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Mason graduates largest class
George Mason University graduated the largest class in its 41-year history on May 17 at the Patriot Center in Fairfax.
A total of 6,988 students received their degrees and added their ranks to the more than 122,000 Mason graduates since the university's inception.
Of the graduating class, 4,025 received undergraduate degrees, 2,500 obtained master’s degrees, 239 earned doctorates and 224 received law degrees.
Thousands of graduates have distinguished themselves during their time at Mason and prior, as well. Two of them are featured below.
Melissa Bradby
She started dancing at 16 months, was a beauty pageant contestant by age 3, an international tap dancing champion in her mid-teens and is currently the reigning Miss Black Virginia USA.
Now Mason graduate Melissa Bradby is well on her way to becoming a teacher, with the further goal of heading a school of her own one day as a principal.
With a newly minted graduate degree in political science in hand and a bachelor's in communication previously earned at Mason, Bradby will be starting a training course in June with Teach for America, a national program that places outstanding recent graduates into schools in low-income communities.
"I was assigned to a kindergarten in Washington, D.C.," Bradby told The Times. "I'm very excited about that."
"The whole purpose of it is to help fix the achievement gap that we have here in the United States as far as low-income students are concerned," she said.
Bradby will be attending the training in Philadelphia instead of competing in the Miss Black USA Pageant in Las Vegas June 17-23.
"That was a pretty hard decision to make," she said. "But I really want to be the best kindergarten teacher I can be."
Justin Procopio
Not many new graduates at any university can lay claim to having been published in one of the world’s most prestigious magazines, but Justin Procopio can.
Procopio's name appears on a map he created for the National Geographic May 2008 edition.
A resident of Powhatan, near Richmond, the 22-year-old geography major landed a 12-week summer internship in 2007 at the magazine's map department at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C., where he made four dozen or so drafts of the map before completing a final version.
Procopio called it one his proudest achievements.
"They have all these set standards on how things need to look to make it a National Geographic map as opposed to anyone else's map," he said.
During his internship, Procopio worked on other research projects, but the published full-color map titled “Beyond the Han,” which traces the minority populations of China, was the project he focused on most.
"I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of hands-on experience that I got," he said.
Interested in math, science and drawing since an early age, Procopio said he hopes to find a job in the Washington Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, as, what else, a cartographer.
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