Celebrating UK graduates: Highlights from May 2025 Commencement

LEXINGTON, Ky. (May 12, 2025) — The University of Kentucky community celebrated a transformational milestone this weekend at the May 2025 Commencement ceremonies.

To view Friday’s ceremonies, visit: https://youtube.com/live/YsmiII45gvo?feature=share.  

To view Saturday’s ceremony, visit: https://youtube.com/live/ZPyWV2ndfAY?feature=share.

Watch the video above to hear students talk about what it means to graduate from the University of Kentucky, and view this gallery of photos to see special moments from the ceremonies.

For more information about UK Commencement, visit http://commencement.uky.edu/.

The following remarks were provided by UK President Eli Capilouto at all four ceremonies:                                                                                                              

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Raven Whitaker-Smith’s voice cracks — two tears sliding slowly down her face — as she recounts her journey. 

“I haven’t actually talked about how proud I am of myself, but to be the first person from my biological family to graduate high school and then move on to college, I’m so incredibly proud of myself,” Raven says. “No one but my parents have seen the things that I’ve had to do to get to where I am today.” 

Raven grew up in foster care in Northern Kentucky. In middle school, she got in trouble and her principal felt led to take her in.  

Ultimately, he and his wife adopted Raven. They became her family.  

They also bled blue. Soon, she did, too. 

At UK, Raven enrolled in social work classes.  

A door opened. A light of awareness came on. The flicker of a new passion started to burn.

“I just felt so passionate. I know I’m supposed to be here,” Raven said. 

“I would think about my past and then think about my biological parents … they grew up in a similar situation that I grew up in … why would the cycle change unless you become educated about it? Social work definitely saved me and changed the way I thought about things.” 

Recently, Raven completed her social work practicum at the very place that facilitated her adoption a few years ago. 

She is helping kids like herself.  

A circle completed.  

A career begun.  

Cycles of despair broken.  

Lives changed.  

Families transformed.  

Raven’s story reminds me that as much as we have spent the last four years trying to teach, you have been imparting lessons all along. 

We just need to listen.  

As you prepare to cross this stage in front of those who love you, I want to offer only a few of the many lessons that I have learned from you.  

Another graduate of UK — now an executive at a technology company — told me that the one of most valuable things about his education was it taught him how to create “structure from chaos.”  

That is what universities do best.  

We seek to make the complex understandable, to find resolution in the midst of tension in ideas and perspectives and extend discovery and healing to the most intractable of dilemmas and diseases. 

In our case, that mission always starts and ends with what is best for Kentucky. 

Already, in your lives, you have lived through — and in many cases learned to thrive — economic recessions and global pandemics. 

You’ve successfully conquered studies in varied disciplines…juggling work, classes and internships. You’ve danced to cure pediatric cancer. You’ve volunteered in homeless shelters and food banks. 

You can think critically, communicate clearly and work in teams.  

Now, we need you to take those skills and apply them wherever you go and in whatever you do. 

Our world so often seems marked by disorder rather than order. 

The default too frequently descends into disunity and discord rather than unity and harmony. 

We need you to create structure out of chaos — to use your purpose and passion to create structure and balance for you and for the communities where you live.  

Second, even as you do that, not everything will go as planned. There can be beauty in that as well. 

Jagger Rice, a Lewis Honors graduate with degrees in psychology and writing, rhetoric and digital studies, thought he had life figured out.  

Or at least a plan for it.

But then he was diagnosed with cancer early his senior year of high school. 

“Not everyone’s path to this moment looked the same,” Jagger said. “Some of us battled illness. Others battled self-doubt. Some of us were the first in our families to go to college …some of us changed majors three, four — okay, maybe five times…But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: Life doesn’t always follow the script you wrote at 17 — or 21. Sometimes, it tears up the whole playbook and hands you a blank page. And maybe that’s the beauty of it.” 

Ernest Hemingway wrote that the “world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” 

So many of you know that. You have been broken, and you are strong in the broken places.  

Others of you have yet to experience that. But you will. All of us do. 

Life invariably doesn’t follow the script. 

But there can — and so often is — beauty in that too.  

Finally, as the writer and teacher Frank Bruni notes, “Hope is not an option. It’s an obligation.” 

And we are not here to hold on to it. 

It’s our obligation to spread it as well. 

Madi Webb came to UK from Paintsville, Kentucky. A Lewis Honors College student, she is graduating from the Gatton College of Business and Economics. 

Her voice is filled with a sense of hope for the future and what it can be — not just for her, but for her home. 

“What’s amazing about UK,” Madi said, “is we all found a home…whether you came from a Chicago high-rise or, like me, from a holler in the mountains, we became family.” 

Now, Madi sees an Appalachia that is transforming. There are, to be sure, challenges still to be met; obstacles to be overcome. 

But communities, she said, are “reimagining themselves, while holding on to the values that stand here today.” 

“Remember,” she reminds others, “to never let fear hold you back…carry your resilience and your strength with you wherever you go.” 

You are going to meet so many people in life.  

You already have at UK — so many people and “names wheeled into the dim wheelhouse of memory,” the poet Billy Collins writes. “So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.” 

You’ve learned from them. You’ve grown. And you will continue to do so. 

Make it your mission using this moment to take those experiences to extend a sense of grace and wonder, of promise and possibility, to all those you meet.  

They may share it, too. 

That is my hope. That, UK graduates of 2025, is what our world — the one we must all share — needs from you. 

Hope, after all, is not an option. 

It is an obligation. 

Congratulations on what you have accomplished. 

You give me hope.