The last thing graduating collegians want to hear, after four years of hard work, and with bursting-with-pride relatives present at commencement ceremonies, is announcers butchering their names.
Hamline University for decades saw this happen again and again, despite commencement organizers’ sincere efforts to get graduates’ name pronunciations right.
This year, the St. Paul-based institution is tapping into tech to get this issue licked once and for all in time for graduation ceremonies, which are occurring Saturday.
A Silicon Valley startup called NameCoach has allowed Hamline’s commencement announcers to prepare in advance by putting at their fingertips audio recordings of all the graduates pronouncing their own names.
“This is a way to show a high level of respect,” said Tracey Tennyson, Hamline’s director of event and conference management. “It is a very important day for a person who finished four years of college, and might be the first in that family to do so.”
Roughly 35 percent of Hamline’s graduates are first-generation collegians, often after their families emigrated to this country, Tennyson said. Correctly pronouncing their names can be a big challenge, in some cases, she noted.
Praveen Shanbhag, NameCoach’s founder, knows this all too well.
“When my sister graduated, they mangled her name,” he said. “It made my family feel a bit alienated and a bit frustrated during a big moment of recognition. Obviously, we were very proud of her and it was a joyous moment, but something was taken from that moment.”
This caused Shanbhag, who was pursuing a PhD in philosophy at Stanford University, to make an abrupt departure into technology entrepreneurship. NameCoach, incubated at Stanford, is now on its own as a four-employee tech startup in Palo Alto, Calif.
One NameCoach’s product, called NameCoach Commencement, is aimed at colleges and universities. Every soon-to-graduate senior at such an institution receives a link to a site that prompts them for a phonetic spelling, and then asks them to audio-record their names’ correct pronunciations.
This worked all but flawlessly for Hamline last year, the first time it used the service, but the process was somewhat clunky because students had to do this on computers. This year, it’s easier because they’re doing it on their phones.
The phonetic spellings and audio recordings from all the students are compiled on the NameCoach site, and can be exported into a spreadsheet — which is what Hamline did, according to Tennyson.
It’s “miraculous,” she said. “It eliminates any possibility of error, and it is great to see how happy they are when it’s said correctly after their four years of hard work.”
