Tyler Clayton ran into Boone Pickens Stadium last fall, carrying the Oklahoma flag along with fellow members of Oklahoma State University’s ROTC program.

The cadets were the final leg of OSU’s annual Prisoner of War/Missing in Action 24-hour relay throughout Stillwater.

Clayton will be walking into Gallagher-Iba Arena on Saturday, carrying the College of Arts and Sciences flag, leading his fellow members of the Class of 2026 into commencement.

Carrying the college gonfalon is an honor bestowed on each college’s outstanding senior as an orange gown graduate.

Both of these moments are something Clayton, a native of Canyon, Texas, would never have dreamed of when he came to OSU.

Clayton was part of a then-record freshman class in 2022 who looked to go into engineering. He picked OSU at the time because he felt the university experience was built around the student, a sentiment he didn’t receive from other campus tours.

“I felt like OSU cared about me. And throughout all four years, I've changed majors and colleges. I've had a lot of different advisors, and I've never felt like that wasn't the case,” Clayton said.

Clayton said he feels like OSU has given him a chance to grow and explore other avenues, which has culminated in his current major and future career path. For his initial engineering degree, Clayton took computer science classes early on. Those pre-requisite classes were what he became passionate about.

“Both computer engineering and computer science deal with computers and technology, but engineering is more like the hardware design side, whereas computer science is more like the software design side,” Clayton said. “Working with both, I preferred the physical tools to already be in place so that I could work with the system.”

Clayton’s favorite class became operating systems, which showed a different side to computer science than what the general public usually thinks.

“Usually you think, ‘Oh, I'm writing some code that will do something,’ Clayton said. “But operating systems are, ‘What controls the whole computer?’ And that was just a whole step into a different world of CS. I guess, up until that point, we're just writing code that does one specific thing, but this is writing code that allows everything else to work within the computer. I thought it was really interesting.”

Clayton will get to work in his field of study after he graduates, as well. Friday, he will be commissioned into the U.S. Space Force as a second lieutenant, another path he had no idea he would take when he first arrived in Stillwater.

He knew being a part of the Reserve Officer Training Corps was going to be part of his college experience, but not the Space Force.

When Clayton became part of OSU’s Air Force ROTC Det. 670, he met Jackie Harsha, who became the CAS orange gown graduate in spring 2023 and also entered the Space Force. That opened a completely different career door for Clayton.

“As time went on, it came time for me to make my choice, and I thought, ‘What better thing to get into than something brand new like the Space Force. Nobody knows about it. It's brand new, and I can help establish what it’s going to be for the future,” Clayton said.

The Space Force, established on Dec. 20, 2019, secures the nation’s interests in, from and to space. Clayton will be stationed in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he hopes to aid in the branch’s mission.

“I'm hoping to use my computer science degree and get into cyber operations,” Clayton said. “Using the capabilities of computers, I want to provide support to other military operations.”

Balancing an AFROTC commission while finishing at the top of his class seems like an impossible task, but Clayton hopes others don’t view it that way. The ROTC does provide structure, he said, but it mostly develops its cadets' leadership qualities, which is what Clayton said professors do as well.

Just putting your head down and getting to work can lead you to the field of Boone Pickens Stadium, the court of Gallagher-Iba Arena and even to space operations.

“Don't avoid doing something because it sounds hard, because pretty much everything I've done in college that ended up being worth doing was really hard, and freshman me probably wouldn't have done most of those things,” Clayton said. “But I did the hard things a little bit at a time until I could do those things that were once unimaginable.”