Alumna created scholarship for veterans

11/09/2021 

Retired Army Lt. Col. Janice Atwood ’73  has the highest regard for the people who serve their country in the military.

“You give a military person a mission and they make it happen, you know?” said Atwood of Annapolis, Maryland.  “They say, ‘What do you need and when do you need it by?’”

She also values the education she received at SUNY Cortland.

Merge those two concepts and you get the Janice L. Atwood ’73 and Judith A. Rasmussen U.S. Armed Services Scholarship, which Atwood established naming both herself and her late sister several years ago through the Cortland College Foundation.

Awarded three times to date, the scholarship is the third the university offers for students who’ve served in the military or who are the children of veterans.

The Atwood/Rasmussen Scholarship helps students who either are a currently serving member of the U.S. Armed Forces,  a veteran from active duty, reserves or National Guard or an immediate family member of such a military service member. The recipient must be someone who is in good academic standing and enrolled fulltime with at least one year remaining at the start of the award year.

“I gravitate toward veterans,” Atwood said.

She noted that her own active and reserve military service from 1973 to 2000 was completed during the relatively peaceful years spanning Vietnam and the first Iraq War. The wide skill set Atwood developed in the service served her well in  civilian life,  supporting military contractors, including Booz Allen Hamilton, mainly with information security assignments.

She feels she has been fortunate and now wants to support her fellows in the armed services.

“When I went through grad school in Maryland, I used the G.I. Bill,” Atwood said. “And I had savings from being on active duty, and then I had my graduate assistant position, and then there was my pay from the Army Reserve. Some people aren’t as lucky to have the savings as I did.”

The scholarship also honors the generosity of Atwood’s late sister, a SUNY Plattsburgh graduate who left a bequest to her sibling that enabled Atwood to fully endow the scholarship.

A physical education major while at Cortland, Atwood established a similar scholarship at the University of Maryland at College Park, where she earned an M.A. in recreation in 1989. She received a second master’s degree in information and telecommunications systems for business from Johns Hopkins University in 1998.

In 2019 and 2020, two SUNY Cortland students — one armed services member and one child in a military family — benefited from the scholarship. Recently, Melany Jimenez, a junior biology major from Farmingdale, N.Y., was announced as the 2021 scholarship recipient.

Atwood met the first recipient, former Army Sgt. Peter Sarkodie ’20, who had enlisted after studying for one semester at SUNY Cortland in the early 2010s, in 2019 at the President’s Circle Scholarship Recognition Dinner at the Lynne Parks ’68 SUNY Cortland Alumni House.

An eight-year veteran, Sarkodie served as a quartermaster in Iraq and was later wounded in Afghanistan. Back in the U.S., stationed in Tennessee and with the support of the G.I. Bill, he decided to return to Cortland to finish a bachelor’s degree in community health.

“The scholarship was a great help to me while I was at SUNY Cortland and it helped me to get into this nursing program,” said Sarkodie, who currently is studying to become a registered nurse at University of Rochester.

“I’ve always wanted of be in the public health sector,” Sarkodie said. “With community health, you’re helping the community as a whole, dealing one on one. This degree gave me the basis for that. I can choose to become a community health nurse and if I go that route, my degree from Cortland will be very useful.”

The 2020 President’s Circle event was virtual, with physical education major Kate Jensen giving a video speech acknowledging her scholarship.

“This scholarship helped me greatly in my pursuit of a degree, as my family had two other children in college at that time, and I was paying for my education,” said Jensen of Prattsburgh, N.Y., recently.

Her father, SUNY Cortland graduate Jon Jensen ’88, and brother, Leif Jensen, tie her to the military.

“My father enlisted in the Army after high school as a military police,” Jensen said. “He was stationed in Germany before the (Berlin) Wall came down and finished his deployment as private first class.”

Her brother served as a platoon guide during his Army basic training at Fort Jackson in South Carolina. A private first class in public affairs, he is waiting for his Advanced Individual Training assignment.

“Educating others about fitness is my passion, and this scholarship will help greatly in my pursuit of a teaching certification,” Jensen said.

Now a junior, the Honors Program scholar hopes to complete her student teaching in Australia and later get her master’s degree in order to either teach physical education in high school, launch a personal training business or become a strength and conditioning coach.

“This scholarship will allow me to continue my education here at SUNY Cortland feeling more secure financially,” she said.

In 2017, SUNY Cortland was recognized as a 2017 Military Friendly® School by Victory Media, which runs a Website and several ranking programs aimed at helping veterans get employment or a college education.

Along with that comes support of current students with this and several previous academic scholarship opportunities targeted to them.

Many generations of SUNY Cortland physics, chemistry, biological sciences and geology students with a military tie have benefited from a scholarship for their post-graduation graduate studies that was created by the parents of the late William Phelps ’69 in his memory decades ago. In 1971, during the Vietnam War, the former physics major and Air Force weapons and systems operator had disappeared along with the crew of their F4 Phantom jet while flying night missions over Laos. Their remains were never found and Phelps was declared Killed In Action in 1978.

The Thomas and Martha Rhubottom Scholarship, created in 2011, helps a SUNY Cortland student enrolled in any discipline who has served in the U.S. Armed Forces or is a child  of a military service member. The scholarship was endowed by Brian G. Murphy ’83 and his wife, Patricia Rhubottom, one of two the couple created, this one with Rhubottom’s father, a career military man, in mind. Murphy served as chair of the Cortland College Foundation Board of Directors and  led the university’s previous, highly successful capital campaign. He was honored in 2012 with the university’s first SUNY Cortland Presidential Champion of Excellence Award.

On Veterans Day, Thursday, Nov. 11, alumni may join the campus community in honoring military service members during the annual Veterans Day ceremony at 3 p.m.

SUNY Cortland English composition Instructor Jeffrey Jackson, a U. S. Army veteran who served two tours in Germany and also participated in Operation Restore Hope in Somalia from 1992 to 1993, will deliver the university’s virtual keynote address.

Those who wish to attend the online gathering can access the ceremony through a link on the Cortland Veterans Day website.

The ceremony also will feature a welcome by SUNY Cortland President Erik J. Bitterbaum and several other presenters, including Neve Polius ’17, who will share her recorded singing of the National Anthem; and Andrew Jensen, a Westpoint Military Academy graduate and captain in the U.S. Army from 2004 to 2009, who is the son-in-law of event co-organizer Sue Vleck. Jensen will read “What is a Veteran.”

Veterans with a SUNY Cortland connection will be honored with the individual’s name, name, branch of service and photo to be included in the university’s 2021 Veteran’s Day Virtual Ceremony slideshow.

For more information, contact Special Events for the President.