On Thursday, May 21 2015 Gateway Community College celebrated its 23 rd Commencement Yale University’s Woolsey Hall. For many GCC students like Anthony Streater the occasion represented a new step towards the future.

Fifty-seven year old Anthony Streater came to Gateway Community College after his successful 35-year career as an auto mechanic ended abruptly after an auto accident. The Eli Whitney High School grad realized, after several surgeries and an ultimate knee replacement, that he needed to go back to school and retrain for a new career. He decided to become a drug and alcohol recovery counselor. 

For Streater, the transition from auto mechanic to drug and alcohol recovery counselor was not that far of a stretch, “Sometimes you have to troubleshoot with people the way you do with cars because they can’t always tell you what is wrong,” explains Streater. “I realized that I am good at that—troubleshooting—and I like helping people.” 

Anthony Streater’s made the most of his studies at Gateway Community College where earned membership in the Phi Theta Kappa honor society and became Vice President of the Drug and Alcohol Recovery Counselor (DARC) Club. Although he found returning to school challenging, Streater is passionate about his career choice and the hard work and studying it took to be successful. As part of his training he had to work an internship at a methadone clinic. “I would have to wake up at 4am to be at the clinic by 5am,” he recalls. “But I worked hard and learned a lot about how to help patients with different personalities and needs.”

As a mature student, Streater looks back fondly on the relationships he’s forged with other students through the DARC Club’s meet and greet sessions where students who had completed their DARC internships would meet with students who were about to start their DARC internships and talk about expectations and challenges.

“Being a GCC senior and talking to the students who are about to start the internships made me realize how much my education and training has prepared me over the past two years,“ he explains. “If I had any words of advice it would be to know that assignments may be challenging but if you have a little confidence in yourself and pace yourself, you will learn so much and be ready to make a difference in the field. Everything that you learn in Gateway’s DARC program is valuable and important.”

Anthony Streater said that he will miss his time at Gateway Community College, but knows that the doors are always open for him to sit down with his peers and the professors to talk about the future.