From the Connecticut Post

By LINDA CONNER LAMBECK

Radiology has long been a program offered by St. Vincent's College in Bridgeport, a school known best for producing nurses.

But for the first time in the school's history, a recipient of the radiology program's two-year, associate's degree has risen to the rank of salutatorian for the Class of 2008.

"It was hard at times,"' confessed Peter Boadi, 27, who lives in Hamden but grew up in the West African nation of Ghana.

In all, 72 associate degrees of science - 57 in nursing and 15 in radiology - were handed out Friday at what was St. Vincent's 16th commencement as a college. Before that, St. Vincent's, founded in 1905, was a "school" of nursing.

The graduation ceremony was held at Fairfield University's Quick Center.

The 2008 commencement speaker was Deborah Shelton, an associate professor and associate dean at the University of Connecticut's School of Nursing and a St. Vincent's alumna.

"It seems like only yesterday," said Shelton, who graduated in 1974 when the college still had dorms upstairs and classes downstairs. She enrolled at St. Vincent's because her family, living in Monroe, didn't want her to travel far from home.

Shelton said the first clinical patient she ever had was a diabetic woman in a coma. Her assignment was to talk to her.

"I thought, why? Well, when she came out of the coma, she said she knew all that I talked about. Since then, it's never stopped," Shelton said of the Catholic and social teaching experiences that stuck with her.

As a result, she continued her education, traveled and held positions from Alaska to Washington, D.C. Her career has taken her to college classrooms and prison cells.

"Take it from me, a grad of St. Vincent's so long ago, you have been taught for a lifetime," she said.

Julie Young, a nursing major from Stratford, was voted by her peers to be class speaker.

An office manager in a Stratford OB-GYN office while attending nursing school part time, Young is headed for a job at the Hospital of St. Raphael in New Haven.

She told her classmates that while different goals brought the members of the Class of '08 to their graduation, the common denominator was the desire to touch and heal people, and offer comfort to those in need.

"It was a calling we could not walk away from," she said.

"Remember, what we do is an art. And you are the artist."

Boadi, the salutatorian, juggled a lot to stay in the program.

While studying to be a radiology technician, he is also working in a nuclear medicine program at Briarwood College.

The program studies cell function.

The two programs support his eventual goal of attending medical school.

Boadi walked away with four awards at graduation, including the Connecticut General Assembly Citation of Merit and Anelia Kerbelis Memorial Award.

Class valedictorian was Cheryl C. Mingione, of Milford. She received the college's top honor, the Medical Staff Award.