URBANA - Mount Pulaski resident Jennifer Reardon and Mark Cochran are two normal University of Illinois seniors looking forward to graduating this weekend, just like thousands of their classmates.

But it turns out their degrees are a pretty big deal.

Reardon, a psychology major from Bolingbrook, will be the 500,000th student to receive an undergraduate degree from the school. Cochran, a computer science major, is No. 500,001, university officials say.

So instead of just sitting through Sunday's campus-wide commencement ceremonies with other Urbana-Champaign graduates, they'll be called on stage and introduced by Chancellor Richard Herman. They also got a school coffee mug.

"It's just going to be a cool feeling, since at that ceremony it's only masters and Ph.D. students that normally get called out," said Cochran, who plans to join a technical consulting firm in Chicago after graduation.

UIUC's 135th commencement is just one of several university graduation ceremonies across the state this weekend. The others include Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, Illinois State University, Western Illinois, Bradley, Northeastern Illinois, Northern Illinois and the University of Illinois at Springfield.

The staff at the Urbana-Champaign campus admissions and records office didn't really count up from No. 1, but someone there noticed earlier this year that the school had conferred 496,186 degrees in its 134 previous commencement ceremonies, said Robin Kaler, the associate vice chancellor for public affairs. That meant No. 500,000 was likely to come this spring.

So officials began counting students as they were added to the list of pending degrees to determine to whom that 500,000th degree would go. It turned out that Reardon and Cochran were the 3,814th and 3,815th students added to the list, Kaler said.

"I was pretty surprised," said Reardon, who plans to take a year off from her studies before exploring graduate schools. "It's just a nice little unexpected extra to graduation."

Herman will introduce Reardon during the university's morning graduation ceremony and Cochran during the afternoon ceremony. About 7,000 undergraduate and graduate degrees will be conferred by UIUC on Sunday, according to the admissions and records office.

UI alum Thomas M. Siebel, the founder and former chairman of Siebel Systems Inc. will speak at both commencement ceremonies. In 1999, Siebel donated $32 million to help build a new computer science building. The building that bears his name was finished in 2004.