The CUNY Baccalaureate Blog

CUNY Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies 2008 Commencement

Journalist John Hockenberry to speak

Time and Place: Monday, June 9, 10:30 am, The Great Hall at The Cooper Union, 7 East 7th St. at Third Avenue (the Foundation Building), Manhattan

Graduates: 250

Speaker: John Hockenberry, three-time Peabody Award winner, four-time Emmy award winner and Dateline NBC correspondent; now co-host of an NPR morning news program, “The Takeaway”

Faculty speaker: Professor John Krinsky, Associate Professor of Political Science, City College

Student speaker: Easter Z. Wood (Area of Concentration: The African Diaspora in the Americas)

The CUNY Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies (CUNY BA), administered by the CUNY Graduate Center, is a university-wide individualized bachelor’s degree where students work one-on-one with faculty. This small program, with an annual enrollment of 600, is intended for self-directed, academically strong students who have well-formulated academic and career goals. Most are working adults, many of whom are raising families; 80% are over 25 years old (49% are over 35 years old); and a significant number are returning to school, often after a hiatus of anywhere from 5 to 30 years. Since its inception in 1971, over 6000 students have earned their degrees through this route; almost 50% have gone on to graduate school.

Four students have received major graduate school fellowships: Aaron Brower will attend Harvard Divinity School with a Presidential Scholarship - free tuition plus a $20,000 stipend; Sharif Corinaldi will attend the University of California/Berkeley for a Ph.D. in Physics/Quantum Information and Computation with the Chancellor’s Fellowship – five years of free tuition plus a $25,000 stipend; Corey Lamont will attend Howard University for a Ph.D. in English with the Frederick Douglass Fellowship - five years of free tuition plus an $18,000 stipend; and Diana Kachan, a 2008 Jonas E. Salk Scholar, will attend the University of Miami School of Medicine for an M.D./Ph.D. with a Dean’s Fellowship, covering four years of the medical degree.

117 students will participate in the ceremony, during which several scholarships will be awarded. Guests are coming from all over the U.S. including the Virgin Islands, as well as Antigua, Australia, Barbuda, Belize, The Canary Islands, Dominica, Ecuador, England, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Israel, Jamaica, and Trinidad.