Jennifer Benway receives her degree in accounting at Bryant University graduation ceremonies yesterday in Smithfield. The university conferred 749 undergraduate degrees.

The Providence Journal / John Freidah

SMITHFIELD — Christian Pickett took a step closer to Wall Street and away from his modest upbringing on Long Island, N.Y., yesterday.

Pickett, the first in his family to enroll in a four-year college, was among 749 undergraduates receiving their degrees at Bryant University’s 144th commencement ceremony.

“It was a huge decision to go to college,” Pickett recalled. “I come from a long line of blue-collar workers. My father owns a nursery. He started working in the business when he was 18 years old, and then he bought it. My older brother is a union carpenter. So the whole college application process was completely unknown to anyone in my family. I didn’t have an example in the family to follow. It was all a brand new lesson.”

After getting good grades in high school, there was never any question that college was in his future. Now Pickett, a 22-year-old financial-services major, is aiming for a career in investment banking, where he believes his energy and drive will catapult him to success.

“In business, there’s no ceiling, no limits, to what can be achieved if you have the energy, drive and motivation. It’s all potential,” he said.

It was a chilly 55 degrees, with a light mist, as the graduates, dressed in the traditional black caps and gowns, made the short procession from the campus academic hall to the white tent where yesterday’s ceremony was held.

The graduates processed along a brick path through a decorative, wrought-iron archway and across a footbridge that passed over a reflecting pool. Parents dodged muddy patches on the campus green as they searched for the best angle to snap a photo.

Families with older relatives and young children watched the ceremony from flat screen televisions and projection screens set up in the campus library, student union and academic hall. They sipped hot drinks from the campus’s three coffee shops, which were abuzz with business all morning.

Keynote speaker Soledad O’Brien, a CNN correspondent, Steven S. Reinemund, retiring CEO of PepsiCo, and Kevin Sharer, CEO of the biotech firm Amgen, received honorary doctorates from the university.

“Most people are idiots,” said O’Brien, sharing a piece of advice her mother — an Afro-Cuban, who early in life was harassed because she was married to a white man — once gave her. “It is truly the best and most relevant advice I have been given as I encountered people in my life trying to limit me and define me and tell me what it is that I could achieve.”

Living in Baltimore, Md., during the 1950s, O’Brien said her parents forged ahead with their relationship despite being turned away from restaurants because they were an interracial couple. They married in Washington, D.C., because at the time it was illegal for blacks and whites to intermarry in Baltimore. O’Brien’s parents ultimately had six children, all of whom attended Harvard University.

“They never let other people set their goals or map out their ambition,” she said. “They simply followed their own hearts and lived the life they wanted to live.”

Sitting with his fellow graduates, accounting major William Moore, of Weymouth, Mass., looked toward a future at a Boston accounting firm, and a life, for now, rooted close to family and friends.

“The world is going to be what it is going to be,” he said. “You can only hope that the firm you go working for doesn’t end up belly up like Enron.”

Management major Alicia B. Eshleman considered what she was going to do with all her free time now that she was out of school. But it wasn’t for lack of a job.

The 32-year-old North Attleboro native has been working for Fidelity Investments for the past nine years and attending Bryant part-time for 12 years. “I almost feel like I should just keep going and get my master’s, but I haven’t decided yet,” Eshleman said. “I’m thinking of taking a little time off from school.”

pmarcelo@projo.com