Sonoma State University has alumni in many different fields living their dreams while carrying on the Seawolf legacy, and Class of 2019 graduate and current NBC Bay Area digital media editor Mandela Linder is no exception.

On Tuesday, Sonoma State University announced its recipients of the 2020-2021 Koret Scholars Award, a research scholarship meant to support undergraduate students and their faculty mentors in various projects. Six faculty members from the Arts and Humanities Department were chosen to receive the award, and each recipient has a team of four undergraduate students. Awards vary depending on the project, the maximum for each team as a whole being $8,000 and the minimum being $6,000.

As Election Day draws closer and closer, Sonoma State University is working hard to provide as many resources as possible can to make voting accessible to all students. Throughout the next month, there are a variety of scheduled informational events centered around informing students, and there is now a ballot box on campus for Seawolves and locals to safely submit their absentee ballots.

Earlier this year, The Santa Rosa Police Department was issued $32,000 in fines by the Division of Occupational Safety and Health, better known as Cal-OSHA. These fines were issued on the grounds of a series of health and safety violations that led to nine confirmed Coronavirus cases within the department, as well as the death of a veteran detective.

Ever since the first COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders rolled out across the globe, greenhouse gas emissions have plummeted, opening up a unique opportunity for some redemption in the Earth’s impending climate crisis. Despite the good news, experts are saying this progress will have no effect on the planet’s rising temperatures.

With massive budget cuts and new leadership, the HUB and CCE will likely go through changes, despite SSU administration’s claims that everything will remain the same.

On September 2, San Diego State University announced that they would halt all in-person instruction for the foreseeable future due to the rising number of COVID-19 cases on their campus. Their first recorded positive case was reported on August 21, just two days after move-in day at the dorms. Despite the fact that classes are no longer in person, students remain in the dorms, where the majority of the infected individuals currently reside. Students who test positive for COVID are moved to isolation dorms, rather than being sent home or relocated off campus.

On September 1, SSU announced to its faculty that they would soon hire current staff members for a Faculty Fellow for Anti-Racist Curriculum Design position. The new position is a part of a collaborative effort between six CSU campuses to begin redesigning current classroom curriculum to include anti-racist themes and expose students to issues of race they may not have applied to a given subject before.

In November of 2016, SSU professor Farid Farahmand and a group of engineering students began working on a new invention that assists patients with recovery from respiratory issues. Fast forward nearly four years, that same invention could potentially help patients recovering from COVID-19, as well as other conditions.

In the weeks leading up to the start of Fall semester, Sonoma State let hundreds of student employees go due to pandemic-related budget cuts. Students are either finding themselves without jobs just as the new semester begins, or waiting for decisions to be made on whether their position will exist in the future.