Dr. Suzanne Smith is SUNY Potsdam’s eighteenth president and joined the campus in April 2023. Between that time and her inauguration, a year later in April 2024, President Smith has encouraged the entire SUNY Potsdam community to elevate engagement with the next generation of students, to help them achieve success in the years ahead. At the ceremony, President Smith shared her thoughts, “as we have heard everyone’s ideas and contemplated the road ahead, for me, the hopes and dreams that came across coalesced around the idea of elevating engagement—lifting each other up and raising the bar for what we can accomplish together.”
Generous unrestricted gifts to the Fund for Potsdam or the Potsdam Promise make it possible to prioritize recruitment, through marketing and advertising, and retention, through special campus programming. Such campus programs have included a Pancakes with the President event, where guests were adorned with T-shirts to wear with Potsdam pride and full bellies to prepare them for finals, as well as an epic sledding event at the President’s House, welcoming all community members together to kick-off the new Spring 2024 semester.
As they continue serving SUNY Potsdam, President Suzanne Smith and her husband Brett Lloyd have also made efforts to leave a legacy by establishing the Suzanne Smith and Brett Lloyd Presidential Scholarship.
"Your gifts will provide versatile support for collaborative efforts to recruit and retain students, unique educational experiences, reimagined community connections and partnerships, hands-on learning, training and development of in-demand programs.”
SUNY Potsdam President