Summer graduation now a “hot” commodity

Photo by Florida International University courtesy of Creative Commons.

Simone Garvey-Ewan/ Contributing Writer

Some students trade in their sunscreen and beach balls for textbooks and scantrons as summer graduations reportedly rise.

According to Ivette Duarte, the interim director of Career Services, seniors enrolled in summer A, B and C term graduate in August and face a better job market.

“Students seem to have a new optimism about the future,” said Duarte. “The job market is better around the end of the summer, class sizes are reduced and the competition out there isn’t as intense.”

Duarte herself has a new optimism about next year’s summer graduation, partly because of the 170  employers who will be in attendance at the Sept. 18 Career Fair.

According to Duarte, “students will finally have more jobs.”

Some students, like Brooke Jones, a senior majoring in health services administration, consider themselves very lucky to have an early graduation. She is supposed to be graduating in spring 2015, but met her requirements before the anticipated date.

“I came to FIU with college credits and took classes each summer so I’m ahead,” said Jones.

Typically, there are six summer graduation ceremonies that occur. According to the Sun Sentinel, 3,500 students graduated this past summer, as opposed to 4,000 last winter and 4,300 last spring.

According to Duarte, the colleges with the largest amount of graduates are the College of Arts and Sciences along with the College of Business.

Eve Desorme, a senior biology major, will be graduating a semester late due to the unavailability of certain classes.

“I’m scheduled to graduate in the spring but the classes that I would take now or in the spring are full or they conflict with my schedule,” said Desorme. “For example, there is only one class opened for Statistics II this semester. Why would they do that?”

According to various students, the summer is used to retake failed classes.

Simone McPherson, a 2013 graduate in the Robert Stempel College of Public Health and Social Work, took advantage of summer classes to take her final three classes because she didn’t want to have a heavier class load in the spring.

“I didn’t get a break. As soon as I graduated, I went right into graduate school,” said McPherson. “However, attending graduate school so soon after forced me to remain very focused.”

Major companies usually do their recruiting in the fall and spring. To further prepare summer graduates for life after their degree, Career Services hosts internship fairs in the fall and spring semesters.

– news@fiusm.com