Two ceremonies per graduate, days apart

A WashU graduation is not one event. It is a week, and every graduate has at least two ceremonies in it.

The university-wide Commencement closes the week on the Friday morning, on Francis Olympic Field. Every school graduates together, the chancellor and a keynote speaker give addresses, honorary degrees are conferred, and the degrees of the whole class are conferred at once. It is a big, outdoor, all-university occasion, and it does not read names.

The school recognition ceremony is where your graduate is named. WashU’s own instruction is that graduates should attend their individual school ceremony to have their name called and to cross the stage. Those ceremonies are spread across the Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday before the Friday, in the Field House, Graham Chapel, the Newman Education Center and on Francis Olympic Field itself. The table above lists every one, with its day, time and room.

So the question that sets the length of your trip is which day your graduate’s school is on. A family whose graduate is in the Brown School is there from Tuesday. Olin undergraduates cross the stage on Wednesday. The College of Arts and Sciences undergraduates walk on Thursday morning. All of them come back together on Friday.

WashU also runs a series of smaller celebrations across the same fortnight, for military and veteran students, international students, first-generation students and several affinity groups, and an Army ROTC commissioning. If your graduate is part of one, it adds another date to the week.

Friday on Francis Olympic Field

The university-wide ceremony starts at 9 a.m. sharp, and the gates open at 7 a.m. Seating is first come, first served, and the ceremony runs about two hours, followed straight away by the Commencement Festival on the Danforth Campus.

It is held rain or shine. WashU does not move it indoors. Instead it streams the ceremony with live captions and opens several indoor viewing rooms on campus, all accessible, climate controlled and with seats that have back support. For an older relative, one of those rooms may be the better seat on a hot or wet morning.

Guests need a ticket. WashU emails tickets to the graduate, who sends them on; printed or on a phone both work. At the time of writing WashU says there is no limit on how many guests a graduate can invite, while noting that the policy can change.

Security: clear bags and metal detectors

Everyone, graduates included, goes through metal detectors. The bag rule is strict and WashU does not supply bags at the gate: clear bags up to 14 by 14 by 4 inches, small clutches up to 4 by 6 inches, and medically necessary bags, which include diaper bags. Anything else goes back to the car. Graduates themselves bring no bag at all onto the field; the gown has pockets, and a water bottle is allowed.

The prohibited list covers the usual celebration kit: air horns and other noisemakers, balloons, glitter and confetti, signs bigger than two feet by three or on any kind of pole, food and drink other than water, lasers and drones.

December is its own, smaller ceremony

Students who finish in the summer or at the end of the fall semester have the December Recognition Ceremony, a Saturday morning in the Athletic Complex. It is about an hour and a half, doors open an hour and a half before, and each graduate’s name is announced as they cross the stage and have their photo taken. The same ticket and bag rules apply.

Parking, the train, and getting dropped off

Campus parking on Commencement Week is limited to five garages, and WashU asks families to arrive early or not to drive. Its preferred options are rideshare and taxis, which drop off on Shepley Drive near the Clocktower, and MetroLink, St. Louis’s light rail. Accessible parking is in the Danforth University Center garage, and there is a separate drop-off for guests with accessibility needs, entered from Forsyth Boulevard via northbound Wallace Drive. WashU takes reservations for a limited number of wheelchairs in spring.

Where to sleep

WashU publishes its own list of nearby hotels, all within twenty minutes of campus, and asks families to mention the graduation when booking. First on that list is the Charles F. Knight Center, on the Danforth Campus itself.

The next closest are just off campus. The Moonrise Hotel on the Delmar Loop, a lively strip of restaurants to the north, has 125 rooms. A mile or so west, Clayton has the Ritz-Carlton with 301 rooms, Le Meridien with 268 and a Hampton Inn and Suites with 106. None of these publishes a graduation-week minimum stay or prepayment rule.

Past Clayton, the Central West End across Forest Park is about ten minutes away and is where the physical therapy ceremony is held, at the Chase Park Plaza. Brentwood’s hotels are as close to the south-west, and downtown and the airport are each about a quarter of an hour by road.

Because the week is spread over five days and several ceremonies, the crowd arrives in waves rather than all at once. Our grade for the pressure here is a reading of the supply, not a count of what was left in a past year, and we have not run one; the rooms that go first will be the handful you can walk from.