Friday, May 06, 2016

Four commencement ceremonies for the UNCW Class of 2016 will be held May 6-7 in Trask Coliseum. More than 2,000 undergraduates, 318 graduate students and nine doctoral students will participate in UNCW’s 91^st commencement exercises – the largest to date.

The schedule for the ceremonies is as follows:

Friday, May 6

• 2 p.m. – Cameron School of Business

Guest speaker: Jean Matney English, Vice President Global Marketing, IBM Cloud

• 5:30 p.m. – Watson College of Education and the College of Health and Human Services

Guest speaker: Randall Williams, Deputy Secretary for Health Services, North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services

Saturday, May 7

• 9:30 a.m. – Sciences and Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences
  Guest speaker: Rebecca Lee, UNCW associate professor of creative writing

• 1 p.m. – Creative Arts, Social Sciences and Graduate Liberal Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences
  Guest speaker: Steve McNamee, UNCW professor of sociology and criminology

Graduating students should report to Hanover Gym one hour prior to their respective ceremony. Faculty should report to room 119 in Trask Coliseum in their regalia 30 minutes prior to each ceremony. 

The doors will open to the public one hour before each ceremony. Tickets are not required and seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis.

All ceremonies will be streamed live for remote viewing. as well as broadcast on The Learning Network (TLN) with a two- to four-minute delay. Re-broadcasts of the ceremonies will be shown via TLN at a later time. A photo gallery and video of the ceremonies and related events will be posted to the UNCW homepage the week of May 9.

Guests and graduates are encouraged to carpool to maximize the use of all available parking spaces. Parking lots A, K and Eaton Plaza will be closed to normal parking in support of commencement. Please obey all posted signs and refrain from parking on grass or fields.

Members of the Wilmington community are reminded to expect increased traffic on campus and in nearby areas before and after each ceremony.

Related links:

- Parking suggestions for departmental events and receptions
- Map of all parking locations

Social media users are encouraged to use #UNCW2016 for their commencement-related posts. For additional information, visit the commencement website.

Speaker bios:

Jean English is a 1996 graduate of UNCW. She is currently the Vice President of Global Marketing at IBM Cloud. She has been with IBM for more than 15 years, leading global marketing initiatives and teams across channels such as advertising, brand, thought leadership, communications, digital demand generation and digital e-commerce. She was named Cameron School of Business Alumna of the Year in 2013.

Deputy Secretary for Health Services and State Health Director Randall Williams is a licensed obstetrician/gynecologist with more than 25 years of service in public health. A native of North Carolina, he graduated from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill with honors. He then attended UNC School of Medicine where he was a Holderness Fellow and co-founded the Students Teaching Early Prevention initiative. He served as Administrative Chief Resident in Obstetrics and Gynecology at North Carolina Memorial Hospital; President of the Wake County Medical Society and on the Wake County Board of Health.

His volunteer work has taken him to Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Haiti and earned him many accolades, including Red Cross Humanitarian of the Year, News and Observer Tar Heel of the Week and Triangle Business Journal Health Care Hero of the Year.

Professor Rebecca Lee came to the UNCW Department of Creative Writing in 1996 after earning a Master’s of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of the novel The City is a Rising Tide, as well as the short story collection Bobcat and Other Stories, which garnered distinction as a Barnes & Noble ‘Discover’ Award Finalist in Fiction; an Oprah Book of the Week; NPR Best Book of the Year and was featured in the Charlotte Observer, Publishers Weekly and the New York Times. 

She is a past recipient of the Michener Fellowship, The Bunting Fellowship from Harvard University, a National Magazine Award and the Danuta Glude Literary Award. Her writings have been published in The Chicago Tribune, Atlantic Monthly and Outside. 

Steve McNamee is a professor of sociology in the UNCW Department of Sociology and Criminology. He earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Rutgers University-Camden and a master’s and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

He is a past recipient of the UNCW Distinguished Teaching Professorship Award, the UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching, the UNCW Distinguished Faculty Scholarship Award and the North Carolina Sociological Association Contributions to Sociology Award. In addition to teaching and research, he has served in several administrative positions at UNCW, including chair of the sociology and criminology department, associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

-- Caroline Cropp

#CAS
#WCE
#CSB
#CHHS