Commencement 2025 Sunday, May 25, 2025

“We are cognizant of all that we have to be thankful for,” write the Class of 2020 co-presidents. “Nevertheless, we know that it is extremely hard not to think of the unfairness of it all and the pain we know that many of us feel.”

The 154th Commencement of Bates College is at noon, Eastern Daylight Time, May 31, 2020. The ceremony will be conducted remotely via livestream.

This year’s virtual Senior Thesis Exhibition celebrates 15 studio art majors whose artwork, poignant and pivotal, is “essential to protecting and celebrating our humanity.”

Bates photographer Phyllis Graber Jensen teams up with 10 members of the Class of 2020 to create FaceTime portraits.

In 2012, the late journalist Gwen Ifill offered these inspiring words to the graduating seniors: “Look up.”

This year’s remote event marks the eighth different location since the college’s first Commencement, in 1867, at a downtown church.

“With every box, I think of every senior,” says Assistant Vice President Dining, Conferences and Campus Events Christine Schwartz.

“Math manages to work its way into a lot of places that I didn’t expect,” says Findlen-Golden.

Inspired by her childhood in a Maine island community, Hallowell is developing sensors to track climate change.

An Otis Fellowship summer of hiking alongside power lines produced a new understanding of our place in the world — and a book of poems.