USCB graduation: 3 faces from the Class of 2016, one of the university’s largest

The University of South Carolina Beaufort graduated one its largest classes Friday, when 340 members of the Class of 2016 received degrees.

The ceremony, at the Hilton Head Gateway campus, was the university’s 13th baccalaureate graduation since it began conferring four-year degrees in 2004. Overall, it was the institution’s 56th commencement.

There are over 30 areas of study at USCB, so graduates will leave to embark on various career paths or attend graduate school. But some graduates will stay in Beaufort County — on campus itself — to begin the next phase of their lives.

Here are the stories of three members of the Class of 2016 and what’s next for them.

Calvin Calvert

Calvin Calvert once thought he wanted to be a chiropractor.

That was when he first enrolled at USCB back in 2011 — after a 13-year break from school, after a stint in the Army, after serving with the 101st Airborne in Iraq. His had been among the first boots on the ground in that war.

Calvert, 36, who calls Bluffton home, graduated from Hilton Head Island High School in 1998. In 2011, he was an over-30-year-old freshman.

“About two years in, I started asking questions about what do I do if I wash out of chiropractor school,” Calvert said Wednesday. “What do I do with a biology degree?”

So Calvert changed his major to computational science.

“The applied side of computer science,” he explained. “We’re not interested in making computers. We’re interested in taking great computers ... and solving problems.”

The computational job market was better, he said. He’s already landed a job in Winston-Salem, N.C., with Reynolds American Inc. His job will be to help the tobacco company become a better manufacturer and help get its products to a “safer state faster.”

When the combat veteran enrolled at USCB, he worried about “sitting in classrooms with people who were going to have strong, ill-informed opinions” about the war.

But those “preconceived notions” never materialized. Just polite debates.

In October 2014, he helped start the Sand Shark Veterans club — a social, community service and advocacy organization — on campus. He later served as its president.

“I joined (the Army) for the money,” he said.

But he bristles when he hears people call the G.I. Bill “free money.”

In the fall of 2011, he worried his education benefits would expire. That put him on the clock.

In terms of returning to school, he credits his wife for pushing him to go back.

Pascale Rocca

Pascale Rocca realized she was slowly raising her hand.

It was halftime of a Sand Sharks soccer game early this season, and Pascale’s coach wasn’t pleased with the team’s goalkeeping. He asked for a volunteer to stand in the net.

Rocca, a 5-foot-3 center midfielder, saw hers was the only raised hand.

“All right,” she remembers her coach saying. “Go put some gloves on.”

Rocca, 21, claims Bluffton as home. But she was born in Sudbury, Ontario, six hours north of Toronto.

“I pretty much kind of call the Lowcountry and the South home, more than Canada now,” she said Thursday.

She lived in Columbia, S.C., before attending USCB. Singapore before that. She’s moved around a lot.

But her family has relocated to South Carolina, and she’ll stick around after graduation.

She’ll work with the USCB admissions office immediately after graduation until July, when she’ll become the college’s AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer coordinator.

“I knew I wanted to take a break and not go straight to grad school,” the psychology major said, adding she might purse a master’s in higher education administration.

Rocca, this past year’s student body president, came to USCB to play soccer. But she never knew she’d end up in the goal.

The Sand Sharks played rival Savannah College of Art and Design later in the season. Rocca was in goal.

SCAD won 1-0, on a “hard-driven ball” that went straight over Rocca’s head.

“‘I’ve never seen an athlete do something like that in my life,’” Rocca remembers SCAD’s coach saying to her after the game.

“I played really, really well,” Rocca said, “for what I could do.”

Her year in the goal, she said, was a “life lesson.”

Kelli Brunson

As an orientation leader, Kelli Brunson helped create a skit for new USCB students.

In the skit she played a freshman who, reluctantly, went to a party on a school night.

“I was one of the (characters) who didn’t want to go (party), of course,” Brunson said Tuesday.

But her character gave in to peer pressure and went out. In the skit she wakes up late and ends up in the wrong class.

But it was all just an act.

At USCB, Brunson, a 22-year-old hospitality management major from Manning, balanced a full load of classes with several jobs. She worked in the Office of Student Life, USCB’s gym, as a research assistant for the college’s Lowcountry and Resort Islands Tourism Institute and, finally, at the Hilton Head-Bluffton Chamber of Commerce.

In fact, she worked herself into a job at the chamber — she’ll be a research analyst and marketing specialist.

She was surprised recently when her dad asked her if she was going to graduate school. He didn’t attend college, Brunson said, adding that her mom didn’t either.

“I think he knows I like school and everything,” Brunson said, “and he wants me to do everything that I want to do, everything that I want to accomplish.”

Brunson and her older sister are the first members of their immediate family to go to college.

She remembers going on campus tours with her sister and mom.

“I think I was able to relate to the incoming students pretty well,” Brunson said, referring to her time as an orientation leader. “I know that my parents take education seriously, and that’s made me take my education seriously.”

Brunson said she just recently skipped her first class. Intentionally, to work on another project.

She still got an A.

This story was originally published April 29, 2016 at 7:07 PM with the headline "USCB graduation: 3 faces from the Class of 2016, one of the university’s largest."