A week of ceremonies, and only one of them is yours

Loyola does not hold a single commencement. It holds a Commencement Week, and within it each school and college gets its own ceremony, usually paired with one other school in a morning or afternoon slot. The Graduate School shares an afternoon with graduate business students. Nursing shares a morning with Communication. Law and Medicine close the week on the Saturday.

That structure is the most useful thing to understand before you book anything. A family coming for a Nursing graduate needs one specific morning. A family coming for Education needs a different one, earlier in the week. Nobody needs the whole week, and a hotel booked Friday to Sunday “because graduations are at weekends” can miss the ceremony by days.

The good news is that Loyola has already published the complete schedule, with times, months ahead. Everything is in the table above. Find your graduate’s school, note the day and the time, and book around that.

If your graduate is in Arts and Sciences

The College of Arts and Sciences is too large for one ceremony, so it holds three on the same day: morning, early afternoon and early evening. Which one your graduate attends depends on their major, and Loyola shares that breakdown with students rather than on the public schedule.

Two things follow. First, ask your graduate which sitting they are in before you fix your travel, because the difference between a morning and an evening ceremony is the difference between arriving the day before and arriving that morning. Second, if you must book before you know, book the night before the college’s ceremony day. It covers all three sittings.

Six tickets, and nobody walks in without one

Every guest needs a ticket to enter Gentile Arena, and each graduate receives six. It is a fixed number, so the family conversation about who is coming is worth having early.

For guests who need accessible seating, there is space for the guest and one companion, and they can arrive up to 90 minutes before the start to get settled. A live interpreter is present at every ceremony, with an accessible seating area close by. Anyone who cannot travel can watch: each ceremony is streamed from its school’s page, beginning at the start time.

One rule to know before you pack: no glitter and no confetti anywhere on campus during Commencement Week. Loyola’s reason is the state of its grounds, and the rule is campus-wide, not just inside the arena.

No December ceremony

Loyola does not hold a ceremony for December graduates. A student who finishes at the end of the fall semester walks with their school in May. For a family, that means one trip a year to plan, and it is always this one.

Getting to Rogers Park

The Lake Shore Campus sits on Lake Michigan in Rogers Park, on the far north side of the city. The simplest way in is the CTA Red Line: its Loyola station is at the edge of campus, and the CTA lists it as accessible. For a family staying downtown or in Lakeview, the train is usually easier than looking for a parking space around the arena.

By car, downtown is about a quarter of an hour away with clear roads, and Evanston less than ten minutes, but those are the no-traffic figures. Chicago traffic on a weekday morning will stretch both, and several of these ceremonies start at ten o’clock on a weekday.

Where to sleep

The lodging question here has an unusual shape. There is exactly one hotel within walking distance of Gentile Arena: the Hampton Inn beside the Loyola CTA station, a quarter of a mile away, with 145 rooms and suites. It serves every school’s ceremony across the week, so the night you want depends on your graduate’s school. None of the nearby hotels publishes a graduation-week minimum stay or prepayment rule.

After that there is nothing close until Evanston, three to four miles north, where four hotels publish more than 700 rooms between them, among them the Hilton Orrington, the Graduate and the Hilton Garden Inn. Evanston is its own small city with a walkable centre, and for a family wanting a pleasant base it is the natural choice. Lakeview and Wrigleyville, about the same distance south, have smaller boutique hotels; check the Cubs home schedule before booking there. Downtown has the widest choice of all, at the cost of the longest trip in.

We have not measured commencement-week availability in any of these places, and the tables below say so. Because each school graduates on its own day, demand is spread thinner than it would be for a single ceremony. The Hampton Inn is the exception, and it is the room to book first.