Second Day of Commencement Ceremonies at Cal State Monterey Bay

A record number of students graduated from Cal State Monterey Bay’s 22nd commencement.

On Saturday hundreds of students received their well-deserved diplomas. 2,321 students were eligible to graduate this year, that’s 238 more than last year.

Something CSUMB spokesperson says the school takes pride in knowing, “The need for educated, to put educated people in the workplace in California is huge, as you know. So it’s great for us to be able to be growing as a university and be able to put more educated people out into the community,” says Noah Rappahahn.

While it’s a day of celebration, many students tell KION they already have eyes on the future.

“I am going to be doing an internship with the Washington Center,” says Tatiana Kimbo.

Brian Balopoulos and Lizette Mendoza say “we are actually planning to move to Seattle so we have job interviews lined up for next week.”

As for graduate Jessie Brodie, “I am actually planning to go travel the world for the next three months and see you do that I, Brazil, Tokyo, Sydney, Paris, everything. You know international business degree got to go see the world right?”

Some students say they never thought they’d see the day, like Joseph Garabedian, “I questioned coming to school in the first place because we had a family business, but my dad never got the chance to go to college so this is the one thing I could do that he didn’t.”

While most are happy to be done with school, there’s one thing no one seems to be looking forward to, “Student loans yeah, that’s going to be a struggle, but that’s what we’re working for us so we’re going to get that done and pay those off quickly,” says Balopoulos.

Rappahahn says the school does not plan on raising tuition but they are hoping to get more state funding to help keep rolling out record numbers of graduates, “about half of the funding comes from the California state university system, for us, and the other half comes from the California state. So we are hoping to have an increase in funding from the state so we can continue to grow at the rate that we want.”