PSFA Assistant Dean for Student Affairs Skydives with Army Golden Knights

Up, up, and…then down. With the help of SDSU Army ROTC LTC Michelle Parlette, Lanie Lockwood took her first skydive jump on Sept. 30, 2020 with the Army Golden Knights.

LTC Parlette invited Lockwood to express support and gratitude for university faculty leaders and directors in PSFA. Lockwood was nominated for this opportunity for her work and advocacy on behalf of the university’s ROTC program.

Notable are her efforts to improve the Cadet advising process, increase visibility and recruitment efforts at events like Explore SDSU, and advocate to Enrollment Services to gain priority enrollment for Cadets to reduce the number of conflicts between ROTC and academic classes.

“This is an opportunity that most service members don’t even get the chance to partake in, so we are really excited that Lanie got to do this,” LTC Parlette says.

In Lockwood’s pre-jump interview, she reflected on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity enabled by SDSU and colleagues in the Army ROTC department, which led her to honor the SDSU Strategic Plan.

“Our new strategic plan motto popped into my head (We Rise; We Defy) and I laughed, thinking I was literally going to be doing both, so I just had to share it. Plus, the ‘defy’ part personally captured that I chose to defy my personal anxieties about doing this!” Lockwood says.

Lockwood admits she never had put skydiving on her bucket list, so after researching it, she states “there would be no safer way to do a tandem jump than with [the Army Golden Knights]. They are the best-of-the-best in the world.”

To Lockwood, “defying” captures that we as people don’t always know how we’ll get “down” from life’s challenges, but we need to trust each other and ourselves to best get through them.

“I trusted the Golden Knight team and my tandem jump partner, and that trust in them allowed me to enjoy the fantastic ride down,” Lockwood says.

Read more about the SDSU Strategic Plan here.

The content within this article has been edited by Lizbeth Persons.