In the world of college campuses, time passes in one- and four-year cycles, transitioning each spring on the coattails of graduation robes and flitting colored tassels.

On Saturday, May 4, President Mark Rutland’s four-year cycle at ORU will end. The 65-year-old academic CEO will join the class of 2013 on the Mabee Center stage and exit ORU with the group of students he started with four years ago.

“It is like we’re graduating at the same time,” Rutland said. “That’s kind of rewarding.”

This year’s diplomas will still bear his signature.

After another four-year cycle spins out, however, Rutland said he doesn’t expect future students to remember him. With generally short terms in office and even shorter legacies, college administrators are as transient as the Oklahoma wind from Rutland’s point of view.

“Kids are concerned about their papers and their dates and their basketball games, and you know, you’re gone,” he said. “That’s not sad. It’s real.”

After studying abroad in Washington, D.C. for a semester, senior communications major Rachel Curylo took her experiences and turned them into a thrilling script.

At 8 p.m. April 28, a staged reading of “Evasion Persuasion,” an original play by Rachel Curylo, will be performed in Howard Auditorium.

Imagine if some of the most important cities in the world were personified and all gathered together in one room. This is the premise of “Evasion Persuasion.”

“Everything has been running smoothly until Warsaw, (an up-and-coming city) is invited to the meeting by a well-meaning assistant,” said Curylo. “Comedy, chaos and drama ensue.”

Senior mechanical engineer students Luke Chinworth, Bethany Dickie and Andrew Walter are wrapping up their senior project entitled “Design and  Construction of a Process Heater Simulator.”

In simple English, a process heater heats up fluids. Imagine the Bunsen burners that you used in high  school science class on steroids.

The problem that this engineering group tackled is that the industrial machine is too big to be used in a classroom setting.

The senior mechanical engineer trio took Applied Thermodynamics the fall of their junior year under the teaching of Dr. Chuck Baukal, director of the John Zink Institute.

It’s almost the time of year every senior college student anxiously awaits—that victorious moment when he or she receives his or her diploma and cross the stage into the next phase of life.

As the final event as an ORU student, style is key, right?

With the required cap and gown, there’s only  one way to do this: the shoes.

It seems that the lady students take the responsibility to have the perfect footwear more heavily than the guys. While many guys will probably just wear their usual dress shoes, girls hit up department stores with the determination of a climber about to summit Kilimanjaro.