'Leave the city of your comfort,' YSU commencement speaker tells grads

YOUNGSTOWN

Randall Craig Fleischer is not as well-known as Simon Cowell, but he does have some impressive credentials and he did have some good advice for 2015 spring graduates of Youngstown State University.

“When you came to this event and found out the speaker was me, how many of you said, ‘Who’s that?’” Fleischer asked the graduates and their families who were crowded into Beeghly Center for the 2:30 p.m. ceremony that included the College of Creative Arts and Communication, the College of Health and Human Services, and the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.

He was there, he added, because “Simon Cowell was way too expensive.”

He might work for cheap as a speaker, but Fleischer, the musical director of the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra, the Anchorage Symphony and the Hudson Valley Philharmonic has also appeared as a guest conductor with many major orchestras in the United States and internationally, including the Boston Pops, San Francisco Symphony, China Philharmonic and Israel Philharmonic. He is a composer and arranger, and is a national leader in symphonic rock and world music fusion.

He knows about success and he knows about being a leader — two key themes he stressed.

“There is nothing easy about this,” he told them.

“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.”

Earlier Saturday, another group of graduates Eric Spiegel, president and CEO of Siemens USA, for their morning ceremony.

Read both stories and see photo coverage of the events in Sunday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.