Graduate School Creative Writing

SUNY Potsdam to Welcome Students Back to Energized Campus

POTSDAM, NY (08/12/2011)(readMedia)-- As The State University of New York at Potsdam welcomes new and returning students to campus this fall, reminders of SUNY Potsdam's long history and bright future will abound.

With construction on the $41 million Performing Arts Building well underway, the College community is watching with curiosity as the first new academic building in years begins to go up.

Additionally, there's a new shot of color around campus, with bright banners having been erected on academic buildings and light poles, in celebration of the ongoing 125th anniversary of SUNY Potsdam's Crane School of Music.

SUNY Potsdam is excited to be welcoming another large first-year class to the College, with approximately 920 freshmen expected to enter the College in 2011. In addition, about 325 transfer students will join the SUNY Potsdam student body.

The College had a 1.5 percent increase in the number of applications for admission last year, followed by an explosion of growth in the number of incoming freshmen hailing from metropolitan New York City, which increased by 40 percent. In addition, deposits for students from Westchester and the mid-Hudson valley were both up 7 percent.

Students who choose to live on campus enjoy SUNY Potsdam's unique sense of community. The College's residence halls will be full again in 2011-12, with more than 2,500 of Potsdam's approximately 4,460 students moving in this year.

Following a busy summer of construction and maintenance projects, SUNY Potsdam is ready for students to return.

After three months of construction, the foundation of the state-of-the-art Performing Arts Building is becoming more defined. The building is set to open in Fall 2013, and will feature 97,000 square feet of learning and performance space, including a 350-seat proscenium theater, a 200-seat black box theater and a 200-seat dance performance hall.

Around the Academic Quad, renovations are complete in Flagg and Carson halls to make classrooms bigger, smarter and better prepared for incoming students. The renovations don't stop there, however, as the anthropology lab and the Crane School of Music MIDI lab also received makeovers. In addition, the Sara M. Snell Music Theater was renovated over the summer as well.

Over in the residence halls, the third phase of renovation is on the verge of completion in the Bowman Quad, with the East building nearly finished and its Southern counterpart just getting underway. The Lehman residence halls got 15 newly renovated and furnished bathrooms this summer, as well as a new HVAC system in the attached dining hall. New roofing is also complete in the Knowles, Van Housen and Draime residence halls.

How Molly McCaffrey Became a Writer « ph.d. in creative writing

Interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes. Each writer answers the same 5 questions.

Thanks to Molly McCaffrey for saying yes!

1.  Why did you want to become a writer?

Wow, that’s a question, isn’t it? It took me a long time to find writing, so you’ll have to bear with me as I explain my roundabout path to becoming a writer.

I’ve been an avid reader my whole life. My sister claims that I wouldn’t play games with her as a kid because I always wanted to be reading instead. And I grew up hitting bookstores and libraries with my dad, never going anywhere without a paperback I could read if I had a minute to spare. But my interest in books was just that: reading. In fact, I hated writing so much when I was in college—because I couldn’t write nearly as well as I would have liked—that I tried to only take classes that didn’t require any writing.

After college, I went to grad school (the first time) at the Savannah College of Art & Design to study graphic design. I didn’t start writing there, but I did take a film and video elective, which I loved. I vowed then that if and when I got bored with design, I’d work in film.

Pretty soon after that, I dropped out of grad school because I realized it was kind of pointless to get an M.F.A. in graphic design and moved to Washington, D.C. where I began working as a designer. But I kept thinking about film. I’d always loved movies as much as I loved books, so right after I turned twenty-five I enrolled in a graduate film class at American University, which taught me, among other things, that I needed to learn to write a good screenplay. That was what led me to sign up for my first creative writing class—with poet Jane Shore at George Washington University, where I happened to be working as a designer. I wrote my first story—“Sliders,” which is the oldest story in How to Survive —during the first week of Jane’s class, and I decided immediately that I didn’t want to work in film, I didn’t want to work in design, but rather I wanted to be a writer.