West Georgia to Hold Commencement Saturday

The University of West Georgia summer commencement will be held in the Campus Center Gymnasium at 9 a.m., noon and 3 p.m. Undergraduates from the College of Arts and Sciences will be awarded degrees at the 9 a.m. ceremony. The noon ceremony will feature undergraduates receiving their degrees from the Richards College of Business. At 3 p.m., students earning their degrees from the College of Education and the Graduate School will receive their diploma.

Yong Suh, a graduate of the UWG Honors College and Advanced Academy of Georgia, will speak at the 9 a.m. ceremony. Suh is currently a healthcare analyst focusing on pharmaceutical and biotechnology investments at Noonday Asset Management, a global multi-strategy hedge fund.

As an undergraduate student at UWG, Suh was one of only four undergraduates in the nation selected to serve as a National Institutes of Health research fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Francis Collins, then the director of the Human Genome Project. Following his graduation from UWG in 2001, he worked in Collins’ lab researching the genetics of type 2 diabetes.
Before embarking on a career in finance, Suh was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University and the only Marshall Scholarship recipient in UWG’s history. He completed two master’s degrees at Oxford in less than two years, graduating with a M.Sc. in research in pharmacology and an MBA the age of 23.

Dr. David H. Hovey will speak at the noon ceremony. Hovey served as dean of the Richards College of Business at UWG from 1984 to 1999 and as professor of management until his retirement this summer.

During his years as dean, the RCOB achieved accreditation of its graduate programs and separate accreditation of accounting undergraduate and graduate programs from the prestigious Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International (AACSBI). Hovey also established the Small Business Development Center on campus and helped create a consortium to offer Georgia’s first online MBA degree. Other programs initiated during his tenure include the International Banking and Finance Study Abroad Program, the annual Economic Forecast Breakfast and the Merryl and Hardy McCalman Executive Roundtable.
Hovey was also instrumental in securing the donation from the Roy Richards family that led to the college’s naming as the “Richards” College of Business. Beginning this fall, he will continue his university service by teaching part time in the RCOB.

Dr. Brent M. Snow will be the commencement speaker for the 3 p.m. ceremony. Snow is the associate vice president for Academic Affairs, a professor of counseling and educational psychology at UWG and has served as the chair of the Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology for 16 years.

Snow and faculty in the counseling and educational psychology department earned recognition as pioneers and national leaders in school counseling reform in 2002 by the Education Trust, a nonprofit educational organization based in Washington, D.C. Under his leadership, the department was also one of only six university departments in the United States to gain funding from the Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund to transform graduate-level training programs in school counseling. The $450,000 grant is the largest private grant in UWG’s history.
Approximately 500 students will graduate with a degree this summer. For more information, visit the university website at westga.edu.