The morning before the Stony Brook University graduation ceremony on Friday, May 23rd. SoMAS hosted a convocation ceremony to honor and celebrate the accomplishments of graduating students.
This year, more than thirty undergraduates earned either a B.S. in Atmospheric & Ocean Sciences, a B.A. in Environmental Studies, or a B.S.in Marine Sciences , making the SoMAS class of 2008 the largest cohort of matriculating SoMAS undergraduates in Stony Brook University history.
While not all graduate students were able to attend the ceremony this year SoMAS awarded seven master’s degrees and five doctorates in Marine and Atmospheric Sciences.
The Petra M. Udellhofen Memorial Scholarship, awarded annually to an undergraduate entering his/her senior year of study in the Environmental Studies, Atmospheric Sciences/Meteorology, and/or Marine Sciences programs at Stony Brook Universtiy, was presented to Raema Obbie. The scholarship is named in memory Dr. Petra M. Udelhofen, an Assistant Research Professor in the Institute for Terrestrial and Planetary Atmospheres at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of SoMAS.
In his opening remarks, Dean David Conover congratulated the students and their families and thanked event organizers Carol Dovi, Christina Fink, and Regina Gartin.
Dean Conover let the students know that the entire SoMAS community will miss them as they move on to other challenges. He then speculated as to what those challenges are likely to be, particularly with regards to the environment.
“The environment challenges back [when I was in school] were clear and apparent,” he said, “Now we face a different kind of challenge. It’s not the obvious point source impacts to the environment which are relatively easy to solve. Our challenge is much more formidable foe. It is the gradual, incremental changes to our environment that get just a little bit worse each year—things like climate change.”
He concluded that many of the answers to these problems will likely come from the next generation of scientists and policy-makers, such as the students who graduate this year.
Dean Conover told the graduates: “You have a great opportunity to take what you’ve learned here at Stony Brook and apply that knowledge to the numberous challenges that confront our world.”
Congratulations 2008 Graduates!
