Celebrating the Graduating Class of 2024: Gedeon Baende

The University of San Diego would like to congratulate all of our wonderful students who are graduating this year. We will be spotlighting students from across campus, sharing their educational journeys leading up to graduation.

Gedeon Baende is graduating from the Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering with a dual Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Arts degree in Integrated Engineering.

When Baende was young, his parents made the difficult decision to send him and his siblings to the United States to escape political and economic turmoil in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and to pursue opportunities in higher education. When he arrived, Baende knew several languages, but English wasn’t one of them.

“The biggest headache was going to school, not understanding it, then having to teach yourself everything at home,” he said. “It was pretty much double the hours of schooling.”

Baende picked up English quickly and, with the help of his support system – siblings, relatives, church groups and more – he thrived. Eventually he landed at USD, where he felt like he was starting from scratch again. He joined clubs (and even started one of his own) and gave his time to things like STEM camps all while tackling a challenging engineering curriculum. It’s important to him to give back, he said, because he remembers all the people who helped him get to where he is.

Baende is a budding entrepreneur, and has also accepted a position as a software developer at Goldman Sachs. He’s also the subject of an Amazon Web Services docuseries, featuring students who’ve earned scholarships for the company’s artificial intelligence learning program.

He’s looking forward to what’s ahead, but first the celebration at commencement, where he’ll have a lot of family in attendance cheering him on.