By Philip Newman
More than 1,000 members of LaGuardia Community College’s Class of 2014 expressed its exultation with traditional screams of joy Thursday after two speakers urged them to seize the day in their quest for success.
U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, the commencement speaker, told them not to be sidelined by adversity, recalling his up-and-down experiences in his political candidacy in Maryland, where he was elected to the Montgomery County Council but failed to win the Democratic Party nod for state attorney general.
“Look at Steve Jobs, who dropped out of college and started Apple out of his garage,” Perez said. ”Or look at J.K. Rowling. When she first wrote the Harry Potter books, she was receiving public assistance.”
Perez, who grew up in Buffalo, N.Y. as a member of a Dominican family, also asked those on the way up to extend a hand to those below them on the ladder of success.
Ray Suarez, the prize-winning news correspondent at PBS NewsHour, who is now with Al Jazeera America television, told the graduates “somewhere along your way you may have been told ‘you are not college material.”
“Thank God you didn’t listen,” Suarez said in his keynote address.
He urged the graduates not to let the degrees they had just earned be their last.
Suarez told the graduates that time was a gift they should make use of.
College officials urged the audience of thousands as well as the graduates to hold down their traditionally noisy salute as each diploma was extended lest the din muffle the announcement of the next graduate’s name in the Javits Convention Center on West 34th Street in Manhattan.
Fiorello LaGuardia Community College, in Long Island City was founded in 1971 as an experiment in opening the doors of “high education to all.”
In the Class of 2014:
Gender: 62.6 percent women and 37.4 percent men.
Ethnicity: 35.3 percent identify themselves as Hispanic; 19.6 percent Asian/Pacific Islanders; 12.3 black non-Hispanic; 12 percent white, non-Hispanic; 20 percent consider themselves of another ethnic origin or did not wish to self-identify.
Residence: 63.7 percent live in Queens, 14.9 percent live in Brooklyn, 10.3 percent live in Manhattan, 6.6 percent live in the Bronx and 4.5 percent live elsewhere.
