Thursday afternoon we confirmed the dates for the spring commencement makeup weekend. Our ceremonies will take place between July 31 and August 2 for our master’s, specialist’s and bachelor’s degree candidates in the Stephen C. O’Connell Center. These ceremonies will have colleges joined together in groups, as we do in our fall ceremonies. We will not have a makeup university wide ceremony in the stadium.

Specific times and how many ceremonies have not yet been determined. This will depend on how many students we anticipate will return for these makeup ceremonies. A survey was sent out late afternoon to help us get a preliminary sense of participation numbers.

Doctoral candidates will be invited to join our summer doctoral ceremony.

An email will come out today from the bookstore concerning regalia orders- the bookstore will either mail graduates their regalia if they still want it OR they will refund them and give them information on how that transaction is to take place.

It is important to note that while typically colleges handle their own walk-out-of-term requests for undergrads wishing to participate in other ceremony semesters, a more centralized system will have to be developed for requests that may come from our spring graduates. We will not necessarily have the capacity in our summer and fall ceremonies to meet the needs of those requests, and we can’t run the risk of capacity issues that would potentially cause us to violate fire code. I do not yet have a system in place for this, and am open to discussion as to how to handle this, but wanted to address it with you now before whomever within your college started receiving and approving these requests. I will reach out to your ceremony coordinators about this as an item of further discussion next week.

Thank you,

Steph McBride
Director of Commencements
Office of the Provost
PO Box 113175
352-392-5277
stephmcbride@aa.ufl.edu

Posted: March 20, 2020
Category: Covid-19 Updates