Diploma Names in Alternate Alphabets

In case you have not read this, I strongly encourage you to do so. We were asked by the students about the possibility of having their names printed in a language other than English, we agreed to explore and got it done. As is the case with everything, it is not trivial. We quickly developed an app where the students could copy and paste their name composed using a tool like Google Input Tools . We had them reviewed by faculty members and in a few cases volunteers from outside and then found a very cooperative printer in Scrip Safe who was willing to print them for us. We needed to purchase the fonts we needed. 32 students participated in the pilot and the names were in 9 languages, with Mandarin Chinese topping the list at 20. The diplomas will have their name in English as well as the alternate alphabet. We will be handing them over tomorrow after the commencement!

We collaborate with the Registrar’s Office, Student Life and the Provost’s Office on various things leading up to the commencement. The last couple of weeks leading to the commencement are pretty intense, mainly because of the compression of schedules and other complications. But everyone at the College put in enormous efforts to make sure that everything goes well.

We have developed several systems to support the various offices on campus that come into play here and a lot of them are available starting from the Fall semester of their senior year. But, students have many other priorities and a lot of what I describe below tend to happen in the last minute and after several nudges.

We ask the students to provide us “Diploma Name” which can be different from their official name as it appears in Banner. For the most part they tend to be identical, but there are a few who choose different names. For example, some choose not to have their middle name appear in the diploma. As described above, we also asked participating students to provide their names in alternate alphabets.

Then, we ask them to record their names so that when the Deans and the Provost read their name during the commencement, it is accurate. We replaced our homegrown app with an excellent hosted system called the Name Coach this year, which made life easy for all of us. This requires a lot of nudge and the bulk of the recordings happen in the last few weeks. We then download these recordings, sort them properly, save them on iPods (yes, remember those little thingies???) and hand them over to our Deans and the Provost. They take this very seriously and practice by listening to the names and taking notes so they can be read properly.

We also developed a degree audit system that gets used the most during the Spring semester and since it involves workflow and academic departments and student life, the Registrar’s office needs to do a lot of coordination to make it all happen. The deadline for grade submission is about a week before the commencement. Our faculty are great about submitting the senior grades by that time, but there will always be a few who need to be nudged to submit the grades quickly. This is followed by an intense couple of days during the weekend.

This is when the Latin honors calculations are carried out and verified. Then, the Registrar’s staff and the class deans meet to go over the final check and create the information necessary for the Academic Review Board. This typically happens on Monday or Tuesday (if Monday happens to be the Memorial Day). It is only after this we have the official final list of students with latin honors etc. and the Registrar’s office makes the final adjustments to the student records in Banner that night.

This year we developed a web application that pulls the information from Banner and creates a whole slew of reports relating to the commencement, including the lineup and seat numbers. Once the official list is finalized, we run through this system and it is only at this point we can record the names for use by the Deans and the Provost! They barely have a day or two to practice the names. We need to scramble to get this final list to our public affairs so they can prepare the program. Guess what, some students call the Registrar’s office after all of this to say that they cannot participate in the commencement. Unfortunately, nothing can be done and assigned seats will remain vacant!

We also developed a nice little app for the seniors that pulls all the relevant information in one place. A senior checklist of sorts. Initial indications are that this was very useful and we plan to enhance it even more next year.

Oops, I forgot one of the most difficult thing. Many of our students take classes in MIT and the grading deadline for MIT is smack in the middle of our commencement weak. This causes enormous difficulties in terms of the process described above. This year, we took a lot of proactive steps by informing both the students and the parents on the importance of asking the students to let the MIT faculty know how critical it is for them to submit the final grades for Wellesley students by the Friday before our commencement. We nudge more as we get closer to the commencement. It was very effective this year and the MIT registrar also provided a lot of support by sending the grades often. We automated the posting of MIT grades into Banner, so all of these helped. Next year we hope to have a system whereby once the grade is posted to MIT system, through an API, we will pull the grade in almost real time!

We also try to get as many LTS staff as possible to volunteer for various commencement related activities. I am volunteering too, for handing out the Diplomas at the end!

There is a lot more to this than what I have described, but it should give you a flavor of all of what is involved. Here we are, a happy day to remember for all the graduating seniors and their families. In small ways, we all have contributed to making sure that the day goes well. Unfortunately, we have not been able to figure out (yet) how to reduce the temperature in the academic quad to be just right!