Tuesday, August 04, 2015

[025] MTSU will celebrate nearly 900 new grads at Aug. 8 summer commencement

           
MURFREESBORO — Middle Tennessee State University’s upcoming summer 2015 commencement ceremony, set for Saturday, Aug. 8, will celebrate a lifetime of educational achievement for almost 900 students.

The ceremony, which will begin at 10 a.m. Aug. 8 in Hale Arena inside Murphy Center, will feature a special commencement address from MTSU professor William Canak, the 2014-15 president of the university's Faculty Senate and a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology in the College of Liberal Arts.

On Aug. 8, according to a report from the university’s Registrar’s Office, 896 students are set to graduate from MTSU. Of that number, 672 are undergraduates and 224 are graduate students, including 208 master’s candidates, five education-specialist degree recipients and 11 doctoral candidates. One graduate student also will receive a graduate certificate.

Candidates from all nine of MTSU’s colleges — the College of Graduate Studies, Basic and Applied Sciences, Jones College of Business, College of Education, College of Behavioral and Health Sciences, College of Liberal Arts, College of Mass Communication, the University College and the University Honors College — will receive their degrees during the summer ceremony.

MTSU’s commencement ceremonies are always free and open to the public; a printable campus map with parking details is available at http://tinyurl.com/MTSUParking14-15. Friends, families and supporters who can’t attend in person can watch the Aug. 8 ceremony live online via streaming video.

You can visit http://ow.ly/rwxOz for a link to the video feed and more details. Be aware that the video feed will not be live until about 9:45 a.m. Aug. 8.  

Speaker Canak, who earned his doctorate in sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was a National Institute of Mental Health post-doctoral fellow at Duke University and member of the faculties of Brown, Tulane and Loyola universities before joining the MTSU faculty in 1994.

He was a Fulbright Regional Research Fellow to Argentina in 1988, founded the Tennessee Employment Relations Research Association in 1998 and has been an executive board member of the national Labor and Employment Relations Association since 2006. Canak’s Latin America-focused research and his research on American labor law and industrial relations have been published in numerous professional journals, and his most recent research has focused on state wage and hour laws, employment practices that violate those laws, and the fiscal impact on state revenues.

Students, friends, families and community supporters who attend the Aug. 8 ceremony should be aware that the event could last more than two hours. Graduating students are required to stay for the entire ceremony.

Organizers are encouraging guests to arrive early at Murphy Center and to move toward the center seats in each section, instead of remaining at the end of the aisles, to ensure that everyone can have a comfortable seat to enjoy the celebration.

Graduation information — including maps and driving directions to Murphy Center, instructions on watching the ceremonies via streaming video on commencement day, cap-and-gown information and contacts for the Registrar’s Office — is available online at http://www.mtsunews.com/graduation-info.

The university’s 2015-16 academic year begins Monday, Aug. 24, with the first official day of fall 2015 semester classes. University Convocation, a public ceremony welcoming new freshmen into the MTSU family, is set for Sunday, Aug. 24, at 2 p.m. in Murphy Center.

MTSU Summer 2015 Commencement at a Glance

Who: A projected 896 graduates* (672 undergraduates, 224 graduate students)
What: 2015 MTSU Summer Commencement ceremony
When: Saturday, Aug. 8
Where: Hale Arena inside Murphy Center on the MTSU campus
Commencement speaker: Dr. William Canak, sociology professor and 2014-15 president of the MTSU Faculty Senate.


*— Approximate numbers as of July 30, 2015.

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