By GREGORY ZELLER //
A top-rated Long Island university will enjoy 15 (idiomatic) minutes of additional fame on a popular Amazon Prime television series.
“The College Tour” – which devotes each roughly 30-minute episode to a single college or university, telling its story through flashy visuals and student interviews – has included Adelphi University in its recently completed Season 3 lineup. The circa-1896 Garden City university is the first New York school featured on the show, which debuted in 2021.
The Adelphi episode, which runs a little over 27 minutes, is already posted online and scheduled to stream on Amazon Prime beginning Feb. 8.
Guided by host Alex Boylan, viewers get up close and personal with 10 Adelphi students – a future neuroscientist, a future biologist, a nursing trainee, an MBA candidate and others – while virtually visiting the Garden City campus, with stops at the university’s theaters, science laboratories, playing fields and student centers.
Alex Boylan: Big man on campus.
Trumpeting Adelphi’s impressive U.S. News & World Report rankings, 17 NCAA national titles and proximity to New York City, among other attributes, Boylan vigorously applauds the “small but powerful university” – but it’s the student one-on-ones that energize the episode, according to Kristen Capezza, Adelphi’s vice president for enrollment management and university communications.
“Our students have been so enthusiastic and happy to share their stories of the incredible experiences offered at Adelphi,” Capezza told Innovate Long Island, adding the university was “excited to be the first university in New York” featured on “The College Tour.”
The episode, broken into 10 segments, focuses heavily on Adelphi’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics prowess. But as a whole, it highlights a carefully curated selection of students and academic pursuits, including a history major from Mineola, an international relations major from Brooklyn and a theater arts major – concentrating on design technology – from Sri Lanka.
While the students represent a cross-section of racial and economic backgrounds on vastly different academic trajectories, they each credit the Garden City university’s unique education approach and emphasize the quality of their individual Adelphi experience.
Come on in: Several campus hotspots enjoy closeups, including the Ruth S. Harley University Center.
“For most, it was their first chance to be part of a professional video production,” Capezza noted. “We could not be prouder of our 10 superstars.”
Adelphi is one of 32 schools profiled through the first three seasons of “The College Tour” – a smorgasbord of state universities, secular institutions, high-profile technological institutes and lesser-known schools like suburban Philadelphia’s Salus University and Arizona’s Grand Canyon University.
The Amazon Prime series is already knee-deep in production of Season 4, meaning Adelphi won’t be the only featured New York school for long – or featured Long Island school, for that matter. Long Island University, including its Greenvale and Brooklyn campuses, is scheduled as part of the show’s next slate.
