Published: May 10, 2008 11:57 pm            

A year of accomplishment at OSU

My first two months as Oklahoma State University president have been a flurry of activity, and First Cowgirl, Ann, and I have enjoyed every minute of it! We have been overwhelmed by our warm welcome to OSU and Stillwater.

It is an honor to return to my alma mater, particularly at a time of exciting expansion and opportunity on the OSU campus and across Stillwater. OSU and Stillwater have a long and successful partnership and our collaborative relationship has never been more important.

I want to commend Mayor Roger McMillian, the City Council, and county, city and business leaders for their visionary leadership and look forward to continuing our work together. I am committed to making our “town-gown” relationship the best anywhere.

Stillwater is a wonderful college town and I want to thank the countless Stillwater businesses and individuals who serve our students and employees and do their part in creating the special OSU experience. I also want to thank the many businesses who employ our students, helping support their educational goals. The rising cost of education often makes these jobs the difference in whether a student graduates or not.

Like everyone else, I was proud to see our city lead the state with 17 percent population growth since 2000. Businesses and buildings are popping up all over town and if you have been on the OSU campus recently you have seen the progress we are making on various construction projects.

The multimodal transportation center at Hall of Fame and Monroe streets should be ready this summer, giving us a 1,100-space parking garage. The North Classroom Building just south of the multimodal facility should be ready next spring. The large crane on Monroe Street is for the Interdisciplinary Science Research Building which is scheduled to open in spring of 2010.

We are ahead of schedule on the west end zone of Boone Pickens Stadium, which will be ready for seating this fall, giving us a capacity of around 60,000. The build-out of our football operations facilities underneath the stands in the west end zone should be completed by the fall of 2009.

Probably the best news for Stillwater, we are pleased Hall of Fame Avenue should re-open before the start of school in August. This will once again make this important east-west artery available to Stillwater drivers.

We were honored to have Gov. Brad Henry and Lt. Gov. Jari Askins serve as speakers at our undergraduate commencement ceremonies earlier this month. We recognized nearly 2,700 graduates and their families at a packed Gallagher-Iba Arena.

A real asset to OSU and our community are the international students who represent nearly 120 different countries. We graduated 400 international students during commencement, including the special graduation of Hideyoshi Shigeta from Kameoka, Japan, the sister city of Stillwater. Hideyoshi received his bachelor’s degree in animal science. He is the fourth member of his family to receive an OSU degree, following two sisters and a brother to Stillwater.

We have had an incredible year on the academic front, with OSU students capturing some of the nation’s premier awards such as the Truman, Goldwater, Fulbright, Udall and others. We are extremely proud of our many outstanding students and applaud our faculty for the work they do.

Three of our winners are local students, from Stillwater, Eli Sluch was named a Goldwater Scholar, and Kelsey Williams won an Oxford Clarendon Press Scholarship. Sarah Rowland from Morrison won a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.

A record number of students earned Honors College degrees at commencement. We had 69 seniors achieve this hard-earned degree, among them the 1,000th honoree in the history of the program. These students have excelled at a very high level. Earning an Honors College degree requires 39 credit hours in honors courses, a senior honors thesis and 3.5 OSU and cumulative grade point averages. (I particularly appreciated the thesis by Victoria Radke on the difficulty of parking at athletic events!)

OSU athletes have thrilled us with their accomplishments this past year and I am especially proud that they have also been winners in the classroom. We had 113 student-athletes earn Academic All-Big 12 honors, tops in the conference, and we had a league-high 39 Academic All-Americans. Both numbers are school records.

Students from the OSU School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering are once again flying high. Our two Aerospace Capstone Design Teams took first and third at the international Design/Build/Fly Competition in April. OSU has dominated the competition in recent years, taking first and second for three straight years before finishing second and fourth last year.

If you have not tuned in to listen to the new KOSU, I encourage you to check it out. Our award-winning public radio station has added a number of news and information programs, as well as enhanced its music lineup with weekend jazz, my favorite. The changes were in response to listener feedback and make KOSU an even better source for news and entertainment.

I want to close by once again thanking the city of Stillwater for its on-going support of Oklahoma State University. OSU and Stillwater rely heavily on each other and I am excited about what we will accomplish together.

Burns Hargis is Oklahoma State University’s president and chief executive officer.쇓

        

• Click to discuss this story with other readers on our forums.