2016 Commencement Information

• There is a mandatory rehearsal for all graduates that will take place on Friday, April 29th, at 1:30 p.m.

• There will be two commencement ceremonies: One at 8:30 a.m. and another at 11:30 a.m.

• Ceremonies are split up by majors.

On April 30, The ASFLC President Lindley Gallegos will ring the Fort Lewis College bell 53 times - once for each graduating class since FLCs became a four-year college - during the 2016 commencement address.

Planning Graduation

There are two commencement ceremonies for FLC graduates. One begins at 8:30 a.m. and the other begins at 11:30 a.m., Kathy Kendall, the FLC Registrar said. Commencement ceremonies usually take around an hour and a half.

Out of 558 students who applied for graduation, 517 students have been approved to graduate, Kendall said.

The commencement ceremony is put on by the commencement committee, which is composed of several different offices on campus, including the Registrar’s Office, the President’s Office, the Provost’s office, Sodexo, the Physical Plant and the music department, Kendall said.

Degrees

Degrees are not given until after commencement, because grades are not finalized by professors until May 2, the Monday after graduation, Kendall said. The Registrar's Office tries to make them viewable to students by Wednesday, May 4.

Once the grades are posted, the Registrar’s Office will review them to make sure the graduates passed. Once approved, degrees usually take six to eight weeks to arrive, Kendall said.

Each student is only allowed to walk once during graduation, Kendall said. If a student does not pass a class this spring and has to pass that class in order to graduate, they will still walk this graduation, but will have to complete their class before receiving their degree.

The Ceremony

Each ceremony is preceded by robing, where the students put on their cap and gown, get their reader cards that phonetically spell out their name - which helps the speaker pronounce their name at graduation - and line up for the ceremony.

At the end of the commencement ceremony, the platform party and faculty march out first and form a gauntlet for the students to walk through, Kendall said.

“It is pretty neat,” she said.

The commencement ceremony does not require tickets to attend, Kendall said, but that does not mean attendance is low. In the last 20 graduations she has attended, Kendall believes there have always been people standing.

“In all of them that I’ve ever been to, it seems like there is always people having to stand because it just gets so crowded in there,” Kendall said.

If it ever gets to a point where the college needs to address the rising attendance, Kendall hopes the college stays away from using tickets, and instead uses the concert hall with a video feed as an overflow room, which has been done before in the past, she said.

The process of commencement is generally maintained from year to year, leaving the registrar as a troubleshoot for last minute problems, she said.

“It can seem overwhelming,” Kendall said. “I figured whatever happens, happens. You just kind of take things as they come and deal with it and then just move on.”