Nancy Gregg spoke about older non-traditional students – a subject that is near to her heart… Nancy Gregg spoke about older non-traditional students – a subject that is near to her heart because … she is one.

After working for 20 years, spending 10 of them as a single parent, the mother of three college graduates attended a class at Westmoreland County Community College in 2002.

“I thought obtaining a degree was beyond my reach,” she said Saturday, after taking first place in the informative category of this year’s Undergraduate Oratory Competition.

Gregg – who is remarried – graduated from Westmoreland with an associate’s degree in 2005, received a scholarship from Seton Hill University, spent one semester there and then transferred to Pitt.

“Most people think I’m a graduate student,” Gregg said. “They’re always surprised when I tell them I’m an undergraduate.”

She’s majoring in media and communications.

Coincidentally, Gregg and the winner in the persuasive speech category have something in common.

Sophomore Allison O’Konski’s mother was also a non-traditional student; she got her teaching degree just a short while ago.

O’Konski, a communications major, won the persuasive category delivering an uplifting speech that drew on examples from filmmaking to professional sports for inspiration.

“It was in the persuasive category, but it fell under motivational,” she said.

O’Konski credited her adeptness at speaking to a series of classes she took at Wheeling Park High School in West Virginia, under the guidance of teacher Fran Schoolcraft.

O’Konski actually received college credit while in high school for her public speaking classes through a special program.

She said that, in terms of public speaking, Oprah Winfrey is her role model.

This was the communication department’s ninth annual Undergraduate Oratory Competition. There are two categories (persuasive and informative). The top three speakers in each category – as chosen by a panel of judges – receive prizes: $200 for first, $100 for second and $50 for third. Everyone who enters gets a T-shirt.

Other speakers in the persuasive category showed off some of their rhetorical skills in Saturday’s contest.

Junior TaMisha Greathouse, who took second place, used the word “phenomenal” late in her speech as an allusion to her beginning – which included a reading of Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman.”

Greathouse argued against the sexual exploitation of young girls by clothing manufacturers and other corporations.

“These Disney Channel stars are no longer G-rated,” she said, as she attacked everything from stores selling thongs to 7-year-olds to T-shirt companies printing derogatory slogans on their products.

“There is a clear problem, a big and phenomenal problem,” Greathouse said.

Third-place winner freshman LaTrenda Leonard used pathos to sway the judges in support of more activism against family homelessness.

“You will not see them on park benches,” she said at the beginning of her speech, giving the problem a mysterious – almost eerily invisible – connotation.

Leonard called shelters a “poor substitute” for permanent housing.

“There may always be poor families … but there need not always be homelessness,” she said as she ended.

Trudy Bayer, who has a doctorate in communications and is a faculty member in Pitt’s Communication department, said that the competition began with 42 entrants. About a third of them advanced from the first round into the finals.

Bayer was pleased with the diversity of subjects discussed and majors represented in the competition.

Senior biology major Pieter Heemstra took second place in the informative category. Tim Jackson got third.

Though most of the contestants in the final round of the persuasive category were communications majors, there were some who weren’t.

Freshman Jordan Bowmaster, a pharmacy major, argued that major-sport college athletes should receive financial compensation for their efforts. Fellow freshman Laura McGee, who is majoring in social work, warned the audience about gastric bypass surgery.