President’s Corner
Hello Everyone-
I hope that this message finds each of you doing splendidly. As of July 1st, the new fiscal year is upon us. Your local alumni Chapter is presently hard at work completing its annual report to the main campus and filing its fiscal year end taxes with the IRS so that we can continue to be an officially recognized alumni Chapter. Doing this makes us eligible for additional aid that can continue to help us grow. It’s now time to recap what has taken place over the past 12 months and look ahead into the future.
By the time you read this, we will have just completed a summer community service project that supports the youth in our region. I hope it exceeded everyone’s expectations. We have a group of judges that participated in evaluating applications for our local scholarships. We had our annual student summer sendoff at the Chalet. We supported numerous college recruiting fairs from Lorain to Cleveland to Lakeland. And we hosted a handful and were even invited to two football watch parties last season.
We have a number of activities in the fall which include the annual summer sendoff where we award scholarships to deserving students, football watch parties, and the annual fundraiser which benefits THON. In the fall and spring we represent the University at approximately ten college recruiting fairs. You never know whom you might run into at one of these from time to time. Thanks to those that have given their time and energy to support these events.
Something else to be on the lookout for during the next 12 months is a redesigned Chapter website. This has been worked on for a little while now. It is our hope that the updates will make it seamless to navigate through, allow us to archive files for your reference, and make it more inviting for those that come across it. This will have links to our FaceBook page, email, and Twitter so it can serve as a one-stop shop for our social media platforms.
If you haven’t already please like our Facebook page where you can keep up to date with everything that is going with your local alumni Chapter. We want to make you more aware of what we already do and provide opportunities to interact with each of you. To do that, we need to know what you think would be beneficial for the chapter to provide to its alumni contingent. I hope that you can find a few hours from time to time to participate and/or contribute to an event that interests you.
What I can’t and won’t forget is that most of us, whether we like it or not, have a great many things to do and responsibilities to take care of throughout our typical day to day activities. The local alumni Chapter and its leadership team members who spent a countless unknown number of hours to pull all of this together. On behalf of them, I want to personally say thanks to each and every one of you for taking the time out of your busy day to read the 2019 edition of this newsletter.
Whether it be unique to one or some combination of social, political, economic or personal matters, we live in a local and global society that changes by the moment. That can influence us both positively and negatively. I know there are occasions sometimes that I simply just can’t comprehend why an event has happened or a decision that was made. What I try to remember during those times and want to share with you is that our Penn State University education no matter what degree makes a difference every day.
It’s been a pleasure to represent and serve as your local alumni chapter President over this past handful of years. I look forward to whatever this new fiscal year will bring forth to all of us. If you have any questions, ideas or would like the opportunity to get involved please don’t hesitate to contact me directly at the chapter email which is PSUcleveland@gmail.com. We can only become better by being more diverse. That can only happen with your involvement. I look forward to meeting you at a future event
Sincerely,
Robert C. Clark; BSME ‘96 & MEM ‘18
PSU Greater Cleveland Alumni Chapter President WE ARE now and forever PENN STATE!!!