More than 2,000 students will graduate from Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business next week. This is one of the biggest graduation classes ever for the school, known as one of the largest and highest-ranked business schools in the country. The president of the Phoenix Suns, a group of executives flying in from China, and a student who already started a nonprofit to help foster teens will be part of the ceremonies.
“We have another fantastic graduating class this year,” says W. P. Carey School of Business Dean Robert Mittelstaedt. “These students exemplify why our undergraduate, full-time MBA and part-time MBA programs are all ranked Top 30 by U.S. News & World Report. It’s another batch of high achievers.”
The school’s graduate-level convocation will include more than 900 students, most of them receiving MBAs, but others getting master’s degrees in accountancy, tax, information management, real estate development and health systems management. The event will be held Friday, May 4 at 5 p.m. at the Wells Fargo Arena in Tempe. The featured speaker will be Brad Casper, president of the Phoenix Suns basketball team, who is known for his community involvement and heavy focus on area schools.
In addition, about 20 of the 120 executives graduating from the school’s executive MBA program in Shanghai are traveling to Phoenix to participate in the Tempe ceremony. The Shanghai program educates some of the highest-level business and government leaders in China and is currently ranked among the Top 20 executive MBA programs in the world by the Financial Times, Britain’s equivalent of The Wall Street Journal. Past students have included the CEOs of Baosteel and Shanghai Electric, three vice governors of China’s major provinces, six city mayors, the chief executive officer of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, several bank chairmen and the chairman of Shanghai Airlines.
At the undergraduate level, more than 1,100 students are eligible to walk the stage, and more than a dozen different types of business degrees will be awarded. The undergraduate convocation is set for Thursday, May 3 at 8 a.m. at the Wells Fargo Arena. The main speaker will be Chris Spinella, chief executive officer of Apriva, which develops and advances smart-card technology and wireless applications for payment processing and secure mobile communications.
The graduates at this ceremony will include the winner of the spring 2012 Turken Family Outstanding Graduating Senior Award, Christos Makridis. He co-founded the Quanta Foundation LLC, an educational services company that connects high school students with high-profile university projects to produce research and multimedia materials. Makridis is also a McCord Scholar, an economics teaching assistant, chairman of the business school’s Dean’s Advisory Council and editor in chief of an international undergraduate-research journal on science policy at ASU.
Another finalist for the Turken Family award, Priya Nathan, co-founded a nonprofit to benefit young people. Partnered for Success helps foster and orphan youth successfully transition out of the foster care system in the Phoenix area. The program has been recognized by Fast Company magazine and was selected as an ASU Innovation Challenge grant winner twice.
“Many of these graduates are already making their mark well beyond the classroom,” says W. P. Carey School of Business Executive Dean Amy Hillman. “We have students who are small-business owners, working moms, members of the military and lots of others already making us proud. We look forward to their continued success.”
