Jody Roberts recognized for academic excellence as she achieves longstanding personal goal

The Martinos Center’s Jody Roberts with State Representative Joseph McGonagle (right) and Senator Sal DiDomenico (left) at a ceremony earlier this month. Roberts was recognized for her academic achievements as an All-Massachusetts and All-USA Academic Team Member. (Image courtesy of Jody Roberts.)

When Jody Camerario Roberts crosses the stage at Bunker Hill Community College this weekend, with a degree in Business Administration and an armload of awards and accolades, she will have reached a milestone decades in the making.

Roberts, a grant administrator in the MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, graduated from high school 38 years ago and was ready and eager to begin college. She was slated to receive several scholarships to help her do so, but the school she was planning to attend unexpectedly shuttered its doors. She was devastated, she says.

She hoped to return to her studies several years later but, with a burgeoning family and long-term serious illnesses among those closest to her, time was a precious commodity. Her studies remained on hold. Still, she never lost sight of her goals. In recent years, even as she continued to work full-time and care for those who needed her, she started taking classes at Bunker Hill—at nights and on weekends as well as online—weaving them around her other responsibilities.

Much of what she learned in her business management courses was familiar to her. In her professional life, she has chaired committees, held management roles and supervised finances, “any role you can imagine,” she says. But obtaining the degree, while continuing to grow and explore new areas through her studies, remained an important goal. In a recent honors course, for example, she researched and wrote about the impact of pharmaceutical pollution on marine life.

Her hard work and her dedication to completing her degree, even in the face of personal challenges, have not gone unnoticed. Earlier this month in a ceremony held at the State House in Boston, Roberts, a member of the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society, was selected to the All-Massachusetts Academic Team. Just this week, she was honored with the prestigious President’s Leadership Award.

And fittingly, she has been awarded several scholarships—the Coca Cola Leaders of Promise Scholarship, the Stanley Z. Koplik Certificate of Mastery Scholarship, and the Commonwealth Honors Program Scholarship—that will help her continue her education at a four-year institution.

Roberts has already transferred to a Southern New Hampshire University online program in Healthcare Management called College for America. Partners HealthCare, the umbrella organization encompassing the Massachusetts General and other area hospitals, recently teamed up with the school to offer its employees self-paced associate’s and bachelor’s degrees. Roberts, who is also a two-time recipient of the Partners in Excellence Award, is a member of the pilot program and may be among the first of its students to earn a bachelor’s this year.