BOSTON — A year ago, Kyle L. Gathers, a gang member and longtime drug dealer, was sitting in prison.
On Saturday, he was sitting on the stage for his graduation from vocational school, where he was the student commencement speaker.
“I lived in a neighborhood where hope didn’t exist, where potential didn’t matter,” he told his 200 fellow graduates at Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology here. “And when you heard you had it, it saddened you, because you couldn’t fathom a future.”
Mr. Gathers, 31, spent 10 years in and out of prison on convictions for shootings, extortion and selling cocaine and marijuana. He was in solitary confinement for two of those years.
On Saturday, he had an urgent message for his classmates, who were gathered before him in black caps and gowns in a steamy auditorium. You need to think about your “personal legend” and the influence you are having on younger people, he told them, because they look up to you whether you realize it or not.
Mr. Gathers said that when he was growing up, his role models had been cousins and uncles who belonged to gangs and hung out in a scruffy park in the Dorchester section of Boston.
He said he became comfortable in the streets. He was cool. He was tough. He never used drugs, he said, but he started dealing as a teenager to help his mother make ends meet.
And he gained some notoriety, starting at 9 when relatives were rounded up in a federal raid.
“I got a reputation,” he recalled in an interview after the ceremony. “Everyone felt comfortable around me, they liked me or they were scared of me. It was some sort of celebrity. And then being in solitary, and being in prison in general, it was like a celebration, to them.”
But he was unaware of the effect that he was having on his younger siblings. When he was 13, his younger sister was shot while she was sitting next to him. She survived. But in 2014, his brother, Jameil Williams, who adored him and followed his every move, was not so lucky. He was gunned down and killed at 22.
“That was the turning point for me,” Mr. Gathers said.
“I was loyal to the streets but the streets were not loyal to me,” he said. “I was important where it didn’t matter to be important.”
He was determined to turn his life around, for himself and for his son, now 10. While he was still imprisoned, Mr. Gathers began studying and wrote a book of poems, “The Feelings They Couldn’t Lock Away.”
When he was released from prison, in June, he entered a program called College Bound Dorchester and enrolled at Benjamin Franklin, where he specialized in heating, ventilation and air-conditioning technology. On Saturday, he graduated magna cum laude and sat on the stage with the institute’s officials.
His immediate future is uncertain. He is staying with a friend for now because he has nowhere else to live. His job search will begin on Monday, when he sends out his résumé.
He is amazed to still be alive. When he was in high school, he said, he was consumed with wondering about whether he would be killed. Prison actually offered him some protection.
“Today seemed impossible,” he told his classmates. “Many of my friends didn’t make it to see today, my brother being one of them, and others may not ever get to see the outside world again.”
He added: “No one taught us how to believe in ourselves. That grit came from us.”