From the President

By the time this issue of OSWEGO Alumni Magazine lands in your mailbox, we will have celebrated Opening Weekend on campus—one of the most exciting times to be here at SUNY Oswego. Our new students arrived ready to unpack their luggage, fill their minds and explore their Future Landscapes at SUNY Oswego.

This August, we were thrilled to be able to deliver an in-person welcome to students safely. We hosted a newly-conceived Laker Launch, a series of programs, workshops and experiences that taught our first-year students what they need to know to be successful at SUNY Oswego. This weeklong kickoff led up to our 32nd Annual Welcoming Torchlight Ceremony for all new first-year, transfer and graduate students—which is the bookend to our longest-standing college tradition other than Commencement, the Commencement Eve Torchlight Ceremony in May. During the August ceremony, we encourage students to think about what they would like to accomplish during their time at Oswego and to craft the future they want to experience.

In this Future Landscapes issue, alumni share their perspectives on what to expect as it relates to aging, criminal justice education, eradicating hunger and even our own campus leadership, construction and facilities. For example, you will read about the very exciting, nearly $80 million renovation of Hewitt Hall, which will provide truly best-in-class facilities for broadcasting and mass communication, graphic design and other majors in the School of Communication, Media and the Arts. You will learn how the successful completion of the Path Forward campaign has doubled the number of need-based scholarships available to SUNY Oswego students to open wider the door to opportunities to future generations of Lakers.

You will get a glimpse at the Future Landscape for some members of the Class of 2021 who graduated during eight in-person ceremonies in May. You will also read about two Graduates Of the Last Decade, whom we call our GOLD alumni: one who discovered her own Future Landscape by traversing the country and the other who explores new landscapes in space as a software engineer with NASA.

Being part of a college campus means always considering Future Landscapes—what skills will our students need to be successful in the future? What grand challenges will our research work to solve? How can we become a more sustainable community to preserve and protect our natural resources tomorrow? How can we secure the resources today to safeguard our success as an institution decades from now?

These are questions that the SUNY Oswego campus has asked and answered since our founding 160 years ago, and we will continue to pursue a brighter, more solid Future Landscape, hopefully for another 160 years.

With Laker pride,