CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – The 141st commencement of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will be held in two ceremonies May 13 (Sunday) at Assembly Hall, 1800 S. First St., Champaign.
Cokie Roberts, a best-selling author and political commentator for ABC News, will speak at the 10:30 a.m. ceremony. Orion Samuelson, widely regarded as the best-known agricultural broadcaster in the U.S., will be the speaker at the 2 p.m. ceremony.
Raymond Ozzie, former chief software architect for the Microsoft Corp. and former system programmer for PLATO at the U. of I., has been chosen to receive an honorary doctor of engineering degree at the afternoon ceremony.
In the early 1990s, his creation, Lotus Notes, was the first networked groupware application for the personal computer, revolutionizing business computing. In 1994, he was named one of seven “Windows Pioneers” by Microsoft because of the impact he and Lotus Notes had on the development of the Windows operating system.
Ozzie is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is a fellow in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
At the morning ceremony, candidates in the colleges of Applied Health Sciences; Law; Liberal Arts and Sciences; Media; Veterinary Medicine; the Institute of Aviation; the School of Labor and Employment Relations; the School of Social Work; and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science will receive degrees.
Candidates in the colleges of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences; Business; Education; Engineering; and Fine and Applied Arts will receive degrees at the afternoon ceremony.
Doors will open at 9:30 a.m. for the morning ceremony and at 1 p.m. for the afternoon ceremony. After all students and their guests are seated, the remaining seats will be available to the public. Shuttle buses also will stop at various campus locations, including the Assembly Hall, from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
All students who have earned bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral and professional degrees and advanced certificates during the preceding year are honored at the annual commencement.
All graduating students and their guests are invited to a reception from 8 to 9:30 a.m. May 13 in the gardens of the president’s house, 711 W. Florida Ave., Urbana. Academic attire is encouraged.
The first floor of the main library will be open from 1 to 4 p.m. May 12 and 13 for visitors and students to view the University Honors Bronze Tablets.
Many individual U. of I. units have scheduled additional commencement ceremonies.
More information is available online:
