Reflections on the New Academic Year By Presidents & Experts
Queens College, City University of New York
By President James L. Muyskens
Queens College may be located on 77 beautiful acres in Flushing, but our campus is everywhere.
We have always attracted excellent students and faculty from around the globe—at present over 140 countries are represented on campus—and now we are working to send more of our students out into the world. Our Education Abroad program offers students a chance to study cinema and business in Japan, the crusades in Israel, photography, food, and art in Florence, aboriginal culture in Australia—indeed, we help students study almost anything they want anywhere in the world they wish to do so.
And who knows how far students might go when they take advantage of the many opportunities to do research with our stellar faculty? Later this semester three of our students will be accompanying their professor to Antarctica. And this fall alone we have hired new faculty who have done outstanding research in Italy, Turkey, Ghana, New Zealand, and China.
Students who prefer traveling in time to traveling in space will enjoy our innovative Reacting to the Past pedagogy. In these classes, students role-play important historical figures—such as Socrates, Galileo, and Gandhi—to get a better understanding of the ideas that have shaped our world.
Of course, we do much more than just react to the past: we are always introducing new majors in fields that will be in demand in the future, such as business administration, neuroscience, graphic design, environmental geosciences, and translation. And if students have a great new business idea, they can bring that idea to our faculty in the Schutzman Center for Entrepreneurship, where they will receive advice from experts and maybe even the financing they need to get their idea out into the global marketplace.
If the journey students most dream of is living on their own during their college years, Queens College is the place to do it. We will be opening the Summit, our first residence hall, next fall. In keeping with our commitment to sustainability and a greener planet, the Summit is expected to receive Silver certification from the United States Green Building Council, an award given to structures that prevent waste and conserve energy.
A first-rate education is perhaps the greatest voyage any of us ever takes. And more and more of our city’s top students are now making that voyage with Queens College.#
