Fall 2026 Commencement Ceremony
Dr. Joyner sent this out last night. Thought I’d share so we can discuss here:
“Hey everyone!
If you're receiving this, you're on my list of Fall 2026 OMSCS degree candidates. Good luck finishing out your OMSCS studies!
Secondly, if you were planning to walk at Fall commencement, I wanted to point out that the Fall 2026 Commencement schedule was just posted: https://commencement.gatech.edu/events-schedule
Importantly, there are two significant changes from previous years that I wanted to call out:
OMSCS students will graduate on Thursday evening, December 17. The commencement is scheduled for 6PM, with doors opening at 4:30PM.
OMSCS graduates have their own ceremony this semester.
The other events we usually have—the Dean's New Alumni celebration and the campus tour—are tentatively planned for Friday, December 18, but we'll let you know as soon as we know the official schedule.
Critically, I wanted to give context as to why the schedule works this way this term. For the last couple years, commencement has taken place in Bobby Dodd stadium, which is the football stadium because it's the only venue large enough to hold all the Master's graduates. The main reason it's the only venue large enough to hold all the Master's graduates is because of y'all: roughly 50% of all the Master's graduates are from the College of Computing, and roughly 2/3rds of those Master's graduates are OMSCS graduates.
However, Bobby Dodd stadium will be under construction this fall, and so commencement ceremonies cannot be held there. The next-biggest venue on campus is McCamish Pavilion, the basketball stadium, which is way smaller. As a result, they need to split the commencement into more separate ceremonies and balance the graduates among them. But there are so many OMSCS graduates that OMSCS alone will fill up a commencement ceremony in McCamish, assuming the same numbers we usually receive.
So, OMSCS students will have their own commencement, but I want to make it absolutely clear that's not about sequestering y'all off away from any other events. That's solely about load balancing. The only options are to give OMSCS its own graduation, or to split OMSCS students among other graduations. For further evidence of that, note that OMS-Analytics and OMS-Cybersecurity are not split between online and on campus, so this isn't about online vs. on-campus in general. This is just about there being so many of y'all that you fill the basketball stadium on your own.
I anticipate commencement will return to Bobby Dodd when the stadium reopens in Fall 2027 (although commencement is always planned only a few months in advance—but I know firsthand how much Georgia Tech values its online students, so I know there won't be any lasting separation).
All that said: I'm honestly kind of excited about this. Whenever we've planned commencement in the past, we've always been sensitive that the OMSCS students are such a large audience that there's the risk it interferes with the experience for others—as a result, very little is tailored to OMSCS. Having an OMSCS-specific ceremony means we can do a lot more to celebrate OMSCS on its own.
And having all day Friday for events means we might be able to do some cool stuff as well. If anyone has any ideas for what they'd like to do on Friday besides the new alumni party and the campus tour, please let me know!
David A. Joyner, Ph.D.”