LEWISTON — Change. That’s what it’s all about.

With more than 500 local men and women graduating from Central Maine Community College on Thursday night, a powerful sense of change was in the air.

“There will be no stopping us,” Brianna N. Crosby, the 2015 Student of the Year, told her classmates.

The response was thunderous. Everybody seemed to grasp that change was afoot and that they are a big part of it.

You don’t have to tell Carey Zembas. She’s 40 years old, has two kids and spent more than 10 years teaching at a preschool. For Zembas, life was reaching the stage of quiet routine.

Until it wasn’t.

“I just wanted to do something different,” said Zembas, of Lewiston.

She wanted change and change she got. After taking some cosmetology classes and doing a lot of volunteer work, Zembas enrolled in CMCC’s general studies program. Now that she’s finished, she’s off to the University of Southern Maine to pursue a career in occupational therapy.

There’s change aplenty in Zembas’ life. In the halls of the Androscoggin Bank Colisee on Thursday night, she appeared unable to stop smiling.

“It’s very exciting,” she said, “to be 40 and graduating from college.”

Her children were there to watch her graduate. Her parents were in the audience and so were her co-workers. Who could blame her for being giddy?

Up and down the Colisee halls, a range of emotions were on display. One young woman said she was so nervous, she thought she might throw up. A classmate told her to lighten up and to think about the party that would follow the ceremony. A passing young man, meanwhile, lamented that he had not thought to put bubble wrap on the pants of one of his classmates as a prank.

Crosby, who graduated with a pristine 4.0 grade-point average, is off to Ireland to study on a scholarship. She urged others to likewise keep the big wheel of change turning.

“Do not let this be the end to your education,” she said.

Speaker Rick Malinowski knows all about change. In his address, he had the perfect story to demonstrate the capriciousness of life. A Procter & Gamble manager, Malinowski told the Class of 2015 the speech he was delivering was not the one he’d originally planned.

“So last night at about 10 p.m., I knocked back a Red Bull, checked my Facebook, played a couple of hours of ‘Assassin’s Creed,’ cleared a few levels of ‘Candy Crush’ and then got down to business,” Malinowski said. “Since I was in a college mode, I thought, ‘I will make this speech rock. I will go all Eminem, drop a few F-bombs, do a little twerking, get all cray-cray up in here.’

“So I wrote the speech and it was killer,” he said. “Then, this morning, I get a phone call. It goes like this: ‘Hey that’s awesome; yeah, it should be fun, can’t wait to see you there. MOM!’ So no more R-rated speech.”

Again, the audience thundered. Change was on its way, all right.

“You have reached the end of this journey and the beginning of a new one,” Malinowski said. “No one can ever take away the knowledge you’ve gained here in your time at college. Use it wisely, give back to people who helped you get here, pay it forward to those coming next and make the world a better place.”

And then it was over, and more than 500 people left the Colisee to greet whatever changes awaited them.

“We are breaking out,” Crosby said. “We, as the Class of 2015, will be sharing our voices with the world.”