Cal Poly combines architecture and science commencements

Author

Carly Heltzel
January 20, 2026

Good morning. It’s Tuesday, and I’m watching the livestream of the SLO CAL Open, a World Surf League Qualifier in Pismo Beach. Onto the five Cal Poly, SLO and California stories you need to know for today.

1.

Cal Poly is combining the commencement ceremonies for architecture students and science and math students in order to make way for two engineering ceremonies. Students have mixed feelings. One said that because architecture students are very close knit, combining with another college would dilute the celebration. Another said it doesn’t matter and a third said it would have been better to keep them separate and add a seventh ceremony.

2.

SLO is changing how you vote for city council this year. After a lawsuit from a Latino rights organization tried to push the city into creating districts that are each represented by one councilmember, the city came to a settlement that instead, each voter will only get one vote for city council per election, even if there are two or more seats open. This new system aims to encourage people to vote for the one person who will best represent them.

3.

A SLO hospital is getting a $220 million upgrade. The Adventist Health Sierra Vista hospital is the closest to Cal Poly’s campus, has the only trauma center and NICU in the county and is aging rapidly such that its facilities can’t keep up with the region’s demands. The expansion will roughly double the number of beds in the emergency room. But it’s still in the planning stages and likely won’t break ground until 2028.

4.

California’s attorney general ordered Elon Musk’s xAI to stop producing and distributing deepfake sexual images from users’ clothed posts without their knowledge or consent. He warned that the images, which have picked up at alarming rates in the past few weeks, violate the state’s new pornographic deepfake ban that went into effect two weeks ago. One assemblymember said for the women and children who are targeted in the images, “the psychological and reputational harm is devastating.”

5.

Wine coolers had a decade of greatness from their invention in 1981 to their tax-induced death in 1991. But a SLO County father-son duo is bringing them back with their brand: Wilbur Wines. Because the original products aren’t in circulation, they had to develop their formula from scratch, testing combinations of wine, fruit juice and bubbles. Finally, with two flavors perfected, the pair launched “the reboot nobody asked for.”