About 1,500 students received degrees and certificates during the ceremony at the Knight campus, in Warwick.

WARWICK –– The drummer gave the cue. The two bagpipers followed.

It was 4:35 p.m., time to march.

The 1,500-plus graduates-to-be, with their black caps on and gowns fluttering in the wind, left the Community College of Rhode Island’s Knight campus main building and marched around the plaza into the Field House.

Their families and friends packed the field house, armed with flowers, balloons and anything that would produce noise.

Minutes later, the prospective graduates made their big entrance.

Cheers blended with applause and whistles.

Necks outstretched, their friends and relatives tried to make eye contact, find the one they came to support in a crowd that suddenly looked so similar. Then came the waves and camera flashes.

“Mommy!” said one of the young women as she recognized her mother from a distance.

Her mother waved back.

“Are you excited?” CCRI’s president Ray M. Di Pasquale yelled into the crowd.

The students’ cheers filled the room.

And cheer they did as Judge Frank Caprio, chairman of the Board of Governors for Higher Education, stepped to the lectern.

Caprio, whose videotaped court proceedings play regularly on the public-access show Caught in Providence, joked he saw many familiar faces in the crowd.

Caprio said he, like many of those who received their associate degrees and certificates Friday, was the first in his family –– first of 65 cousins, he said –– to go to college.

“As you go through life,” Caprio said, “don’t be afraid to go out on a limb.”

“I know these are tough economic times,” Governor Carcieri told the graduates-to-be, but “with every challenge in life, there is always great opportunity.”

“The future is filled with uncertainty,” retired state Supreme Court Chief Justice Frank J. Williams said in his commencement address. “Yet, we have, we must have hope –– our state’s motto.”

Williams, a Lincoln scholar, urged students to develop some of the qualities that have made the president a revered figure in American history: political courage, leadership and compassion.

“What will be asked of you is hard work,” Williams said. “What will be expected of you is best effort … Life is a continuous challenge to achieve your goals.

“It is not how you enter the stage, but how you exit it that people will remember. Embrace the challenge,” he continued.

“Class of 2009, you really are the future of Rhode Island,” Williams said, adding, “We need your talent and energy in our beloved state.”

Di Pasquale reminded students to look around, at themselves and their peers, to remember how far they had come and the hurdles they had overcome along the way.

From the student who faced medical tragedy in her family to eventually become a registered nurse, to the student who turned himself into the state’s custody or the student who dropped out of high school to go on to graduate with a 4.0 GPA, to students who fled war-torn regions, that, Di Pasquale said, is the spirit of the Class of 2009.Inside

•The calendar of college graduations in Rhode Island, including keynote speakers.

•Bryant University awards advanced degrees to 187 graduates.

•More than 650 will collect graduate degrees from URI on Saturday.

•RIPTA offers free rides to URI’s undergraduate commencement on Sunday.

Stories on Page A4

marmenta@projo.com