Pictured (left to right): Bruce MacWatters, Instructor of Canine Training & Management; President Marion Terenzio; Mark Cornwell, Associate Professor of Fisheries and Aquaculture.
The MacWatters family has pledged $20,000 to sustain an endowed scholarship supporting students on internships while enrolled in a Fisheries, Wildlife, Environmental & Plant Sciences program at the College. The scholarship adds to the valuable experiential and applied learning experience that students receive while interning at the Otsego Lake Biological Field Station in Cooperstown.
The gift is in honor of the late Robert “Doc” MacWatters, a former professor of biology and zoology, who started the Fisheries & Aquaculture program at SUNY Cobleskill in the early 1970s and purchased a fishing boat for the College that students and faculty still use today.
For Bruce MacWatters, now a Canine Training & Management instructor at the college, supporting this scholarship represents both a tribute to his father’s legacy and an unexpected return to his family’s educational roots. “When I was younger, the students loved him and he built up a very respectable reputation in the fisheries and wildlife fields,” Bruce recalls of his father.
Following high school, Bruce joined the Air Force, where a chance encounter during basic training changed his life’s trajectory. “One of the drill instructors came into our class and asked, ‘Who wants to be a dog handler?’ I was the only one who raised my hand and didn’t really know what I was getting myself into,” Bruce remembers. “And then the next thing I knew, I’m traveling all over Europe, searching for bombs and narcotics and getting a wealth of knowledge about working with canines.
“That Air Force experience launched a 32-year career with the state police, followed by his own dog training business. When Bruce heard about an opening at the College for a canine instructor, he found himself back on the campus where he used to spend time with his dad as a kid. “If you told me when I was younger that I would one day be teaching at the same college where my father taught, I would have never believed you,” he reflects.
Now, through his supporting the scholarship that bears his family’s name, Bruce ensures his father’s desire to help students succeed continues to live on. “This gift will let today’s students take advantage of the scholarship and I know my dad would have loved this. So, it was important for me to keep it going.”
Coming full circle, Bruce now finds himself collaborating directly with the very program his father founded decades ago. As a Canine instructor, he is working alongside Fisheries faculty and students on groundbreaking research using dogs as a tool to track the advancement of the invasive round goby in New York waterways.
The field research aims to verify that canines can identify round goby DNA in water and alert to its presence, with Bruce leading this innovative work in partnership with other academic departments. It’s truly transdisciplinary research that can only occur at a college where these specialized programs can work so closely together, and another example of the unexpected paths that can lead us back to where we belong.
Related:
In April 2025, SUNY Cobleskill and SUNY Oneonta announced a collaborative agreement providing qualified Cobleskill students the opportunity to earn a bachelor’s degree in Fisheries Science while simultaneously taking classes during their senior year at the SUNY Oneonta Biological Field Station to complete their master’s degree in Lake Management – accelerating dual degree completion in five years, rather than six.
