Network/Chapter Leader Award: Myron Scott Gnall

The West—and Wyoming especially—has long answered that calling for adventure, for something different and new. That promise is what brought Myron Scott Gnall (B.S. ’96) to Laramie from the East Coast.

“I was trying to figure out who I was and what I could become,” he says. “I took it upon myself to understand the place I was in. So I took great care in learning about the normal things that other people were doing out there because they were—without a doubt—vastly different.”

Gnall is one of this year’s Network/Chapter Leader Award winners. The award recognizes active members of the University of Wyoming’s alumni community, especially those who have been leaders in UW Alumni Association networks.

“It still doesn’t quite register,” Gnall says of receiving the award. “It wasn’t like I did this for recognition. I just want to give back. I found a few people, we had an event, and I saw how incredibly appreciative the people who showed up were.”

Now an analyst for the New York City Transit Authority, Gnall runs UWAA’s New York Metropolitan Area network. The alumni chapter started with a simple effort to get in touch with other UW Cowboys fans to watch games together.

Gnall was looking to maintain connections to the place and institution he discovered as a young man. Others—many of them Wyoming natives living in NYC—were looking for something even more.

“It became so much more as time went on,” Gnall says. “It gives them that sense of home, to have that feeling of community.”

The New York network welcomes UW folks living or traveling in the tri-state area and has started raising money for scholarships, aiming to encourage local high school graduates to take a chance on the West and to discover what so many UW alumni once discovered themselves.

As with all things, the network has been slowed by the pandemic, but Gnall says he’s excited to get things moving again once the current crisis passes.

“It started with giving back, but I didn’t know how far it would go,” he says. “The chapter has a dedicated bunch who want to see the network grow and do more.”