Dear USC Viterbi Community,

The theme for Veteran's Day 2022 is "Honor."
 

For Will Pressley, M.S. '17, a 20 year Navy pilot, that means "living up to your commitments, your promises, and doing the right thing when nobody's watching. It's connected directly to service." 
 

For Sue Warner-Bean and Tom Anthony and others in USC Viterbi's Aviation Safety and Security Program, it means honoring veterans by building new kindergartens in Vietnam, including the USC Peace Kindergarten, which broke ground this past summer. 
 

At the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, it is our great privilege to honor the 100 veteran, active duty, reserve or military dependent students enrolled in USC Viterbi degree programs. Not to mention countless alumni, parents, faculty and staff who are both Trojan engineers and members of the armed services.
 

USC is ranked #9 in the 2022-2023 Top 10 "Best Colleges for Veterans" by U.S. News & World Report. The USC Viterbi School of Engineering is also ranked #3 for Best Online Graduate Information Technology (Computer Science) Programs for Veterans and #5 for Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs for Veterans (U.S. News & World Report, 2022). Additionally, USC Viterbi earned the ASEE Engineering Excellence for Veterans Award in 2017 for initiatives like the Yellow Ribbon program, a pledge to provide an unlimited number of scholarship awards to eligible veterans pursuing a Viterbi degree program.
 

To the Trojan engineer community, I urge us all to follow Cmdr. Pressley's dictum:
 

"Do the right thing when no one's watching."
 

Warmest regards,

Yannis C. Yortsos
Dean, USC Viterbi School of Engineering