PHILADELPHIA Graduates of several schools at the University of Pennsylvania will be able to individualize their commencement experience this year thanks to MarchingOrder. The program will also be used at the University of New Mexico.

MarchingOrder is a software program that allows students to post their names, hometowns and/or personal messages on a giant screen as they pass through the commencement exercises. Prior to graduation day, they submit the information to their schools, and at the ceremony the individual information is accessed through a bar code and projected on a 25-by-65-foot screen.

Penn School of Engineering and Applied Sciences piloted the software at the 2001 commencement. This year, thanks to Penn support, MarchingOrder will personalize the ceremonies for more than 2,000 graduate and undergraduate students in SEAS and four other schools at Penn.

The University of New Mexico Department of Economics will also use it.

The brainchild of David Badler, a senior in SEAS and Penn Wharton business school, MarchingOrder attracted the interest of fellow Wharton/SEAS senior Tyler Mullins and Matt Uffalussy, a senior in Penn digital media design program. Badler and Mullins, who created MarchingOrder financial model and market research survey, used it as an independent study for a marketing class, a senior project for a computer science class and a class project for an operations and information management class. Uffalussy provided the graphic design on the Web site, www.marchingorder.upenn.edu. With guidance from SEAS professor David Farber and marketing professor David Reibstein, the students never felt out on a limb.

What began as a student project now has entrepreneurial and financial support from Penn business-incubator program, P2B, and its Business Services division. Penn administrative officials were so impressed with MarchingOrder, they agreed to fund start-up costs for hardware, interfacing software, a bar-code reader and other expenses through P2B.

"We continue to be impressed with what they are doing," said Phil Goldstein, P2B chief operating officer. "We have been helping them to design their pilots for other universities and to develop a business plan to help launch them as a company after the pilots."

Lourdes McKenna, administrator at the University of New Mexico Department of Economics, said, "The decision to use MarchingOrder was a simple one. Once we saw how novel an idea this was, we were eager to improve our graduation ceremony using this innovative software program."

MarchingOrder is also proving useful as a tool to manage other events. Penn School of Engineering and Applied Science plans to use it for its awards ceremony this year.

"Knowing that MarchingOrder can make these ceremonies a little bit better for everyone involved makes it real exciting for me," Mullins said. "It a big improvement over tape on mortarboards."