Seven Students Awarded $35,000 In Scholarships From Mid-Atlantic CIO Forum

Press release from Towson University:

By Cody Boteler on February 24, 2021

Seven Towson University students were each awarded $5,000 scholarships from the Mid-Atlantic
CIO Forum for the spring 2021 term.

While normally honored in person, the seven recipients—Georgia Coleman, William Freeman,
Skylar Gayhart, Moshe Goldstein, Sean McGuire, Garrett Partenza and Samuel Peacock—were
recognized at a virtual event in late January.

Tom Lonegro, a founding member of the forum and coordinator for the scholarship selection
committee, says choosing the winners is always a rigorous process.

“The CIO Forum Scholarship requires a high-performance GPA to qualify,” Lonegro says.
“But what we’re looking for, in addition to very bright students, are students who
have taken the initiative to get active in their career objectives.”

The Mid-Atlantic CIO Forum formed in 2003 as a peer-to-peer regional network for CIOs
and other senior-level informational technology executives. The forum, though independent,
has a partnership with Towson University. It added a Security Networking Group, focusing
on cybersecurity, in 2013.

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All of this term’s scholarship winners are undergraduates in the Department of Computer
& Information Science. The forum has awarded scholarships to TU students since 2006.

Gayhart, a sophomore from Bowie, Maryland, says receiving the award will help her
network and grow.

“Winning helped me realize my success, how far I’ve come since starting at Towson
University and to recognize how hard I’ve worked to get where I am now,” she says.

Freeman, a sophomore from Landover, Maryland, says he is extremely grateful for the
scholarship, especially in light of how competitive it is. Like Gayhart, he says the
award is “a validation that I’m on the right track.”

Lonegro says the forum wants to provide networking opportunities for its scholarship
recipients, not just financial support. It’s part of the organization’s long-term
mission to improve the information technology field.

Goldstein, a senior from Baltimore, says the scholarship was especially helpful after
a “hard year” stemming from the novel coronavirus pandemic.

“Being able to learn from and interact with all these CIOs [has been valuable]. [They
could be] my bosses one day. I look up to these people,” he says.

Towson University faculty and staff experts can provide commentary and analysis on
topics in the news. For help finding a faculty expert email Matt Palmer at mpalmer@towson.edu.

This press release was produced by Towson University. The views expressed here are the author’s own.