Graduating Seawolf Sean Deery Has Advice for New Students: Get Involved

College campuses can seem large and intimidating to some new arrivals, but “there’s a lot of opportunity if you go make it yourself.”

That’s the advice Sean Deery ‘19 wants to share with new students, and he speaks from experience.  Soon after arriving on campus, he helped drive sustainability initiatives and found innovative ways of engaging prospective students.

“When I was enrolling at Stony Brook, even though I chose to come here, I didn’t know what it was like to be a student in the College of Business,” Deery said.

To fix that, he decided to shoot a video aimed at prospective business students. Deery reached out to administrators, who recommended a group of active business majors to interview. With some help from SBU-TV and access to its equipment, he spent six months filming and editing the video, which is now featured on the College of Business website.

“I thought it could be a good resource for the University,” Deery said. “I applied what I was learning in business and marketing to benefit me in the future.”

Since making the video, Deery has stayed busy on campus as a student representative for the College of Business Dean’s Advisory Board, as a member of the Undergraduate Student Government Sustainability Committee and on the University’s Faculty Senate Environmental Subcommittee.

As a member of the two environmental committees, he’s worked on how to better market reusable containers in the dining halls, along with proposing a program for clubs to use reusable cutlery for their events.

Meanwhile, he participated in the creation and management of permaculture gardens on campus, tending to fresh herbs and vegetables – such as flat-leaf parsley, escarole, bibb lettuce, spinach and peas – which are used at dining locations on campus. Garden sites consist of five raised herb beds and two raised garden beds near east side dining, as well as plantings near the south entrance of the Student Activities Center.

Deery has more to give to Stony Brook. After graduating this May with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Management and concentration in Marketing and Sustainable Business, is enrolling in a Stony Brook MBA program as a part-time student. He is also working this summer at the University’s Research and Development Park with a start-up company which sells distributed wireless communications technology.

“It goes along with what I was saying: applying the principles of what you’re learning into the real world.”

— Jhonatan Bonilla