University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross says campuses will provide extensive COVID-19 testing for students, faculty and staff in hopes that campuses can resume in-person classes this fall.
Graduates and their loved ones tuned into the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s first ever virtual commencement ceremony Saturday.
This weekend I will graduate in my living room. I will turn my tassel for a Zoom audience full of loved ones and drink a bottle of champagne in honor of my ancestors. Then, I will assure everyone looking on that despite drastic changes in our reality, I am eternally grateful for the journey that led me to this point. We will dance and sing in our respective homes and get tipsy enough that the distance that separates us will shrink. And I will end the night as a 2020 graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
This was the weekend it begins: The celebratory season in which thousands of proud family members traditionally descend on campuses statewide to witness and revel in what for most is the academic accomplishment of a lifetime.
But this year, the campuses are largely empty.
Nearly 8,500 University of Wisconsin-Madison students graduated Saturday, when a commencement video was published online at noon in lieu of the annual pomp and circumstance at Camp Randall Stadium.
Yogev Ben-Yitschak expected his Facebook feed to be filled with photos of friends’ final semester on UW-Madison’s campus and announcements about where they will spend the next chapter of their lives.
Graduating seniors said an abrupt and socially distanced goodbye to their campuses in March when classes moved online in a matter of days. The pandemic stripped much of the pomp and all of the in-person options from commencement ceremonies. And the graduates now enter a job market in which unemployment is the highest since the Great Depression.
The medical degree class of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health graduated virtually this morning.
Graduating seniors are taking photos across the UW-Madison campus in their caps and gowns and attending ceremonies virtually this weekend.
The commencement, which featured speeches from Chancellor Rebecca Blank and keynote speaker James Patterson, was watched by students who celebrated at home with family.
UW-Madison graduates don’t get to celebrate in Camp Randall Stadium and the Kohl Center this year due to the pandemic. However, this didn’t stop UW-Madison from honoring the Class of 2020.
“We put the tv and the couch outside, and we put the ceremony on and we kind of just enjoyed each other,” UW-Madison Graduate Janell Voves said.
The 2020 graduates of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health virtually moved their tassels Friday morning at 10 a.m. A live ceremony was held on the school’s Facebook page.
The virtual commencement lasted about a half an hour on the UW-Madison’s Facebook page, starting at noon Saturday.
It is a time of celebration and uncertainty for many in the Class of 2020.
Aguirre, who worked as a peer career advisor, said, “The tone of my graduating class is kind of scared.”
’No one will ever forget the class of 2020,’ Patterson said.
Class of 2020 celebrates accomplishments despite fear, stress over future.
When Soyeon Shim was young, she wanted to be a teacher.
“I’d come home and gather all the kids in the neighborhood and play like we were at school and I was the teacher,” she says.
For a girl growing up in South Korea, there weren’t many other options. “Teacher or nurse,” Shim says. “But in the back of my mind, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur.”
Thousands of UW-Madison students in the Class of 2020 imagined the culmination of their college career to end at Camp Randall Stadium. They pictured the moment they’d throw their mortarboards high into the sky and sit in Abe Lincoln’s lap for the quintessential photo opp.
The ceremony is pre-taped, not live, and is available to the public. No password is needed. The video will remain on the website so that people can watch the ceremony at the time most convenient to them.
“The Class of 2020 has been resilient and adaptable, finishing their schooling in the midst of a global pandemic. I hope they will celebrate their accomplishments,” Chancellor Rebecca Blank said.
The Odyssey Project on campus seeks to help adults, ages 18 to 71 over the years, overcome adversity through two semesters-long coursework. According to co-director of the program Emily Auerbach, students have experienced incarceration, teen pregnancy, domestic abuse, substance abuse, among other barriers to higher education.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, there are questions about what a college football season will look like — if one happens at all. Will fans be allowed in stadiums? How many? What kinds of distancing practices will be in place, and how would they impact capacity?
Madison has issued 57 warning letters and six citations in a little under a month for alleged violations of the governor’s “safer at home” order to limit the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, including for several parties near the UW-Madison campus and to people “cruising” or racing the streets in souped-up cars.
ACT testing requirements will be temporarily suspended at all University of Wisconsin System campuses except UW-Madison under a proposed policy change aimed at easing college entrance requirements amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Photo caption: One of the highlights of the drive to school for Anna Mullen’s son, Ryan, was looking for food delivery robots on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. In the second week of quarantine, they went on a socially-distanced outing to see robots up close on the library mall. Photo courtesy of Anna Mullen
NBC15 News checked in with UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication Burgess Chair in Journalism Ethics, Kathleen Bartzen Culver two months after virtual lectures and assignments began.
The fifth annual Water@UW-Madison symposium will take place virtually Tuesday, highlighting water challenges at the university and state levels.
To most fairly assess a semester that has been far from normal, professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are taking liberties with final exams and projects.
Project assistant for Public History Project spoke about specific challenges students with disabilities faced throughout history of UW.
Quoted: UW-Madison anticipated a freshmen class of roughly 7,300 students, nearly 3,700 of those students would be in state.
André Phillips, director of admissions and recruitment at UW-Madison, said they should be able to surpass the 7,300 students anticipated by at least 100.
“We’ll likely have several hundred students that we’ll work with throughout the month of May leading up to the June 1 deadline, and that’s pretty significant,” Phillips said.
The furloughs will range from three days to six days over the next six months, UW Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank announced Wednesday.
For Franze, the furloughs add an extra layer of uncertainty. While she’s been teaching at UW-Madison for five years, Franze works on a semester to semester contract. She worries cutting salaries may escalate to cutting staff and she anticipates those without long-term contracts or low salaries will be hit the hardest.
University of Wisconsin-Madison officials are ordering most employees to take furlough days through October and top campus leaders will take pay cuts as the school tries to absorb a $100 million loss due to the coronavirus pandemic.
University of Wisconsin Chancellor Becky Blank announced today in an email to all staff and faculty a graduated furlough plan for most staff, a work-share program for some units and a 15-percent pay cut for Blank and all vice-chancellors. Under the plan, most staff will be furloughed just a few days over the next year. The number of days furloughed will depend on salary.
UW spokesperson Meredith McGlone said to the WSJ the current discussions revolving around the fall semester outline three plans, including a mix of face-to-face classes and online instruction — large lectures could possibly remain online while smaller classes would be in person.
Though the in-person award ceremony has been postponed due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, UW recognizes and celebrates the achievements and contributions of its academic staff.
State campuses in Milwaukee and Madison unveiled more information on their plans to furlough employees this week, with the aim of mitigating the mounting financial fallout from the coronavirus outbreak.
Amid questions about how the coronavirus will affect the 2020 football season and the rest of college sports, senior associate athletic director for capital projects Jason King said UW isn’t changing course until it has a clearer picture.
One isolation center is at the Lowell Center on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. Since opening April 1, eight people have used it. The other state-run isolation facility is at a Super 8 motel in Milwaukee, where 37 people have stayed over the same time period.
UW-Madison Department of Geoscience Professor Stephen Meyers tweeted at Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on Thursday asking the famous actor what some of his favorite geological topics are as a way to send his geology students off with a fun memory.
The university says the 60-credit UW Associate of Arts and Sciences program provides students with a broad liberal arts background, and offers an online option that can lead to early graduations.
“There may be some things we simply cannot do in the fall,” UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank said Monday to the University Committee, a small group of professors representing faculty members on campus. “It is quite possible that 80,000 people cannot gather in Camp Randall.”
If you’re overseeing a Geology 101 class and were seeking inspiration for your students whose class was disrupted by COVID-19, who would you call? How about actor Dwayne Johnson, who goes by the nickname, The Rock, since his pro wrestling days?
UW-Madison students appeared on Saturday to have listened to warnings not to attend the Mifflin Street Block Party for the sake of social distancing amid the COVID-19 pandemic, police said.
Member of Student Information System Optimization Program Team speaks on specific improvements implemented to SIS.
No Frisbee-flying on Bascom Hill. No sunset-watching on the Terrace. No bar-hopping on the weekends.
“It was really clear the environment was a priority, and it was really clear we needed interdisciplinary training and research, but it wasn’t clear how to do that,” said Professor Paul Robbins.
In the earlier stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, Chancellor Rebecca Blank’s biggest priority was making sure UW-Madison finished its spring semester. As the university works to make that happen, Blank said it is taking the opportunity to tackle immediate concerns — including $100 million in losses — but also prioritize campus safety and prevention moving forward.
The Madison Police Department has a short message to UW-Madison students mulling whether to attend the Mifflin Street Block Party slated for Saturday: Don’t.
“If you were a Badger and you are going to come back, please be counted,” said Brenda Gonzalez, Director of Community Relations at UW-Madison.
“We thought we’d try an experiment, which was to put this thing online and hopefully reach an even larger and more diverse population of people who think about, work in and worry about the environment,” said Professor Paul Robbins, dean of the Nelson Institute, as he spoke to the participants in a recorded video from his home.
Offensive speech is free speech, causing students, experts to debate its place on campus.
So does Max Prestigiacomo, a freshman at the University of Wisconsin, who is set to take his seat on the city council of Madison, Wisconsin.
Ana Tinder, a sophomore music performance major and violinist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told WPR in March that she didn’t know how her one-on-one lessons and music ensembles would go on.
Naperville North senior Rachel Hale decided where she’s going: the University of Wisconsin Madison to study journalism.
The Studio Zer0 team is made up of mechanical engineering students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and architecture students from UW-Milwaukee. It’s the fifth year that the two universities have joined forces for the contest.
When neighbors Joe Lahti and Greg Thomson shared a video of them and their neighborhood dancing to a song beloved by Badger fans everywhere, they never expected it to become a worldwide movement.
With SOAR online this summer, team is committed to giving families ’warm welcome.’
