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How many ballons rain from the rafters of Alumni Arena?

Who wears what tassel?

And what is a Grad Cap Companion, anyway?

To get you in the True Blue spirt of this weekend’s commencement ceremonies, UBNow dug into its reporter’s notebook and pulled out a few graduation acknowledgements, reminders and tidbits to catch you up before celebrations kick off this evening in Alumni Arena with the ceremony for the School of Public Health and Health Professions.

UB’s Class of 2025 graduates 6,435 students receiving 6,906 degrees and certificates at 18 conferral ceremonies that began May 2 with the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and the School of Dental Medicine.

Here’s the weekend at a glance.

Standard caps and gowns at UB are blue or black, depending on your level of degree, but if you’re paying attention to the rainbow of tassels, some decoding may be required.

Tassels correspond to the graduate’s academic discipline.

“It is a very old tradition, and most U.S. colleges and universities use the same color assignments for the different schools,” explains Doreen Poole, store manager at the UB bookstore, where students have been picking up their graduation regalia for the past several weeks.

Blue violet is for architecture. Orange is for engineering. There’s apricot for nursing; salmon for public health; drab (light brown) for the School of Management; light blue for education and lemon for library science.

The Law School uses purple and the School of Social Work citron. The blue and white tassel is for students receiving a bachelor’s degree from the College of Arts and Sciences.

Seven of the nine ceremonies in Alumni Arena this weekend will have balloon drops at their conclusion — two balloon drops per ceremony, actually.

“There are about 1,000 balloons in each drop, so 2,000 balloons fall on the graduates at each ceremony,” says Anne Mecca, associate director for admissions and student services in the College of Arts and Sciences, who coordinates its two undergraduate ceremonies.

Staff from each school assist with rounding up the balloons after each ceremony so Balloon Masters, the local company providing the balloons, can hoist them to the rafters in nets for use on the following day, Mecca explains.

“They do replenish some over the course of the weekend, as balloons may pop or graduates take them with them when they exit the building,” Mecca says, “but it’s probably about 3,000 balloons total.”

Organizers are aware there may be graduates with latex allergies and do their best to accommodate them when informed in advance.

One of this season’s “must-have” accessories selling at the UB bookstore is a new item called the Grad Cap Companion.

“I just call it a headband,” Poole says.

A black ring fits inside the mortar board and then attaches to a headband so that the cap stays securely fixed atop the graduate’s head.

“You don’t need 8,000 bobby pins to try to hold it in place,” Poole says.

It’s been a popular seller. Poole recalls selling it to one male student with a large amount of hair.

“I said ‘Listen, you will probably never wear a headband again in your life, but I think you may want to consider this for graduation,” Poole says. “He was like, ‘I think you’re right,’ and he ended up buying one.”

Among the many unsung heroes who help make commencement a success each year are the staff and faculty who volunteer to read the names of the graduates before they walk across the stage.

Each school handles those duties independently, but the College of Arts and Sciences uses teams of four who each read 100 or so names before alternating, Mecca explains.

They’re dynamic speakers and good at pronouncing a variety of diverse names, Mecca says, but here’s a little secret: The college has the graduates spell out their names phonetically so as not to mispronounce them on their big day.

“Having the phonetic renderings in advance is very helpful as we practice pronouncing the names, and thus we’re more confident that we will get each name right,” says John Wood, senior associate vice provost in the Office of International Education and a name reader at graduation for some 20 years.

Each student brings a printed name card to the ceremony — with the phonetic rendering — then each card is handed to the reader as the graduate goes through the line to be congratulated by the president or provost on the platform.

“Of course, sometimes the students don’t know how to accurately render their names phonetically,” Wood says. “We also sometimes see name cards that are hastily scrawled on a piece of paper because the graduate forgot to bring the printed one to the ceremony.”

Sure, Victor is beloved at UB, but it’s another bovine — the bronze bison at Coventry Loop — that takes center stage during graduation.

Graduates are often found before and after commencement ceremonies waiting in line to get their photo taken next to the bronze bison — which is just what UB envisioned when the statute was installed 29 years ago.

University administrators wanted to create a marker of institutional pride and identity for the North Campus, to serve as “the preferred spot for pictures with family and friends,” something for “people to remember and identify with long after their years at UB.”

Based on the sculpted bison in the concourse of the Old Central Terminal in Buffalo, the statue was largely funded through donations. It weighs in at roughly a half ton, while measuring 8 feet long, 65 inches high and 33 inches at its widest part.

The monument was installed at Coventry Loop in 1996 upon a raised concrete platform with stairs and a ramp. Soon after, stone and floral berms were added to display the interlocking UB, aligned with the bison’s nose as the center point.

If you’re not able to attend commencement, but don’t want to miss your favorite graduate cross the stage, don’t worry.

As in the past, all of this weekend’s ceremonies will be livestreamed, so check it out.