Commencement reader cram to prep for tongue twister names

Associated Press Jayne Niemi, right, registrar at Macalaster College in St. Paul, Minn., talks with students Tuesday from left, Baitnairamdal Otgonshar, from Mongolia, Nokuthula Sikhethiwe Kitikiti, from Zimbabwe, and Udochukwu Chinyere Obodo, from Nigeria, at the campus. Niemi will be responsible for pronouncing 450 names correctly at commencement ceremonies on May 17.

A week from Saturday, 453 new graduates will cross the commencement stage on the lawn of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. Among them: Nokuthula Sikhethiwe Kitikiti, Udochukwu Chinyere Obodo, and Baitnairamdal Otgonshar.

Jayne Niemi will be ready.

No-oo-TOOL-a SEE-kay-tee-way Ki-tee-ki-tee. Oo-DO-chu-koo CHIN-yea-ray Oh-boe-doe. Bat-NAI-ram-dal OT-gone-shar.

Niemi’s job is to read out the graduates’ names without mangling them.

“People invest a lot of time and money and commitment to be here at Macalester and get this education, and they get one day of celebration in the end,” says Niemi, a college registrar who will spend several days studying pronunciation cards submitted by students. “Their families are here from all over the world. I don’t want to embarrass them or the college.”

Niemi is part of a cadre of deans, professors and even outsourced professional public speakers that is gearing up to perform one of academia’s quirkier, and tougher, jobs—getting every name right, so nobody leaves campus feeling angry or ungenerous toward his or her alma mater.

Their efforts are a big deal to students like Shadi Rajai Zumut. When he graduated from high school in Texas, the reader flubbed his name so badly his family didn’t recognize it.

Now a senior at Baylor University, he recently e-mailed the officials planning the May 17 commencement there a pronunciation guide (SHAH-dee Rah-JAH-ee ZOO-muht), imploring them to get it right.

“I thought my name personified me. It was unique. It was different from everybody else,” Zumut says, explaining why he resisted suggestions when he was younger to Americanize his name to something like “Chad,” and why it’s so important to him that Baylor say it correctly.

Some commencement name-readers volunteered for the job; others were volunteered by superiors. The job is no breeze. Reading out hundreds of even simple names over several hours, under a hot sun and in an academic gown, takes stamina. And there are now nearly 600,000 foreign students at U.S. colleges, plus an ever-more-diverse group of American students.