do. This is like one of the things to hope. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Joshua Gonzalez. Clara Alaba. Nicole Perez Torres. And Tyrell Stevens. Congratulations to our students from Manita Sanchez. Congratulations guys, that's really an excellent achievement. Vice President Skari and Dean Bianca will now present the 2019 Associate Degree and Certificate of Recipients. Thank you, Matthew. This is the moment that you've all been waiting for. For many of you, I have rode this journey with you as your advisor, as a program director and now as a dean. So I am uniquely privileged and honored to confer those degrees to those certificate and associate degree students. I'd also like to recognize that I will be joining all of those who are in the audience who received honors at your conferral for your bachelor's degree that will happen on the Bristol campus. So thank you. Again, there are a number of students who are joining us via live stream and I would like to honor and their intentions as well. So we will honor them in the program and announce their names. So the first person is John Marion Asabu. Stanley Olston. Mary Emerson. Tanya Ashley. Lindsay Atkinson. Kevin Bailey. Wyatt Benavides. Violet Benitez. James Berkholz. Nicole Benatotti. Alana Brody. Sydney Carson. Marissa Carter. Aaron Katelyn. Dawn Chase. Christine Cook. April Copeland. Julia Crotty. Steven Dees. Gabriela Diaz. Crystal Drew. Ashley Dwyer. Leslie Fielder. Makayla French. Lanny Fry Jones. Olivia Fulda. Nancy Gardner-Matello. Joseph Jermeia. Faith Jerdry Jackson. Jalea Hare. Mara Henderson King. LaCrea Henderson. Deondra Johnson. Travis Johnson. Jennifer Jonah St. Tatiana Cumlatoy. Timothy Klein. Katherine Knifer. Megan Kupnala. Megan Krukoa. Kim Lange. Dylan Malloy. Matthew Martin. Nathan Martin. Crystal Mathrue. Keith Medeus. Ricardo Mello. One second, she wanted to take a photo. You can come back. You were trying. I saw you. We can pause. This is a re-enactment. Yes. Oh, my God. So much. Anytime. Terrell Mitchell. Ana Paula Montero. Janine Murphy. B. O'Brien. Laura Olivia. Azzaro. Timothy Parote. Andre Patterson. Pita Pereira. Jennifer Pine. Joseph Pine. Panita. Shannon Pasillo. Quincy Quinn. Ivette Queenen. Derevan Rivera. Douglas Roper. Vernon Sanders. Madeline Shalut. Derek Shaver. Ryan Sheenan. Dionisha Simmons. Andrea Souza. Lynn Sylvia. Justin Tisdale. Megan Turcott. Mary Paula Valdes. And Khalil Wilkins-Kane. And that is our graduating class. Congratulations, class of 2019. Now reflecting back on some of President Workman's comments, I'd like to introduce Chip Craig on behalf of the Roger Williams University Alumni Association. Thank you, Matt. Congratulations, everyone. And I can still say good morning. Doesn't feel like morning still. As Matt said, I'm Chip Craig. I'm the president of the University Alumni Association. And as an alumnus myself from the class of 1994, Roger Williams taught me to dream big and gave me the tools and confidence to fulfill those dreams. Today is an extraordinary milestone in your life. You may see this as a chapter closing, but really it's the beginning of an incredible journey that started when you began your studies here. It's a wonderful world out there waiting for you to do more great things. And so this is a transition time for you. It's not an end. Really to come off of what Interim Workman said, the Alumni Association is one that has a lot of meaningful aspects to the society and to your continued progress as you continue on through your life. A way to realize your dreams is to continue to build bridges through networking. You've met a number of colleagues here, many peers, many professors, faculty, and staff. And as you continue your journey, you're going to reflect on a lot of those meaningful relationships that you made here. And you'll continue to make further connections. So don't just cut everyone off from here and begin your journey without remembering and staying in continuation and connection to those in the past. Staying in touch with all of those folks that you met here at this wonderful place, Roger Williams, is something that will continue with you. So on behalf of the Alumni Association and its board members, I want to congratulate you officially and welcome all of you as newly members, as new members, of a very proud community of nearly 32,000 alumni worldwide. Your connection to this university is perpetual. And even after today, you can be an active part of the Alumni Association. And doing so will keep you connected to Roger Williams and engage you in ways that are meaningful to you. It doesn't have to just be monetary. We know that there's a lot of cost associated with education. But your time, talent, and skill will help others in the future. So as you carry on to the next stage in your life, take these words of wisdom with you down the path. And that is continue to dream big and make sure you keep building those bridges. Thank you and congratulations. Thank you. My sincerest congratulations to each and every one of you. I know that that was not always easy and the award scholarship certificates and diplomas represent sacrifices as much as accomplishment. Keep the fire burning. Do not hoard your potential. Share it. Inspire others and forge a path for others to follow. Thank you to all the family members and friends for joining in the celebration. Your support and encouragement makes achievements like these possible. I would now like, if there's no objections, to invite everybody for refreshments out in the cafe. Photo opportunities or whatever. And that concludes us our morning. Thank you very much.