W. P. Carey School to graduate record number of students


A record number of students – more than 2,000 -- will graduate from the nationally ranked W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University this week. Appropriately, the speaker at this year’s undergraduate convocation ceremony will be W. P. Carey School of Business alumnus Aaron Matos, chief executive officer and founder of the popular employment website Jobing.com. He will speak to the students about their future in this tough post-recession job market.

“We hope these new graduates will be inspired hearing from a recent alum who created and now leads a multimillion-dollar enterprise,” explains W. P. Carey School of Business Dean Robert Mittelstaedt. “He will touch on how they, too, can succeed in a difficult job market. The W. P. Carey School of Business helps in this area with strong career placement services that drew about 1,300 recruiters to the school last year during the height of the recession.”

Another W. P. Carey School alum, MaryAnn Miller, vice president and chief human resources officer at Avnet, will speak at the graduate-level ceremony. Avnet is currently the highest-ranked Arizona company on the Fortune 500. It’s one of the world’s largest distributors of electronic parts, enterprise computer products and embedded subsystems involved in the technology supply chain.

One of the students graduating this week is also an interesting success story. Lissa Regets, winner of the spring 2010 Turken Family Outstanding Graduating Senior Award, grew up in a single-parent household, where her mother suffered severe, unexpected medical problems. Regets put herself through school using scholarships, federal aid and paychecks from several part-time jobs. Despite her hectic schedule, she became a star ASU athlete in track and field, participated in the Pat Tillman Leadership through Action Program, served as a student mentor in the President Barack Obama Scholars Program, did charity work for several nonprofit organizations and acted as a student mobilization coordinator for Undergraduate Student Government. She will spend the summer working for the U.S. Embassy in Macedonia and then attend graduate school.

About 1,400 undergraduate students and 750 graduate students will receive diplomas this month. The undergraduate convocation ceremony begins Thursday at noon. The graduate-level ceremony starts Saturday at 9 a.m. Both will be held at the Wells Fargo Arena in Tempe.

Students graduating this week represent all four local Arizona State University campuses. A separate ceremony will be held this summer for about 80 students graduating from the school’s prestigious executive MBA in Shanghai, China, currently ranked among the top 50 executive MBA programs in the world.

All of these students will receive diplomas with significant value. The W. P. Carey School of Business is ranked among the top 20 business schools in the nation for “Return on Investment,” according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The school is also top 25 in the world for business school research productivity. The full-time MBA program is ranked top 30 in the country by U.S. News & World Report, and the evening MBA program is ranked top 20.