Setting RPI on a powerful new trajectory inevitably requires a group effort. We will only succeed if we unlock the force inherent in the people and institutions around us and, together, define a new era.
We must invest in our campus community to sustain a living, learning, and working environment where all members of our community participate. We must invest and elevate our region. RPI’s star will rise as the Capital Region rises — as the Hudson Valley, the Mohawk Region, and all of Upstate New York rises. We will seek out and convene those partnerships in the region that will drive growth. That means working with local and state governments to envision our future together.
And finally, we must strengthen our relationship, and establish a sense of shared purpose, with our alumni. RPI needs the support of our alumni, parents, and other friends through their advice, their philanthropic support, their student mentorship, and their expertise. Philanthropic support allows universities to remain affordable to students from all backgrounds. Contributions from alumni allow universities to attract great faculty with endowed professorships, but also in the conduct of research — both pillars in our comprehensive campaign.
Making a Warm Campus Community Even Warmer
One of RPI’s great strengths is the deep appreciation our faculty, staff, and students express for each other and for their peers. We are so fortunate to have a community ethos of tolerance and joy in each other’s individuality. We can see this ethos in both the readiness of our faculty in disparate disciplines to collaborate on highly original projects and the great success of our Rensselaer Union, which supports an astounding array of student activities.
But to achieve our ambitions for our third century, we must invest in our campus community to sustain a living, learning, and working environment where all members of our community participate. Through this campaign, we will secure funding to support the Union, expand internship and study abroad opportunities, create a high school innovators fund, and grow community-based partnerships for our students.
Elevating the Region
As part of this effort to elevate the region, RPI must do much more to support the entrepreneurship of our faculty and students. We rank third in the country11 in terms of the percentage of our alumni who advance to become inventors, as measured by U.S. patent applications and grants between 1996 and 2014. We would like to keep more of our brilliant graduates in the Troy region by offering them the resources they need to build companies here.
Many of the inventions emerging from RPI fall into the category of “tough tech” and require significant time and capital even in the proof of concept and prototyping stages. We have therefore teamed with Rensselaer County to launch a startup accelerator called SCALE.Rensselaer in downtown Troy. SCALE is designed to support these types of companies by creating shared experimental facilities in one central location, while supporting access to a network of computational and experimental assets throughout the Capital Region.
Establishing a Sense of Shared Purpose with Our Alumni
By every metric, the outcomes of an RPI education are outstanding, including starting salaries and graduate school acceptance rates. Our alumni are leaders in many different fields, and many of them are keenly interested in making sure the generations that follow have the same opportunities they did. If we keep our alumni engaged with RPI, we can also keep them engaged with each other — within a powerful network that allows our graduates to support each other as they did when they were students.
But RPI cannot take this interest or engagement for granted. RPI needs the support of our alumni, parents, and other friends through their advice, their philanthropic support, their student mentorship, and their expertise. Today, we are investing in the Institute Advancement team on campus that supports our alumni, which is implementing new programs and technology to connect them not only with each other, but also with our students and faculty.