On June 16, 2019, the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego held commencement ceremonies for 344 students. The commencement ceremonies celebrated the graduation of the school’s Full-Time, FlexEvening and FlexWeekend MBA classes, Ph.D. students, and students from the Master of Finance and Master of Science in Business Analytics classes.
Family, friends and Rady School supporters joined the graduates for the ceremonies. The commencement keynote speakers were Julia Brown, a life science industry executive and Charles Brandes, an investment firm founder and visionary.
“Don’t be afraid to take a risk and try something new,” said Brown. “Decide what path you will take then go for it and don’t look back. Achieving a peak gives absolutely no assurance of staying there. We must earn it every day. What it took to be successful yesterday may be different than what will be required tomorrow. So we need you. We need your brain power, your talent, your energy and your leadership as you embark on your career. We wish you all the best. Whatever you decide to do, we wish you great success, great happiness and a long and gratifying career. So now let’s get out there and make things happen.”
Rady School Dean Robert S. Sullivan presided over the ceremony and emphasized the importance of remaining connected to the Rady School and its alumni after graduation.
“So to our graduates on behalf of this your Rady School community, we look forward to your successes and to your impact,” Sullivan said. “We look forward to confidently building our bridges and our support network. So please know that we will be here for you, our alumni, throughout your professional careers, not just now. If you had an issue five years or 10 years from now, this is the place to come back to keep the connections. And the network that you build as friends, they’ll go on forever.”
Students and alumni also took part in the ceremony, with Lauren Murphy (MBA ’19) and Robert Louis Beyer (MSBA ’19) delivering the student commencement addresses. Rady School Alumni Association President Bosco Lujan (MBA ’12) and Andrea Yoder-Clark (MSBA ’17) delivered the alumni addresses.
Retiring Rady School Adjunct Professor Dr. Harry Markowitz was honored with the Rady School of Management Founders Medal at the ceremony for his outstanding contributions to the school.
Markowitz is an esteemed economist, beloved professor and thoughtful philanthropist, His seminal work, “Portfolio Selection,” launched a distinguished career lauded with economics’ most prestigious accolades, including the Nobel Prize in Economics, the John von Neumann Theory Prize, and the Wharton-Jacobs Levy Prize. His lifetime of teaching ultimately brought him to the Rady School where he joined the founding faculty as an adjunct professor of finance and accounting in 2006 and continued to teach his groundbreaking theory to Rady students until his retirement this year.
In addition to his critical contributions to the establishment and quality of the Rady School, Markowitz has also dedicated himself to securing the future of the Rady School and its students through his timeless generosity. In 2017, Markowitz pledged a $4 million gift to the Rady School of Management to create fellowships for students. He placed his Nobel Medal at the UC San Diego Library in 2018.