2009 Recipient - Dominique Powell
When Dominique Powell walked across the commencement stage to accept the 2009 John F. Kennedy Award for Academic Excellence, the scene must have seemed surreal: 3,000 of her classmates in front of her, dozens of faculty, staff, and VIPs behind, and the honor guard of the U.S.S. Constitution to one side.
“I wouldn’t in a thousand years imagine myself receiving this award,” said the soft-spoken Powell in an interview a few days before the ceremony. “I feel great, but I’m still in shock that I won because I wasn’t going for it, honestly. I was just doing my thing, working, and trying to get good grades—not going for any award.”
Doing her thing was a lot more work than Powell makes it sound. After four years of active duty in the US Marine Corps—spent mostly at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina—Powell said she followed in her sister’s footsteps and began her undergraduate degree at UMass Boston in 2005, not quite sure where it would lead.
Since then, she has served as a student member of the Undergraduate Disciplinary Board, the dean of students Advisory Committee, on the Affirmative Action Plan Hearing Board, worked as an orientation leader for new students, and earned an almost perfect grade point average. Her favorite on-campus role, however, was working as coordinator of the Student Veterans Center and as a science and math tutor at Veterans Upward Bound, an organization aimed at preparing veterans for a post-secondary education.
“One of my goals is to continue working with veterans to help them find their potential,” Powell said. “I think coming out of the service is a difficult thing, and for me, I felt like they [the U.S. military] didn’t do enough to prepare me for what I was going to encounter, and I plummeted into a deep depression. Luckily, I had people around me who cared enough about me, so hopefully I can give that [support] back to people and they can give back to others.”
“The John F. Kennedy Award is one of the highlights of commencement at the University of Massachusetts Boston,” said Chancellor J. Keith Motley. “It is a time when we recognize greatness, hope, and service – what we saw in President Kennedy and what we see in our students. I am so pleased to honor Dominique with this award because she has more than earned it: she lives the ideals for which it stands.”
Powell is the first veteran to receive the JFK Award, an achievement that means as much to her as it does to Augusto St. Silva, the director of Veterans Affairs at UMass Boston, who said he’s waited over two decades for one of his veteran students to receive the honor.
“I have cherished this award, and as I work commencement every year, I listen to the speech made by the student, and I am going to be overly excited this year because it is a veteran student who is receiving this award,” Silva said proudly. “This is an award I would place as high as the Stanley Cup or the World Series, and I hope Dominique holds it high as she walks across that stage.”
Lois Rudnick, one of the five members of the JFK Award selection committee, said that although the award is a momentous achievement, Powell herself is the prize.
“From the moment Dominique walked into the interview, she captivated me,” Rudnick explained. “She is an extremely powerful and compelling person who is extraordinarily honest about the difficulty she’s encountered in her life. She talked eloquently about the Marines [and] her commitment to veteran affairs. I feel terrific about our choice.”