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May 3 commencement will set another record

Janel Shoun-Smith | 

Note: Follow the “LIVE EVENT FEED” link on the Lipscomb homepage to watch the graduation ceremonies streamed live.

 

This year’s commencement ceremony is expected to be the largest in history, with close to 800 graduates participating. The unprecedented numbers resulted in Lipscomb holding two commencement ceremonies for the first time ever.

The graduate and doctorate commencement ceremony will take place this year in Allen Arena at 10:30 a.m. The undergraduate commencement ceremony will take place May 3 in Allen Arena at 2 p.m.

A reception for all graduates and their families will be held in the Student Activities Center, adjacent to the arena, from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.

A baccalaureate ceremony for undergraduates take place on Friday, May 2, at 5:30 p.m. in Collins Alumni Auditorium. A reception will precede the ceremony at 4:30 p.m. on the first floor of the Burton Health Science Center.

Lipscomb is enjoying its fifth consecutive record year, with more undergraduate and more graduate students participating in the commencement ceremony than ever before. In addition, the university will award its first doctorate of ministry degrees, and more nursing graduates than ever before, 63, will receive their diplomas in the ceremony.

Among the crowd of graduates walking across  the stage will be some outstanding students who have made unique accomplishments during their college career:

  • Doris Wood, a 58-year-old social work major, is getting her second bachelor’s degree from Lipscomb after an exciting lifetime with a dual career in graphic design and the military. Click here to read more about Wood’s journey.
  • Daniel Anderson, an integrated studies graduate, has already been hard at work in the business world helping to run a company he founded with two friends from Harding and Pepperdine universities. Good Spread is a peanut butter company that donates one packet of nutrient-rich food to starving children in Africa for every jar sold. Click here to read more about Anderson’s social venture.
  • John Paul Cooke and Lauren Calvin, both Bible majors, won generous scholarships to attend Princeton University to earn Masters of Divinity.
  • The College of Pharmacy will be graduating a set of twins, Jonathan Lee Trenary and Joshua Lee Trenary, and their younger sister Anna Trenary, is a third-year Lipscomb student pharmacist. And that is just one of the set of siblings in the pharmacy college. Nejra and Elma Dobric, born in Bosnia and raised in Arizona, are also both studying pharmacy, with Nejra set to graduate on Saturday.

The commencement will feature remarks by Lipscomb President L. Randolph Lowry and brief comments by Alumnus of the Year David Sampson, former deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce and assistant secretary of commerce for economic development for former President George W. Bush.