While traveling in Asia, Ari Sernik volunteered at a Cambodian orphanage for HIV-positive children. After returning home he devised a way to continue to help: he organized a charity auction of the children’s art work. That experience led him to create Ten-Yad (“Give a Hand” in Hebrew), designed to help children’s charities sell handicrafts.

Like Sernik, several members of the FIU graduating class of 2017 did not wait to receive their degrees before they started to make a difference in the world: In 2014 Guy F. Jean Baptiste cofounded the Cercle des Volontaires por Education et le Progres d’Haiti (CVEPH), an organization that provides education and food to children in Haiti. Andrea Saladrigas turned her talent for sales and her entrepreneurial drive into Master Honey, a non-profit that places beehives with low-income women, teaches them business and hive maintenance skills, and buys the honey they produce.

Sernik, Baptiste and Saladrigas will be recognized as Worlds Ahead Graduates when they receive their bachelor’s degrees from the FIU College of Business at 2 p.m. on Saturday, April 29, 2017, during the first of 11 graduation ceremonies over five days that will turn 5,099 students into FIU alumni. All ceremonies will take place at the Ocean Bank Convocation Center, 12000 SW 8th Street in West Miami-Dade.

“The true mark of professional success is to do well by doing good,” said FIU President Mark B. Rosenberg. “These students are taking responsibility and serve as an inspiration to others about what is possible with passion, knowhow and perseverance.”