By AJ MEDRANO, Student Reporter
The Northwestern Oklahoma State University Commencement will have a speech given by an alumnus who was once a graduate from 1981.
The one who will be giving the speech at the graduation on the 10th of May is Rich Cantillon, who is the alumni for Northwestern. He graduated with a degree of business administration.
Calleb Mosburg, who is part of the commencement committee gave detail about the graduation that’s happening, the number of students walking, keeping the tradition, having the tradition and no change during the commencement. Talking about contingency plans in case of weather situation and now they are doing something different this year with a cum lade medal.
He said, “Right now we look to have about 260 students walking and that’s a combination of undergraduate, masters, and our doctoral programs. Kind of depends cause of the first meeting we had was a week and a half ago and so there’s still some applications that didn’t get finalized. Looks like we got a bigger group graduating this year than we did last year, so that’s exciting to see. Last Spring, we just had over 200, 208-210 what we had walking.”
He also said, “The contingency plans course we put out every year as far as if weather was to be bad, we sent out notifications to each of the graduates with the number of tickets they have for family. Because our largest base build to use is the Percefull Field house, so we have the field house already set up and ready to go.”
He says no to not doing anything different for the commencement because of keeping traditions. But what they will do this year is giving students the cum lade medals. They found a company who was doing honor medals for bigger high schools and they got have the cum lade medals.
Rich Cantillon, when he was in Northwestern, he was part of the Sigma Theta Kappa Fraternity and served in the SGA and also played intramurals.
He’s owned Bob’s picture for 14 years, served as the CEO of the Blackwell chamber for eight years and the Ponca City Chamber for 20 years. He has been to 14 state and even including a trip to the Yellowstone National Park.
Cantillion has earned numerous honors, even including outstanding Blackwell citizen in 1994 and even Outstanding Oklahoma Executive in 2010. He was inducted into the Oklahoma Chamber Hall of Fame in 2021. He was also named a Northwestern Foundation/ Alumni Outstanding Graduate for Business/Professional in 2022.
Northwestern changed his life and he met his wife Pam, who they have been married for 42 years and they are both members of Saint Mary’s Catholic Church and he also taught high school religion for over 30 years and they share three grandchildren, daughter-in-law, a son-in-law and six grandchildren.