One of the things that I found most surprising about NYU when I arrived here in 2016 was its sheer scale. With more than 50,000 students enrolled at any time at our campuses in New York and around the world, we have about as many students as Columbia and Cornell universities combined. From the standpoint of numbers alone, NYU can seem intimidating. But as I’ve spent time here, I have come to realize the flip side of our size: impact. Size, it turns out, does matter — it makes a difference in healthcare, the arts, and in our educational mission. Here are just a few of the accomplishments linked to NYU’s scale: One-in-10 dentists in the United States are educated at NYU's College of Dentistry; in New York State, it is closer to 50 percent. And providing access to oral healthcare is one of the dental college’s foremost missions: it hosts 300,000 patient visits annually for low-income New Yorkers.

NYU educates more Pell-eligible students (the most economically needy) than Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia combined.

NYU's Silver School of Social Work annually sends out 1,000 students citywide to do field work at 654 agencies throughout the city, logging more than 618,784 hours of service to individuals, families, and communities.

NYU students contribute a staggering 1.7 million hours of community engagement activity every year, encompassing everything from local community outreach to service trips abroad.

The largest Higher Education Opportunity Program in New York State is located at NYU, which has helped make higher education more affordable for more than 10,000 students from New York State in the last 25 years.

NYU has more than 500,000 alumni — the largest network of any private university in the US — with 65 active chapters around the world. What does this mean for us, as members of the NYU community? Hopefully, we can feel pride in being part of a great organization that has a genuinely powerful effect on a multitude of issues, communities, and fields. But it’s my hope as well that they inspire us to dream and imagine what’s possible in our own individual futures. For all our grand scale, it’s important to remember that great impact finds its roots in small actions. So as we embark on this new semester, I hope we can find the time to ponder what kind of impact we all want to make in 2018. Who knows? We may be laying the groundwork for giant things to come. One significant way our generously sized student population has a positive impact on our community in NYC is through NYU’s Jumpstart and America Reads/America Counts tutoring programs — the largest college-based federal elementary school literacy initiative in the nation, with approximately 800 NYU students providing 100,000 hours of service at 75 schools annually. In 1890, NYU's School of Law was among the first law schools in the nation to admit women, who went on to have tremendous impact , including: Sarah Herring Soren (1894), the first solo woman to argue before the US Supreme Court; Florence Allen (1913), the first female state Supreme Court justice; Ceclia Goetz (1940), first female editor in chief of a major law review; Roberta Karmel (1962), first female commissioner of the SEC; and Judith Kaye (1962), the first female judge on the New York Court of Appeals. And of course NYU’s impact in the arts is legendary. Over the past year, artists affiliated with NYU far outstrip those affiliated with every other university in the world in terms of winning Oscars, Emmys, Tonys, and Golden Globes. I doubt there’s been a time in history when good quality journalism has been both so vilified and yet so critical. Recent NYU Journalism Institute alumni work at a majority of the nation’s most high-profile and influential media outlets. In this time of rising inequality, we're proud that the number of students from middle- and lower-income families educated at NYU dwarfs that of our peer institutions. Source: Equality of Opportunity Project How many times do you see a college freshman on a billboard in Times Square? As part of Mastercard’s #StartSomethingPriceless campaign, the Clive Davis Institute’s Victoria Canal (TSOA ‘21) is already making her mark as an artist who hasn’t let physical challenges stand in her way. Last week it was my pleasure and honor to welcome many of the students from Puerto Rico who will be studying on campus this spring as part of NYU’s Hurricane Maria Assistance Program Spike Lee. And finally, as we celebrate Black History Month next month at NYU, I hope that many of you can take part in our 13th Annual MLK Week schedule of special events and programs commemorating Martin Luther King Jr.’s visit to campus. The University-wide event on Thursday, Feb. 8, will feature our own Tisch Graduate Film professor