Oswego CMA students, alumni celebrate school’s strengths, look to the future

OSWEGO, N.Y. — As SUNY Oswego’s spring commencement ceremony draws near, many students may find themselves wondering, “Was it all worth it?”

It is a pertinent question in 2026. Uncertainty abounds in both the economy and the job market, particularly in regards to the impact of rapidly evolving artificial intelligence (AI).

“People are treating AI as a god,” said Jonah Hawthorne, a broadcasting and mass communication major who is graduating this month.

Hawthorne and many other students of Oswego’s College of Communication, Media and the Arts (CMA) view AI as an existential threat in an already competitive field.

Still, they remain optimistic.

“Being at this college, if you just hone in and lock in on your classes, you’re going to be just fine,” said Aurora Fitzgerald, a broadcasting and mass communication senior like Hawthorne.

Both she and Hawthorne pointed to internships, secured through CMA and Oswego’s Office of Experiential Learning, as valuable opportunities provided by the college.

“My internship has helped me immensely,” Fitzgerald said. “But even without it, I feel like I would have been decently prepared to go into the real world.”

According to Fitzgerald, a key part of that preparation came from CMA professors.

“They have really helped my passion skyrocket in in ways I could never imagine,” she said.

This was echoed by CMA alumni, including Noah Manglapus and Elizabeth Kobylak, both cinema and screen studies majors who graduated in 2025.

Manglapus specifically mentioned professor Amy Shore, who has continued to support many cinema and screen studies students after graduation.

“She sees people who really care about their fields and are ambitious, and she wants to help those people succeed,” he said.

Kobylak, meanwhile, when asked what her favorite part of her CMA experience was, simply answered, “Jacob Dodd.”

“Jacob Dodd taught me a lot,” she said. “Jacob Dodd made me fall in love with 16 mm film.”

That love shone through on “Moderation,” Kobylak’s senior thesis short film, which was shot entirely on 16 mm stock and has gone on to appear at more than half a dozen film festivals around the world.

Older cinema and screen studies alumnus Allain Daigle, who graduated in 2012, similarly praised Shore and professor Bennet Schaber, as well as the comprehensive film education offered by the program.

“Being at Oswego and getting to see such a broad swath of what constitutes cinema, from history to theory to production, made me a really thoughtful thinker who was able to then move on to pursue my graduate work,” he said.

That graduate work included a master’s degree from the University of St. Andrew’s in Scotland and a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Daigle now works at Pennsylvania State University as an instructional designer. Though not explicitly tied to cinema and screen studies, he said that his Oswego education prepared him for the role, which sits at the intersection of people and technology.

“That’s something that I do see as coming out of my time at Oswego, is being somebody who can understand there are certain material conditions around technology,” Daigle said.

Current students seem to understand material conditions as well. Hawthorne noted that, despite its strengths, CMA is not immune to problems occurring across SUNY Oswego.

“When the amount of students you’re bringing in goes down, colleges lose money pretty quickly,” he said. “And the response is always the same.”

Namely, according to Hawthorne, programs, events and opportunities are cut across the university. In regards to CMA specifically, he noted the cuts to student workers at “the Cage,” the college’s equipment rental center.

The scale of CMA may exacerbate these issues. It has historically ranked as the smallest of the university’s four schools, both in terms of how many students declare for it when first enrolling at Oswego, and how many students earn degrees and certifications within it.

Whatever the case, funding remains an issue. 

“Unfortunately, it is kind of the thing that makes the world go around,” Fitzgerald said. “You can’t be in a news studio without funding.”

Still, as graduation approaches, and CMA seniors such as Fitzgerald and Hawthorne prepare to follow in the footsteps of successful alumni such as Manglapus, Kobylak and Daigle, hope also remains.

“College can get you a job,” Hawthorne said. “I do think that, despite all of my fears with AI, I’m in a better position than people who didn’t go to college.”

Fitzgerald agrees, even in the face of an uncertain future.

“It’s okay to not know what you’re going to do after you graduate. It’s okay to not know what’s going to come next. I am okay with not knowing what is going to come next,” she said. “I still have my dreams.”