Students and staff helped clean up at Fort Tryon Park in Manhattan on Nov. 4 as part of NYIT’s Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.

Caring hearts and helping hands were in plentiful supply as the NYIT community united to help friends, families, and neighborhoods impacted by Hurricane Sandy. In the days following the storm—which struck the New York metropolitan area on Oct. 29—NYIT students, faculty, and staff mobilized to deliver food, coordinate cleanup efforts, and communicate with colleagues and classmates to ensure their families were safe and essential needs were being met.

During and immediately after the storm, NYIT staff reassured students located at the university’s New York campuses and their families of their safety. A special phone and email hotline was established for students to assist them with personal or academic issues they experienced as a result of the hurricane. NYIT’s Hurricane Sandy blog at nyit.edu/sandy included daily updates on relief efforts as well as transportation information, carpooling opportunities, and Sandy-related news stories.

Throughout the month of November, NYIT students and staff delivered food and provided cleanup assistance to nearby communities, including Long Beach, N.Y., Fort Tryon Park in Manhattan, Clinton Hill in Brooklyn, and other areas hit by the storm. Food and clothing drives were organized at the Old Westbury and Manhattan campuses, and an NYIT Family Relief Fund was established to assist students, staff, and faculty with essential needs. NYIT’s School of Education launched a supplies drive to collect items for K-12 schools impacted by the hurricane.

In addition, NYIT faculty and students dedicated their expertise to ensuring local communities received vital assistance. Susan Neville, Ph.D., R.N., chair and associate professor in NYIT’s Department of Nursing, worked at a Manhasset, N.Y., shelter alongside medical professionals from the Red Cross, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and other support groups to assistant elderly patients and families. First-year medical student Iya Katz in the NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine worked with her family to assist seniors struggling without heat or hot water in Coney Island, N.Y., a story that was also featured in the New York Daily News.

For students living in NYIT residence halls in Old Westbury, the hurricane provided an opportunity to bond with classmates.

“I was proud to see other NYIT students reaching out to their peers who needed help,” says Christopher Frumusa, who serves as head resident assistant, orientation leader, and first-year experience mentor. During the storm, the residence hall students had access to power, emergency lighting, food, and cell phones to contact their families.

At NYIT’s New York campuses, storm damage was confined to a few broken windows in Manhattan and, in Old Westbury, there were brief power outages and fallen trees. Thanks to the tireless efforts of NYIT’s buildings and grounds crews, both campuses were quickly up and running with normal operations and classes resuming on Nov. 5.

Only a few days following the storm, the NYIT Auditorium on Broadway hosted a Nov. 2 screening of Fox Searchlight’s new film, Hitchcock, for movie critics and members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, proving that even following a hurricane, at NYIT the show must go on.

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Vol. 10 No. 3 Table of Contents