Clarkson University is a private research university in Potsdam, New York, founded in 1896 as the Thomas S. Clarkson Memorial School of Technology. It enrolled about 4,000 students as of 2024 and is known mainly for engineering, business, and science. Its academic units include the Wallace H. Coulter School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the David D. Reh School of Business, the Lewis School of Health and Life Sciences, the Institute for a Sustainable Environment, and the Institute for STEM Education.
Thomas S. Clarkson's sisters and niece founded the school in his memory. He was a local quarry owner and entrepreneur who died in 1894 from injuries he suffered while pushing a worker out of danger at his sandstone quarry. The school became the Thomas S. Clarkson Memorial College of Technology in 1913 and took the name Clarkson University in 1984. It is classified as an R2 doctoral university with high research activity. In 2016 Union Graduate College merged into Clarkson, creating a Capital Region Campus in Schenectady; that campus's operations moved to Latham, New York, in late 2024. Clarkson's men's and women's ice hockey teams compete in NCAA Division I, and the women's team won national championships in 2014, 2017, and 2018. Michelle Larson became the university's first woman president in 2025.
I studied electrical engineering at Clarkson from 1986 to 1989 and graduated in three years with distinction. I was a Resident Advisor and Resident Director and a charter member of the 📝Sigma Chi chapter there. Today I live about as far from Potsdam as you can and still be in the continental United States, because it's as cold as shit there and humans don't have to choose to live that way anymore.