The highlight of the year, our graduation is tomorrow. It’s always fantastic to see everyone get their degrees, and the friends & families pleasure in seeing them walk across the stage is always great to see and hear.

Here’s my bit about the School from the brochure:
It’s been another busy and successful year for the School. Our students have won prizes from the Royal Television Society and from the BBC in its Developing Talent Awards, showing that our courses continue to produce graduates capable of working to the highest standards.

We started a new initiative with the BBC to develop the skills of their software engineers, who will be trained by our staff at the BBC in Salford and London with a view to working towards a masters degree. We developed a ground-breaking new Masters degree in Music Video Creation in collaboration with the world famous Mute Records. We created the Digital Working Academy to provide work experience for students and recent graduates, resulting in 98 students working on commercial projects worth £108k, with some of these students already finding work for the companies who commissioned the projects.

Our research continues to develop and grow, with income attracted in areas including modelling of toxicity to help avoid animal testing of substances, the digitisation of archaeological bones to help understand medical conditions and creating a 3D model of the cornea. And we are now the university in the UK to have a full high-definition outside broadcast truck.

It’s a pretty good summary of the year.  We’re on first tomorrow at 10am, and there’s a reception for gradautes afterwards, invite repeated here in case you missed it:
Following the ceremony, you are invited to a free drinks reception with live music at the Norcroft Centre from 11.30am–1.00pm
(prizes presentation at 12.15pm)
Graduation Photograph in the Student Central Lecture theatre
1.15pm Department of Computing and Maths
1.45pm Bradford Media School
2.15pm Creative Technology
(please arrive 15 mins beforehand)

I hope all goes well tomorrow. And for those of you graduating, well done, good luck and when I pronounce your name wrong tomorrow (and although I’ve practiced, I WILL get some of them wrong), please forgive me!