Achievement

students are remarkable. They arrive smart and leave poised to make a difference.

As a student body, individually and in national competitions, our students consistently excel.

's superb students

  • More New York state students planning for college have their SAT scores sent to University than to any other school, and they tend to be the state's top students.
  • 's students have an average High school GPA (mid-50%) of 93–98 and SAT scores averaging 1300-1450, highlighting their proven passion for learning. Read more about the class profile.
  • Our freshman-to-sophomore retention rate is consistently near 90%, attesting to the University's record for creating an invigorating living-and-learning culture that draws the best scholars.
  • Graduate students at tend to stick around! In fact, our one-year retention rate for new graduate students is consistently higher than 93%.

Student award winners in national and international competitions

  • Chia-Hsu Jessica Chang, a comparative literature doctoral student, was recently awarded the 2023 National Women’s Studies Association’s (NWSA) Women of Color Caucus (WoCC) Frontiers Student Essay Award for her article, “Resistant Un/translatability as a Gate-opener and a Gate-keeper: Contributions to the Development of a Decolonial Methodology for the Politics of Women of Color.” The article is currently undergoing revisions for the Frontiers Journal, the gender studies journal in collaboration with NWSA, for potential publication.  Read more.
  • Efrain Arroyo, a Clark Fellow and first-year PhD student in anthropology, has received the Clark Fellowship Travel and Research Grant, a competitive source of funding for graduate students pursuing projects that require them to travel. Efrain plans to use this prestigious award for drone research in Peru. Read more.
  • This year, the BFirst Network (BFirst) held its first-ever, first-generation college student cording ceremony, when over 150 undergraduate students received cords to wear as they crossed the stage during Commencement. Held May 12 in the Mandela Room in the The Union, the event honored graduating first-generation students at a luncheon that included celebratory cake. The ceremony also featured words of wisdom and advice from fellow graduating students and first-generation alumni, faculty and staff. Read more.
  • Graduating senior Eliza Klingler will head to South Korea on a Fulbright award next winter. In South Korea, she will be part of the Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Program, teaching the language to secondary students. Read more.
  • is widely renowned for its academic rigor, but perhaps just as central to the University’s commitment to its liberal arts background are the experiences students have outside the classroom, where they excel at rates just as impressive as in their academic endeavors. To recognize the broad range of excellence exhibited by our students, the Division of Student Affairs hosted the Student Awards Gala on May 2 where University staff and administrators and members of the Student Association executive board presented awards to 14 individual students and two student organizations. Read more.
  • Maeve Kelly is a senior in the traditional nursing program at ’s Decker College of Nursing and Health Sciences and a 2022 recipient of a State University of New York (SUNY) Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence and the University’s President’s Award for Undergraduate Student Excellence. The Chancellor's Award recognizes outstanding students who have integrated academic excellence with other aspects of their lives, such as leadership, campus involvement, community service, the arts, athletics or career achievement. Working with the Rescue Mission occupied much of Kelly’s first two years at . More recently, she has been volunteering at the NoMa Community Center, a facility that works to improve quality of life and provide recreational and health-based programs for residents who live north of Main Street in . Despite being in a particularly rigorous academic program that includes the additional requirement of clinical nursing experiences in several specialty areas, along with volunteering Kelly finds time to work as a student ambassador and peer advisor for Decker College’s Division of Advising and Academic Excellence. She is also completing an internship at the Addiction Center of Broome County. Following graduation in May, Kelly intends to spend about a month focusing on studying for her National Council Licensure Examination (the exam required to become a registered nurse). Read more.
  • When graduate student Sari Richards committed to his journey to sobriety, he turned to external resources to help support his recovery. A 12-step recovery program helped him beat his substance-use disorder, but it was unaffiliated with . Richards and Peter McEntee, a graduate student who is also sober, wanted to extend the opportunities for recovery to all students through the University. The pair decided to create the Campus Recovery Support Group (CRSG), which provides support for students who are struggling with substance-use issues. Read more.
  • For Ernest Wang and Joseph Won, research is more than a future career: It’s a call to adventure, a way to contribute to the unfolding of knowledge and even a means to change the world. The University juniors recently received the prestigious Barry Goldwater Scholarship, which is given to sophomores and juniors who demonstrate potential in research. The award covers a full year’s tuition. Read more.
  • Meg Gauck’s doctoral work requires travel to Tanzania, and a new award from the State University of New York will help her get there. Gauck, a biological anthropology student at , was among 28 winners of the 2022 SUNY Graduate Research Empowering and Accelerating Talent (GREAT) Award. The prize encourages undergraduate and graduate SUNY students to apply for competitive graduate fellowships to fund their master’s or doctoral studies. Read more.

  • Two doctoral students in behavioral neuroscience have received prestigious NIH National Research Service Awards from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). The grant awards — each about $60,000 — will enable Siara Rouzer and Andrew Vore to support their dissertation research, fund travel, equipment and supplies, and take part in professional development.

  • Jasper Baur has already accomplished a great deal in his three years at : a presentation at the American Geophysical Union conference, a first-place finish in an international technology design competition and three published papers. Baur can now add Goldwater scholar to his list of accolades. The rising senior and geological sciences major is one of 496 U.S. college students to receive the prestigious Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship for the 2019-20 academic year. The scholarship — worth up $7,500 per year — goes to sophomores and juniors pursuing research in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering. Baur, who was chosen from among 1,223 nominees, is also one of seven SUNY students to earn the 2019-20 honor.

  •  Decker School of Nursing student Toni Barbarino is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence for 2019. The award recognizes outstanding students who have integrated academic excellence with other aspects of their lives, such as leadership, campus involvement, community service, the arts, athletics or career achievement. Barbarino, a senior from Kings Park, N.Y., is an exceptional student-athlete who balances an often-rigorous workload, splitting her focus into a bevy of pursuits and succeeding in all. A member of the Decker School’s Honors Program, Barbarino’s work focuses on the application of touch therapy for infants in neonatal care and for infants experiencing drug withdrawal. In addition, during the summer she was selected for a competitive externship at Northwell Health (only 10 students are chosen), where she gained clinical experience and educated fellow students about the importance of patient advocacy. Barbarino is also a University Scholar. She is completing a health and wellness studies minor and is a consistent member of the Dean’s List. But, more importantly to her, she is widely involved both on and off campus.

  • Michelle Crook received a prestigious National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship. Crook, who graduated in May with a degree in chemistry is one of 2,000 to receive an award offer from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program. This year’s award recipients were selected from more than 12,000 applicants across the country. The program recruits high-potential, early-career scientists and engineers and supports their graduate research training in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. The program also provides three years of financial support within a five-year fellowship period—a $34,000 annual stipend and a $12,000 cost-of-education allowance to the graduate institution. Crook, a 21-year-old from Corning, N.Y., will use her fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, where she will begin pursuit of her doctorate this fall in synthetic and organic chemistry.

  • Elizabeth “Cope” Feurer, is the recipient of a 2016 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. It’s a fact of life that adolescence is tumultuous. No matter where you grow up, whether you’re a boy or a girl, those awkward years between childhood and adulthood are full of possibilities and accomplishments but also rife with social pitfalls, yearnings to fit in and the push to succeed at school and beyond. Because of this, adolescence can be one of the most stressful periods of people’s lives. One the biggest challenges for psychologists studying why some adolescents handle stress well while others don’t is that there’s no answer on whether lab studies and real-world studies are looking at the same phenomenon. That’s why Elizabeth will spend the next three years studying whether current laboratory methods of researching stress reactivity reflect the way adolescents experience stress in the real world.

  • Daniel McMonagle, an undergraduate student from Clarence, N.Y., who majors in linguistics and Chinese studies, and Erin Riggs, a doctoral student in anthropology from Running Springs, Calif., are among about 560 students to earn a Critical Language Scholarship (CLS). is the only SUNY school to have more than one CLS recipient for 2016. The Critical Language Scholarship program has enabled more than 5,000 students overseas to examine languages such as Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bangla, Hindi, Korean, Persian, Russian, Swahili and Turkish. McMonagle is spending the summer studying Chinese in Dalian, China, while Riggs is studying Punjabi in Chandigarh, India.

  • Ray Futia, a biology major and chemistry minor is the recipient of the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship Program Grant.  The focus of his research is yeast. Working with yeast, a single-celled organism, provides biologists with more freedom and power in cell manipulation. 

  • Brandon Pereyra, perched 165 feet above the plains of Golden, Colo., looked to the distant Rocky Mountains, then returned his attention to the gears of a wind turbine and how to make them more effective. That was in 2014. Now a year later he is the winner of one of America's most prestigious scholarships, the Barry M. Goldwater award. Pereyra plans to spend the summer at the turbine's base trying to model how waves, currents and water interfere with how wind is turned into energy.

  • Samantha Birk, a junior with a double major in psychology and management who minors in theatre, became one of 61 U.S. students invited to travel to the UK last year to participate in the Fulbright U.K. Summer Institute program. At King's College London, she learned about the history of British cities. Read more
  • Natalia Chapovalova has become the first student to receive a prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Read more.
  • Leland Foster, a senior studying English at , recently placed second in a national art competition through the Smithsonian Institution of Arts. Read more.
  • Dali Lu, Oyuka Baatarkhuyag, Michael Genito, Ying Zhu and Joyce Wenjing Xu – all students in the School of Management – won first prize in the 2013 Ernst & Young, LLP (E&Y) "Your World, Your Vision" competition, which included universities from across the U.S. and Canada. Read more.
  • David Bassen, recently received a 2012-13 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship. Read more.