"Hi, Mom!" -- Penn Students Develop
a Way to Personalize Commencement for Participants
PHILADELPHIA - Graduates of several schools at the University
of Pennsylvania will be able to individualize their commencement
experience this year thanks to MarchingOrder. The program
will also be used at the University of New Mexico.
MarchingOrder is a software program that allows students
to post their names, hometowns and/or personal messages on
a giant screen as they pass through the commencement exercises.
Prior to graduation day, they submit the information to their
schools, and at the ceremony the individual information is
accessed through a bar code and projected on a 25-by-65-foot
screen.
Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences piloted
the software at the 2001 commencement. This year, thanks to
Penn's support, MarchingOrder will personalize the ceremonies
for more than 2,000 graduate and undergraduate students in
SEAS and four other schools at Penn.
The University of New Mexico's Department of Economics will
also use it.
The brainchild of David Badler, a senior in SEAS and Penn's
Wharton business school, MarchingOrder attracted the interest
of fellow Wharton/SEAS senior Tyler Mullins and Matt Uffalussy,
a senior in Penn's digital media design program. Badler and
Mullins, who created MarchingOrder's financial model and market
research survey, used it as an independent study for a marketing
class, a senior project for a computer science class and a
class project for an operations and information management
class. Uffalussy provided the graphic design on the Web site,
www.marchingorder.upenn.edu. With guidance from SEAS professor
David Farber and marketing professor David Reibstein, the
students never felt out on a limb.
What began as a student project now has entrepreneurial and
financial support from Penn's business-incubator program,
P2B, and its Business Services division. Penn administrative
officials were so impressed with MarchingOrder, they agreed
to fund start-up costs for hardware, interfacing software,
a bar-code reader and other expenses through P2B.
"We continue to be impressed with what they are doing,"
said Phil Goldstein, P2B's chief operating officer. "We
have been helping them to design their pilots for other universities
and to develop a business plan to help launch them as a company
after the pilots."
Lourdes McKenna, administrator at the University of New Mexico's
Department of Economics, said, "The decision to use MarchingOrder
was a simple one. Once we saw how novel an idea this was,
we were eager to improve our graduation ceremony using this
innovative software program."
MarchingOrder is also proving useful as a tool to manage
other events. Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science
plans to use it for its awards ceremony this year.
"Knowing that MarchingOrder can make these ceremonies
a little bit better for everyone involved makes it real exciting
for me," Mullins said. "It's a big improvement over
tape on mortarboards."
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