SCENES: GRADUATION AT SAINT JOSEPH'S UNIVERSITY, MAY 2010

Michael Mungai, SJU 2010, (center) hails from Nairobi, Kenya. He spent some of his adolescence as a street boy with other boys sniffing glue and getting into trouble. Two people who knew his potential share graduation day with him, his mother who traveled from Kenya for the event and Mark Orrs, an SJU graduate, who met Michael in Nairobi some years ago when Michael, then off the street, was working at a center supporting the needs of the street boys.

Here is a happy gesture from Desmond Shannon, Gesu '02, SJP '06 and SJU '10. His degree is in actuarial science and he will have no trouble getting a good job. I take some tiny credit because I helped him prepare for high school math when he was an eighth grader at Gesu. No student but Desmond during the years that I taught pre-algebra demonstrated in his or her work the careful line-by-line illustration of a mind thinking mathematically.

Leya Egea-Hinton graduated Gesu School in 2002, Shipley School in 2006 and Saint Joseph's Univeristy in 2010. I remember her body language during freshman orientation at SJU. It asked the question "what am I doing here and how can I possibly manage it?" But Leya handled her college years with great maturity. None of the rest of us had any doubts about her ability and character.

At the graduation at Saint Joseph's University, I ran into two Prep boys from the Prep class of 2006, Stephen Phillips (center) and Stanley Hendrickson. Stanley was a great help to the SJU Mission Office in the areas related to diversity. Stephen graduated summa cum laude. Congratulations to them both!