Commencement 2019 Celebrates “Awesome” Graduates
On the afternoon of May 18, nearly seven hundred graduating students attended the Metropolitan College Convocation ceremony—ending one chapter in their lives and preparing to start on the next one. As spoken by our guest speaker and recipient of the Award in Service to the Community Mary Ann Esposito, the gathered graduates and their accomplishments, were “Awesome.”
We were galvanized and inspired by the messages of the day. Dean Tanya Zlateva opened by praising the graduates’ commitment: “You persevered and you discovered the joy of understanding complexity and also of making that complexity transparent . . . You strengthened and internalized your ability to ask questions in search for answers, the ability to learn, and this will stay for you throughout your life.”
Mary Ann Esposito, a renowned cookbook author and creator/host of the nationally televised PBS series, Ciao Italia with Mary Ann Esposito, already had something in common with the gathered graduates: she earned her own master’s when she was in her fifties. In words taken from Mary Ann’s address, “. . . love what you do and do what you love. And don’t ever forget to give back. It will set your soul on fire, I promise.”
We also learned that the Mary Ann Esposito Foundation presented Metropolitan College with a generous gift of $10,000 to fund the Rebecca Alssid Award, named for the dedicated founder and longtime administrator of Boston University’s Culinary Arts and Gastronomy programs. The award challenges graduates of the Certificate Program in Culinary Arts to produce a scholarly work dedicated to the history, agriculture, traditions, and recipes of an Italian region of their choice.
Finally, in keeping with tradition, we honored our invaluable part-time instructors—who bring so much up-to-the-minute professional insight from their work to the classrooms—by bestowing upon one exceptional teacher the Roger Deveau Part-Time Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching. This year that award went to Roman Rabinovich (MET’15) of MET’s Administrative Sciences department. Roman graduated from MET with a master’s in International Marketing Management (now Global Marketing Management). He teaches in the Applied Business Analytics program.
The day ended with a bustling reception, where graduates, families, friends, and faculty and staff mingled, shared refreshments and snacks, and posed for pictures at the MET photo booth. Commencement is an exciting time for professors as well as for graduating students, and it was a pleasure to meet so many of you—some of whom were online students who traveled a significant distance to join us in Boston. We are very proud of you, and we welcome you to the BU alumni community!
You can relive the memories by looking at pictures posted on Instagram and Facebook, using #BUMET2019. If you stopped by the MET photo booth, you should have received an email with instructions for accessing your photos. Please email Sara Steele at sgsteele@bu.edu if you are missing your photos.
For those who want a keepsake of the 2019 MET Convocation Ceremony, a video recording is available for purchase at vimeo.com/ondemand/2019bumet.
Diplomas
If you were not able to attend the ceremony, diplomas will be mailed to official graduates who have provided a diploma mailing address via the Student Portal and who have no University holds. The date your diploma is ordered/mailed depends on when you have fulfilled these requirements. Diploma order/mail dates can be viewed a day after the order is placed in the Academics > Diploma & Graduation tab in the Student Portal.
For more information, visit the Office of the University Registrar “Diploma Mailing and Pickup Schedule” page.
