2024 Undergraduate Ceremony

Date: Saturday, May 18, 2024
Time: 2:00-4:00 p.m. (doors open at 12:30 p.m.)
Location: The Palestra, 235 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA

Ceremony Livestream

Keynote Speaker

John Ternus (ENG’97)

John Ternus is Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, reporting to CEO Tim Cook. John leads all hardware engineering, including the teams behind iPhone, iPad, Mac, AirPods, and more.

John joined Apple’s Product Design team in 2001 and has been a vice president of Hardware Engineering since 2013. Throughout his tenure at Apple, John has overseen hardware engineering work on a variety of groundbreaking products including iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods, and Apple Vision Pro. He was also a key leader in transitioning the Mac to Apple silicon.

Prior to Apple, John worked as a mechanical engineer at Virtual Research Systems. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

Student Speaker

Akanksha Tripathy (ENG’24)

Akanksha is from Plainsboro, New Jersey, and is graduating with a B.S.E in Computer and Information Science with a concentration in Data Science, as well as an M.S.E in Computer and Information Science. She is particularly passionate about the various applications of statistics and machine learning across various industries.

While at Penn, Akanksha was involved in the The Daily Pennsylvanian, serving as the business consulting manager responsible for revenue generation for the largest independent student-run media organization. She used this opportunity to explore her interests in entrepreneurship and launched several projects and initiatives to promote small local businesses while growing the organization financially through data-driven products. She was also a dedicated member of Theta Tau, a professional engineering fraternity, as well as Women in Computer Science (WICS), where she served on numerous career panels. In addition, Akanksha served as a teaching assistant for CIS 5450: Big Data Analytics and as a peer advisor and mentor through multiple engineering organizations.

After graduation, Akanksha plans to pursue a career in quantitative analysis and trading in the greater New York area.

Connect and Celebrate With Us!

Penn Engineering encourages our graduates and their families to post on social media using #PennEngineeringProud on Instagram and Twitter (there is also a webform for participation if attendees are not on social media) so that we can include your photos and messages in our celebrations. Participants can also view our social media wall.