On Tuesday the university will hand out 37 doctoral degrees at their morning graduation ceremony and 18 at their afternoon ceremony. A total of 620 degrees, diplomas and certificates will be awarded.
This includes 55 doctoral degrees, 108 Master's degrees, 64 Honours degrees, 243 undergraduate degrees, 71 diplomas and certificates. With the autumn graduates included altogether with 100 PhDs, nearly 5 000 students are expected to graduate.
The university's rector and vice-chancellor Tyrone Pretorius said: “Our society is fraught with a plethora of social, economic and political challenges. It is a society that is in desperate need for inspirational and ethical leadership and hope.”
A large number of exciting and insightful PhD and Master's research topics also emerged. These topics are not only relevant to the South African context, but also to the rest of Africa and the world. Among those PhD candidates was visually-impaired student Matthys Johannes Odendal, who is set to obtain his PhD Linguistics after having faced many challenges.
His work explored the challenges to theories of literacy emerging out of how the visually-impaired engage with texts and think about their literacy.
Another candidate is Riaan Cedras, who had a long journey from Lavender Hill. He previously worked as a grass cutter with ex-convicts at the Simon's Town naval base.
His thesis explored patterns in diversity, abundance, distribution and community structure of cope pods (those small aquatic critters that form the basis of open ocean food chains, feeding the fish that feed us).
Cape Argus