Daemen College will honor its newest graduates with the first on-campus commencement ceremonies at its Amherst campus since 1957.
Graduation Week events kick off with the ALHANA (African, Latinx, Hispanic, Asian, Native American) ceremony on Thursday at noon.
Later, that evening, the Student Excellence Awards will include the presentation of the President’s Award, the Alumni Senior Award, the Mary Angela Canavan Award and others; the event will be live-streamed due to limited seating.
Attendees of the college’s six graduation ceremonies will hear from commencement speaker Scott Bieler—a philanthropist and president and CEO of West Herr Auto Group—who was recently awarded an honorary doctorate from Daemen.
Undergraduate ceremonies will also include the presentation of the Charles Lumsden Award, the college’s most prestigious academic award, annually given to the Daemen student with the highest GPA throughout their undergraduate years.
Program from the 1957 graduation on campus
More information about the week ahead is available from the college’s Commencement Quick Guide.
Since the late 1950s, the college has held commencements at Kleinhans Music Hall on Symphony Circle near downtown Buffalo; more than 60 years have passed since the last graduation at the Amherst campus, when the institution was known as Rosary Hill College.
In 2020, the college’s commencement programming was held entirely virtually, as the COVID-19 pandemic worsened last spring.