On May 20, over 1,500 students from the undergraduate, graduate and professional schools will receive their hard-earned degrees as part of the university's 160th graduation ceremony -- and at the same time hear U.S. senator John McCain (R-AZ) give the commencement address.

Five honorary degrees will be awarded during commencement weekend. Children's Defense Fund Founder and president Marian Wright Edelman will be given an honorary doctor of humanities degree and will speak at the 11 a.m. Baccalaureate service in Wait Chapel. Three others will receive honorary degrees during the same service. Honorary doctor of law degrees will be awarded to Floyd Abrams, one of the nation's premier First Amendment attorneys and partner with the law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel; F. M. Kirby, president and director of the F.M. Kirby Foundation; and former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher will be given an honorary doctor of science degree. The final honorary degree will be awarded to McCain May 20.

Altogether, there will be approximately 835 undergraduate students receiving bachelor's degrees and 666 graduate students from the university's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, School of Law, School of Medicine, and the Babcock Graduate School of Management at this year's commencement. An additional 20 students will comprise the first graduating class of the Divinity School.

The 9 a.m. graduation will cap off a series of events that begins when seniors are officially notified they have met all the prerequisites for graduation on May 17. Baccalaureate and hooding services--ceremonies where graduates are given hoods to wear along with their caps and gowns--will be held on the two days preceding commencement.

University seniors must go through an application and approval process before they can receive their degrees. This process involves verifications from the registrar's office, faculty from the students' respective major and minor departments, and the faculty as a whole. "We're the ones that are required to go through and make it official," said senior associate registrar and registrar of the Divinity School, Hallie Arrington. Arrington further explained that the registrar's office is responsible for checking GPA's and the number of credits each applicant has earned. She says that the instances where students are rejected by her office are becoming less and less common thanks to better technology that keeps students more aware of their status. If a student is rejected, Arrington says it is usually just a matter of pending paperwork.

Yet there are still some seniors each year whose application for graduation does not make it past the registrar's office. "There are some who just miscounted or failed a class in the fall or something happened they did not expect," she explained. In any case, Arrington suggests that no students should be surprised on May 20.

"The campus tale that we pull them out of line is not true," she says. "People will officially know (about their graduation status) on the 17th, but, in reality, they'll know much earlier," she said. The hooding ceremony for Divinity School graduates will take place at 8 p.m. May 18 in Wait Chapel. The address for this ceremony will be given by Phyllis Trible, a Divinity School professor and internationally respected Biblical scholar. Other hooding ceremonies will take place on May 19. The School of Law will hold its ceremony at 1:45 p.m. in Wait Chapel while the hooding for the Graduate School will be held in Brendle Recital Hall at 3 p.m.