2005 Boston Pops POPSearch Winner to Sing at Bunker Hill Community College

2005 Boston Pops POPSearch Winner to Sing at Bunker Hill Community College

BOSTON, May 26 /PRNewswire/ -- "The only time you can make opportunity work is if you go for it," says Boston Pops 2005 POPSearch winner Frances Botelho-Hoeg who will sing the National Anthem at Bunker Hill Community College's (BHCC) 32nd Commencement Exercises on Saturday, June 3, 2006 at 11:00 a.m. Botelho-Hoeg will join keynote speaker Marjorie Clapprood, the Executive Director of One Family Inc., in celebrating this year's Commencement Exercises.

Ms. Botelho-Hoeg, an elementary school principal from Kingston, realized a dream when she was chosen from close to 300 contestants to win the 2005 Boston Pops POPSearch talent competition. She began singing while in elementary school. As a student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Botelho- Hoeg performed in several musical groups on campus, and later in dinner theater in Boston. Then, she gave music up for 16 years to focus on her other love, education, earning a masters degree in educational administration at Eastern Nazarene College.

In 2004, Ms. Botelho-Hoeg saw an ad in the newspaper for the inaugural POPSearch and her 83-year old mother told her this was something she needed to do. "She said 'Do this. You need to do this. Go for it' ... The minute I stepped onto the stage at Symphony Hall, I knew I was in the right place at the right time," said Botelho-Hoeg. While she unable to advance past the second round, she auditioned for the Pops again in 2005 and was picked to perform for a live audience of more than 500,000, with millions more watching on television, during the Boston Pops annual Fourth-of-July celebration at the Hatch Shell. She also sang for select performances during the Boston Pops' 2005 summer tour. "It was just the most wonderful experience of my life, it just was," she said.

Bunker Hill Community College is one of the largest and most diverse institutions of higher education in Massachusetts. The College enrolls 8,172 students on its two campuses and at its five satellite locations each semester. More than 1,700 students take classes on-line. Six in ten students are people of color, and more than half of BHCC's students are women. The college also enrolls hundreds of international students, who come from more than 90 countries and speak over 75 different languages.

Source: Bunker Hill Community College

CONTACT: Carolyn Assa, +1-617-228-2177, of Bunker Hill Community
College

Web site: http://www.bhcc.mass.edu/

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