Category: Vitality

For the eighth consecutive year, Finger Lakes Community College has received the Military Friendly School designation from VIQTORY, a veteran-owned media company that recognizes employers and colleges showing strong recruitment and retention rates among military veterans.

This is the College’s first year achieving gold status. Of the 1,800 schools that applied for the Military Friendly designation for 2022-23, 282 earned gold awards for their leading practices, outcomes, and effective programs.

“The process established for the Military Friendly designation is rigorous and guided by an advisory council of higher education professionals who oversee veteran services. I am very proud of the gradual improvements our dedicated faculty and staff have made to our comprehensive veteran services to reach gold status this year,” said FLCC President Robert Nye.

FLCC scores highest in standards for culture and commitment to veterans and standards for graduation and career outcomes. The College assists students in obtaining the maximum number of credits for their military service, based on training, coursework and occupational specialty. It also helps veterans secure benefits for themselves and their families and provides opportunities to connect with other student veterans and local veterans’ services.

VIQTORY uses public data sources and information from a survey completed by the school and personal data from surveys of veterans to establish its scores. It measures a school’s ability to meet thresholds for retention, graduation, job placement, repayment, persistence, and loan default rates for all students and specifically for student veterans.

FLCC is one of nine New York community colleges that received the designation and one of four to achieve gold award status. More information about FLCC’s veteran services is available at flcc.edu/veterans.

The Finger Lakes Community College Foundation awarded 139 students a total of $177,680 in scholarships funded by local families, business and organizations during 2021.

The Foundation manages more than 100 scholarship funds. Amounts vary from $400 to one-year of tuition, currently $4,968. To view the scholarships and criteria, visit flcc.edu/scholarships. Check back in late January for the link to the 2022 application.

All students who apply to FLCC by March 1 and submit a high school transcript are automatically considered for scholarships based on general criteria, such as a field of study. Students who apply after March 1 or may be eligible due to special criteria, such as status as a veteran or a family member of a veteran, should fill out the application.

The following new scholarships were added in 2021:

• The Biddle/Merrill Veterans Scholarship was launched by Bud and Debbi Biddle and Gary and Sharron Merrill of Canandaigua to support a student who is a military veteran or a family member of a veteran. Bud and Gary are Navy and Army veterans, respectively.
• The Olivia Lynn Calabrese Memorial Scholarship was created in memory of Olivia by her parents, Chris and Amy Calabrese, for a student pursuing an art degree. Amy is a former member of the FLCC Foundation Board of Directors.
• The Geneva City School District Alumni Scholarship was created by FLCC Trustee Santa Abraham and her husband, Matt, to support graduates of the Geneva City School District who attend FLCC.
• The Kathryn Kingsley Wunder Memorial Scholarship was created by Nicole Kingsley Brunner and her husband, Adam, in memory of her grandmother, Kathryn Kingsley Wunder. Kathryn began attending FLCC at age 40 while a single mother of six children. This scholarship recognizes a non-traditional student pursuing a nursing degree.
• The Nancy Schopf Memorial Scholarship was created by the Seventh district of the Federated Garden Clubs of New York State in memory of member Nancy Schopf, to support a student majoring in horticulture.
• The Niagara Label Graphic Arts Award was created by the Niagara Label Company for the winner of the annual wine label design competition.
• The Bill White Memorial Scholarship was established by family and friends of the late Bill White, a manager of instructional technology at FLCC who died in a car accident in 2020. It is awarded to a student majoring in information technology.

Below are the 2021 recipients by county and town.

Continue reading “139 FLCC students receive $177K in private scholarships”

The fall semester was already going well for Emer O’Brien, a graphic design student at Finger Lakes Community College.

She and her volleyball teammates captured the regional championship on Halloween with a win over Fulton Montgomery Community College, earning a trip to the national competition in Minnesota.

A few weeks later, the viticulture and wine technology students selected her proposed design for the next label of the College’s 2021 vintages.

“It’s a huge honor,” she said of knowing 1,700 bottles will be wrapped with her Synthesis No. 10 label. She offered a simple design with the name bisecting a circle on a solid color background, a deep green for the whites and a burgundy for the reds.

Continue reading “Wine label win caps fast-paced semester”

The Finger Lakes Community College Board of Trustees has welcomed a new student trustee, Sophia Parshall, who grew up in Naples and is now studying nursing.

Parshall, who was homeschooled, began attending FLCC as a high school junior through the Early College Scholars program. Early College Scholars provides a 50 percent tuition discount to youth who have not yet graduated from high school and want to get ahead on college credits. Parshall took advantage of the program to begin pre-requisite courses for nursing.

“I decided to study nursing because I have a passion for helping people and have wanted to be a nurse since I was 7 years old. My mom is a nurse and graduated from FLCC when I was about 5 or 6,” she said.

Parshall is interested in specializing in women’s health. Her current plan is to transfer after graduation in 2023 to the University of Rochester, which has a program enabling registered nurses with an associate degree to get a bachelor’s in 16 months. After that, she may enroll in the nurse midwifery program at Frontier University in Kentucky.

“When I was little, I remember begging my mom to let me do a pretend ultrasound on her belly when she was pregnant with one of my siblings,” she added. “Women’s health has always fascinated me, especially finding ways to make women’s health care more accessible for everyone.”

Parshall will serve on the 10-member Board of Trustees through the 2021-22 academic year and have full voting rights as a trustee. She works on campus as a science tutor, admissions tour guide, and staff for the COVID-19 pooled surveillance testing program.

“I have been taking classes at FLCC since I was 15,” she said. “I love this school and it has become sort of like my home as I spend so much time here.”

Finger Lakes Community College President Robert K. Nye has appointed Adam W. Rathbun as vice president of administration and finance.

As a member of the college’s senior leadership team, Rathbun is responsible for maintaining the college’s fiscal health and efficient administrative functions. This includes financial and business services, the operating budget, facilities and grounds, campus police, environmental health and safety and enterprise risk management.

Rathbun has more than 20 years in government and higher education operations, including roles with the National Security Agency (NSA) and Carnegie Mellon University. He most recently served as director of finance and business for Pennsylvania State University’s Beaver Campus, where he led the development and execution of a campus master plan.

Rathbun has a master of business administration (MBA) from the University of Baltimore and a master’s certificate in project management from the University of Pittsburgh. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps and the Maryland Air National Guard.

Rathbun is also a New York community college graduate, having earned an associate degree in computer information systems from Orange County Community College in Middletown.

Finger Lakes Community College is one of five community colleges from across the nation selected to share in a $1.9 million grant to design pilot programs to support rural students and drive economic growth.

The grant was awarded by the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Education Design Lab. It will collaborate with FLCC over the next year to gather economic and labor data, brainstorm, and ultimately, design a pilot program to provide access and support to students.

The resulting project will address a specific area of need among learners and in the local economy. Focus areas are likely to include underserved populations in Wayne County, where FLCC has a campus center, and the healthcare and advanced manufacturing industries where demand continues to grow, said Todd Sloane, director of workforce and career solutions at FLCC.

Sloane is heading up FLCC’s team in the effort, called the BRIDGES initiative. BRIDGES is an acronym for Building Rural Innovation, Designing Educational Strategies. He is joined by colleagues Sim Covington Jr., chief diversity officer; Izy Grooms, associate professor of health science and human performance; Karen Fisher, associate director of assessment, planning and continuous improvement; Deb Corsner, director of the Newark Campus Center; and Katia Yagnik, bilingual admissions and financial aid counselor. Also joining the effort are Joseph Davis, employment and training programs supervisor for Yates County, and Jim VanKouwenberg, training and workforce development coordinator at Optimax Systems in Ontario, Wayne County.

The FLCC cohort will be joined every few months by representatives from Education Design Lab who will steer the process.

“We are really there to be facilitators to work with the institutions,” said Leslie Dougherty, education designer with Education Design Lab. FLCC was invited to apply for the selective grant. “We were looking for smart, excited community colleges that are already doing this work in some way, shape or form,” she added. Continue reading “FLCC to share in $1.9M grant to support rural students”