December 14, 2015
Fall commencement ceremony is Saturday
CARBONDALE, Ill. -- Commencement exercises for fall 2015 graduates at Southern Illinois University Carbondale are set for Saturday, Dec. 19.
The ceremony for all colleges begins at 2 p.m. at the SIU Arena. As of Dec. 8, there are 1,326 candidates for degrees: 935 for bachelor’s degrees, 297 for master’s degrees, 52 for doctoral degrees, 29 for law degrees, and 13 for associate degrees.
The ceremony is open to the public and tickets are not required. More information is available at commencement.siu.edu/. The ceremony will be available via livestream by clicking on the “Watch Live” button at commencement.siu.edu/.
Jak Tichenor, a veteran news broadcaster, public affairs reporter and now retired senior producer at WSIU-TV, will be the keynote speaker. Tichenor has more than four decades of media experience, working in commercial radio in Southern Illinois and western Kentucky from 1971 to 1981 as an announcer, copywriter, music director and news reporter. He retired from the university earlier this year after nearly 34 years with SIU Carbondale; he was the university’s 2006 Lindell W. Sturgis Memorial Professional Achievement Award recipient.
Tichenor is currently executive producer and host of the statewide “Illinois Lawmakers” series on the Illinois General Assembly for statewide Illinois Public Television and has served as statehouse correspondent for the series since 1991. Since 1995, he has been lead producer for the Lincoln Academy of Illinois annual TV special distributed across Illinois.
Tichenor holds two degrees from SIU Carbondale -- a bachelor’s degree in radio-television and a master’s degree in public visual communications.