CVCC graduates move on

Liberty University’s Vines Center served as the platform for Thursday night’s commencement for Central Virginia Community College’s 2008 class.

Of the 452 graduates, 339 received associate degrees, 104 received certificates and nine graduates of Old Dominion University at CVCC received their respective bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

Recent City Council candidate Nat Marshall, who serves on the State Board of Community Colleges, encouraged the students, expressing pleasure that the perception of community colleges is changing.

“No longer is the community college seen as the last place you go when no one else will take you,” he said.

He added that he expects, in the coming years, for the community college system to become a major player in workforce development in the area.

Keynote speaker Brian K. Walsh was awarded the CVCC Alumni and Friends Association’s Outstanding Alumnus Award.

Walsh, the clinical research coordinator for respiratory care at the Children’s Hospital Boston, challenged the students to think less about their impressions on others, and more about authenticity.

He encouraged the graduates not to hide their failures.

“If you don’t think others know your faults, you’re kidding yourself.”

Better, he said, to allow others to laugh and learn from your mistakes than to present a false image.

He also stressed the necessity of asking for advice.

“It doesn’t make you look bad,” he said, adding, “no one likes a know-it-all.”

Above all, Walsh challenged the graduates to develop a strong work ethic, invoking a passage from Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech, “Birth of a New Age.”

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper,” Walsh said, “he should sweep streets as Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper, who did his job well.’”