With commencement just around the corner, every UCLA school and
department is gearing up for for the weekend-long celebration.
Of the 80,000 expected attendees, the College of Letters &
Science is expecting 55,000 guests at its ceremonies; to deal with
the large volume of people, an online ticketing system created by
the College in 2002 will be instituted again this year.
“When we’re dealing with 80,000 people coming to
campus in one weekend, we have to exercise some structure,”
said John Sandbrook, assistant provost of the College.
For the College commencement on June 13, students planning to
participate in the ceremony will have to reserve one ticket for
themselves and can reserve four tickets for family and friends.
Students can request extra tickets, though last year the College
was not able to provide any student with extra tickets.
The tickets are free of charge; the purpose of these tickets is
to let the College know how many students will be walking in its
ceremony and how many guests it must accommodate, Sandbrook
said.
Most individual department ceremonies will be held on Saturday
and Sunday. Students marching in these ceremonies, which range in
size from 150 to 10,000 guests, will have to reserve tickets for
their guests but not for themselves.
Departments must allow every student four free tickets, but some
departments will charge $5 for each additional ticket. This charge
prevents departments from having to dip into student scholarship
funds in order to pay for the ceremonies, Sandbrook said.
Ticket fees will be charged to students’ BAR accounts.
The number of tickets available to graduating students will be
decided by each department.
For instance, psychology graduates will be allowed the required
four free tickets plus six additional $5 tickets, said Irina
Tauber, an academic adviser in the psychology department.
In the anthropology department, though its ceremony will be much
smaller with roughly 90 students expected to attend compared with
800 psychology students, similar ticket limits are likely, said
Jessica Hernandez, assistant to anthropology chairman Douglas
Hollan.
These department ceremonies are designed to give each student a
chance to hear their name called at commencement since the larger
College graduation cannot accommodate such practices, Sandbrook
said.
Students who are eligible to march in the College’s
graduation ceremonies have already received an announcement through
their MyUCLA online notification system.
Tickets will be on sale from April 30 until May 13 ““ four
weeks before commencement itself.
“We really expect people to plan ahead,” Sandbrook
said.