Can you imagine moving from the Middle East to the United States without a grade school education and no familiarity with the English language at all? That is how recent Touro College New York School of Career and Applied Studies (NYSCAS) graduate and Syrian native Maro Souid’s story began but not where it ended. Souid overcame countless challenges to strive for her career goal of becoming a pharmacist. Her first significant step was graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Biology and a 3.9 GPA this past May.

Touro College’s NY Link program hosted its first annual networking social event at the Manhattan location of the New York School for Career and Applied Studies (NYSCAS) on August 7th, 2019 for its alumni, current and perspective students. They gathered to learn more about the school’s Early Childhood and Childhood Education programs and resources and support available for educators.

In June 2019, NYSCAS said goodbye to 630 bachelor’s degree recipients and 291 associate’s degree awardees. These hardworking Touro alumni are bound for great things (we can already tell!) and we’re looking forward to seeing their continued accomplishments. What do they have in store? Here are some thoughts from a few of our outstanding graduates.

New York School of Career and Applied Studies (NYSCAS), a division of Touro College, honored 465 students at the Brooklyn commencement ceremony at the Ford Amphitheater Coney Island on June 6^th, and 456 students at the Manhattan ceremony at Lincoln Center on June 12^th, in front of a crowd of thousands including family and friends of the graduates and Touro faculty and staff.

Growing up, Kishea Paulemont wasn’t academically motivated. Her mother grew up in North Carolina and left school after fifth grade to work with her family as a sharecropper. None of her siblings had graduated college. She cut school frequently, and eventually dropped out, following the example of her peers.

At Touro’s New York School of Career and Applied Studies’ (NYSCAS) commencement ceremony on June 12, 2019, graduates, friends and family will have the opportunity to listen to world-renowned Gospel singer Gerard Placide. Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, Placide has performed for Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, Bill and Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Condoleezza Rice, Robert Gates, the United Nations’ 57^th General Assembly and many others.

We sat down with NYSCAS student and Tornadoes basketball player DJ Abreu to talk about his favorite and most challenging parts of playing on the Touro team, why sports are important in the lives of everyday people and more. Here's what he said.

“I didn’t just join a college,” Alex Segal says of his time at Touro. “I joined a family.”

If you’ve visited a college classroom lately, then you know the majority of college students are so obsessed with their phones that it can be a challenge to get them to fully concentrate on the lesson at hand. With that in mind, Professor Baruch November of Touro’s New York School of Career and Applied Sciences (NYSCAS), who has taught poetry, composition and Shakespeare for nearly fourteen years, takes a different approach to teaching.

Newly-enrolled NYSCAS students attended the school’s orientation sessions—either the one in the morning, or the one in the evening—at the 31^st Street campus in Manhattan on January 23^rd.