Greetings, Seawolves!
To our newest students, welcome to Stony Brook! I am so pleased you have entrusted Stony Brook with your education. In return, our campus community will do everything possible to exceed your expectations for your academic journey. Public research universities — especially great ones like ours — possess a special entrepreneurial spirit of infinite possibilities. Here at Stony Brook, you’ll find a culture of creativity and invention. No matter your department or discipline, you will discover new passions, find better ways to serve your community or even create inventions that can help our society advance toward a better future.
Always remember that the brilliant people around you across the humanities, engineering, sciences, medicine and the arts are your best educational resource. So, my advice is to take full advantage of their expertise. Get to know one another. Learn from each other. The breadth of knowledge and experiences you discover at Stony Brook will contribute to your personal and professional success going forward and help you become a better citizen of the world.
Beginning your college journey is exciting, but transitions can also be challenging. Sometimes things won’t go as planned. That certainly happened to me as a first-year engineering student when I struggled with demanding classes and almost dropped out of the major. But I realized that I could learn how to be a successful student under my own definition of success. Overcoming those early struggles gave me a resilience and tenacity that has served me well throughout my career. So, if you experience bumps along the way, or simply have questions about your path at Stony Brook and afterward, know that you are surrounded by a campus community who believes in you and your aspirations and will help you achieve them, including our Student Support Team, Counseling and Psychological Services and Career Center staff.
I recall my own days as an undergraduate student when I found the journey of exploring a broad range of topics and discovering my passion in them to be truly magical. I encourage you to embrace your journey as Seawolves, to take risks, explore new things, question your aspirations and don’t be afraid to fail. I would say that much of my own professional success is because I persevered through failures and learned from them, and that is true of all the successful people I know. I look forward to getting to know the student community at Stony Brook: your opinions, your experiences, your challenges and your wildest ambitions. Together, let’s turn your aspirations into reality.
Sincerely,
Andrea Goldsmith, President