Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Just over 7,600 students received degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison on May 8, including Megan Newcomb of Farmville.

Newcomb received a Masters of Arts-Library and Information Study.

There were two live ceremonies at Camp Randall, one for undergraduates and one for all graduate degree candidates. Graduating were 5,493 undergraduate students, 1,266 master’s degree students and 871 doctoral candidates.

The commencement speaker was actor and singer Andre De Shields, who graduated from UW-Madison in 1970. He invoked the pandemic and the police killing of George Floyd in his video keynote address to undergraduates, encouraging graduates to transform the world with their talent. 

Many graduates had overcome much during the pandemic, like Shehrose Charania, who maintained her studies while caring for two parents sick with COVID-19, and Noor Bontz, a nursing student who treated the first, and subsequent, waves of COVID-19 patients in a Milwaukee intensive care unit.