Posts filed under ‘University Park campus’
Big Macs and Bio
Where’s the only place at Penn State you can study for finals and snag free refills of sweet iced tea?
McDonald’s—an unlikely study spot, for sure. On the Sunday afternoon before spring finals week, I took a quick walking tour of campus to check out where students were studying. Some of the locations are obvious—all rooms in the library were packed, as was the HUB—but others might surprise you.
My favorite was the three students, studying for a biology exam, who picked the basement of Mickie D’s (which has free WiFi, by the way). They said they actually go there a lot.
Two students, who said they walked around the library and it was simply too packed, ended up in an empty room on the first floor of Willard. Panera and Irvings were also popular, as students filled up on coffee and carbs. It was a nice day—probably the first one all week—so I found a few students laying out picnic blankets outside Old Main. What surprised me the most was that Alumni Hall, on the bottom floor of the HUB-Robeson Center, was wide open with rows of long tables and chairs for students to stop by and study at as they please.
Check out the slideshow below, and comment: Where was your favorite place to study at Penn State?
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-Emily Kaplan, intern
Who Was “Otto,” Anyway?
On Sunday, I stopped in an open house in our State College neighborhood, curious what I’d find. Most of the houses in our area, about a mile south of campus, were built in the 1950s. This one is being sold by the adult children of the late owners, who, it was immediately clear, had taken great care of their home.
I was admiring how well-kept the house was when I noticed something out of place: What looked to be a door where there wasn’t, in fact, a doorway. I asked the realtor about it, and she explained: It was the original decorative door from Otto’s, the on-campus cafe (not to be confused with the State College brew-pub) inside the Kern Building. Turns out the original owners of the house were Otto and Charlotte Mueller, and that Otto was Penn State’s first assistant vice president for Housing and Food Services from 1953 until his retirement in 1978 (he died in 2007, and Charlotte passed in 2010). The door, which I’m kicking myself for not having taken a picture of, appeared to be hand-painted, including a portrait of a smiling Mr. Mueller and the cafe’s daily hours.
From the basement workroom to what appeared to be the original cabinetry, it was obvious that Otto Mueller took good care of the place. I’m guessing that, under his watch, Housing and Food Services was similarly well maintained.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
Public Pride
Students filing out of class early Wednesday afternoon were surprised by what they saw when they passed Old Main: An arc of rainbow balloons spreading across the steps. And a colorful celebration.
Pride Week, an annual event that promotes acceptance and support for the university’s LGBTQA community, is in full swing at Penn State. The week includes a plethora of events, from a intensive three-day workshop focusing on identity to a concert at Chumley’s benefitting the AIDS Project of State College to a drag show on Friday night at the HUB. At Wednesday’s rally, which lasted about an hour, a handful of spectators donned red t-shirts that read, “40 years and still queer, 40 years and still here.” The logo is Pride Week’s theme this year, celebrating the history and strides of LGBTQA organizations at Penn State.
Several speakers—from active leaders in Penn State’s LGBTQA community to the president of the State College High Gay Straight Alliance—stepped up to the makeshift stage in the middle of campus. They told stories of friends who came out, discussed what the LGBTQA community meant to them, and shared personal experiences. Perhaps the loudest applause came when the vice president of the Penn State chapter of Delta Lamdba Phi, a national fraternity for gay, bisexual and progressive men, pointed to his father in the crowd. ”He was the person I was most terrified to come out to,” he said. “And now he’s my biggest supporter.”
As the crowd of about 75 people erupted in applause, two female students sporting backpacks strolled by. ”Wow,” one student said to her friend. “That’s really cool he could share that in front of all these people in the middle of campus. Really cool.”
Emily Kaplan, intern
Gen Ed Classes: A Lot of Learning, A Little Bit of Fun
Twice a year, I find myself staring at my computer screen feeling completely and utterly overwhelmed.
When it comes time to schedule classes, I’m always intimidated by eLion’s lists and lists of courses. That’s what happens when you go to a school with 40,000 students and more than 160 majors. I’m usually fine with classes in my areas of study (journalism and English), but general education courses are a different story. There simply are too many. Some seem intriguing; some, not so much.
Gen-ed requirements have changed a lot over the years: Now, all baccalaureate degree programs include a 45-credit gen-ed component, including three credits in health and physical activity, nine credits in natural science, six credits in art, six credits in humanities, and six credits in social and behavioral sciences.
So as students begin to schedule for fall 2012, I took a look at some of Penn State’s more interesting gen-ed courses. I begin with a class I took last year—a class where SpongeBob appears on the syllabus.
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Course: Geosci 040: The Sea Around Us
Requirement satisfied: GN (Natural Science)
Why I took it: I’m not a science person at all. I had to late drop meteorology my freshman year (who knew predicting weather included calculus?) and needed an easier science class to take.
Interesting assignment: Once, we reported to the HUB-Robeson Center for class. Our lab that day consisted of analyzing the aquarium on the bottom floor. I had no idea there was such an intricate ecosystem living just 100 feet away from Sbarro’s. The most interesting aspect, to me, was that the 500-gallon tank has a self-regulated lighting system, which gets dark at night to mimic the real ocean.
What I got out of it: A new appreciation for beaches and environmentalism. When I visited Cape Cod last summer, I had a hard time looking at the dunes without thinking about how big they once were, and how they got there.
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Course: CMLIT 120: The Literature of the Occult
Requirement satisfied: GH (Humanities)
Interesting assignment: Read the third installment of the Harry Potter series.
What you can get out of it: “In all honesty, an appreciation for the Harry Potter series,” says Alexa Agugliaro, who says she wasn’t on the J.K. Rowling bandwagon before enrolling in the course. “There are a lot of major drabby classes that people have to take while they’re here, so why not, if you have the room, take a cool class about like vampires and monsters.” It’s not all Harry Potter and Twilight, though. Agugliaro wrote her final term paper on the witches in Macbeth.
Side note: Agugliaro says the teacher wore a wizard hat and a robe every day and had a magic wand.
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Course: KINES 028: Fencing
Requirement satisfied: GHA (Health and Physical Activity)
Interesting assignment: Just fence. Senior Matt Giacometti said there’s not much variety to the course, but he doesn’t mind. Students participate in basic drills, then fence each other. “It’s fun,” Giacometti says. “Exactly what you want from the class.”
What you can get out of it: “A ton,” Giacometti says. “I’m learning from coaches that have succeeded at the highest level. These guys have coached Olympians.” Giacometti’s professors for the course? Assistant coaches with the Penn State varsity fencing team—a program with 12 national championships and more than 170 All-Americans in the last 28 years. Did you know that Suzie Paxton ’93, a former Nittany Lion fencer and 1996 Olympian, started fencing in this gym class?
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Course: Applied Linguistics 100
Requirement satisfied: GS (Social and Behavioral Sciences)
Interesting assignment: During one class, the students were asked to think of as many examples of semantic word as they could. As junior Jackie Giraldo recalls, “That was the first time I ever heard the word yinz,” Giraldo says.
What you can get out of it: Says Giraldo: “I learned how language has evolved over time, but also got a deeper look at how words have evolved, how syntax has evolved, and why things are said different ways in different places. I definitely have a new appreciation of communication of different cultures.”
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Course: INART 115: Popular Music in America
Requirement satisfied: GA (Arts)
Interesting assignment: Students were required to participate in online discussions. One debate revolved around who is the most influential musician today, with one student making a good case that the answer was definitively Lady Gaga.
What you can get out of it: “I now understand the hardships that a lot of musicians had to endure in the past in great music from that, era like the jazz and blues,” junior Jared Cruz says. “And it also influenced the development of music nowadays.”
Emily Kaplan, intern
A Giant Comes Down
The setting seemed somehow appropriate: a cold, blustery Friday on a nearly empty campus, the timing and conditions meaning that few were there to see the tree come down. This was probably for the best.
Early Friday morning, an OPP crew began the bleak work of removing one of the two iconic American elm trees that flank the front of Old Main. Planted in 1933, the huge trees were as vulnerable as any at University Park to the spread of elm yellows, which, along with Dutch elm disease, has claimed hundreds of campus trees in recent years. Campus experts decided recently that the tree on the east side of the Old Main entrance was too far gone and no longer safe to leave standing.
No one who has spent time at University Park needs to be told of the elms’ symbolic and nostalgic value. A new one will go up in front of Old Main, eventually. But it won’t have the history. This giant will be missed.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
A New Building Along the Mall
If you haven’t been on the University Park campus in a while, on your next visit you may notice that a new building has snuck in along the Old Main Mall, between Henderson Building and Henderson South.
Construction crews about a year ago tore down the “Bridge,” the building that once connected Henderson (or, for those of you who go farther back, Human Development*) and Henderson South. Now shaping up in its place is the new Biobehavioral Health Building, which should be finished by November of this year.
(*or, for those of you who go even farther back than that, the Home Ec building!)
My first job at Penn State, more than 27 years ago, was in the then-College of Human Development, and my first office was on the now-defunct Bridge. One of my favorite pasttimes was helping the hopelessly lost students who popped their head into my office, looking for help in finding classrooms in the Human Development complex. (I can still remember a freshman basketball player by the name of Suzie McConnell ’88 staring at the room numbers, trying in vain to figure out where the heck she was supposed to be.)
It wasn’t the students’ fault that they were lost—it was that the building numbering made no sense. The dean’s office, in 104, was uphill from the main classroom auditorium, which was S-209. Or maybe the student’s class was actually in Human Development East, which was a whole other building altogether.
I also was working in that college—which by then had morphed into the College of Health and Human Development—when the new doctoral program in biobehavioral health was created, back in 1991. The idea behind that program was to understand the way mind and body work together—how stress affects health, for example, or the biological and psychological components of drug addiction. Those kinds of interplays may sound pretty obvious now, but 20 years ago the idea of getting the “bio” folks and the “behavior” folks together was fairly new.
The experiment was a success: The program has since expanded to include an undergraduate major, which has a pretty robust enrollment of 450 students. You can learn more about the BBH program, as it’s called, at its website.
Tina Hay, editor
The Return of State Patty’s Day
All you need to know about State Patty’s Day can be found at Peoples Nation, the pricy T-shirt shop on College Avenue. The front third of the store features items custom made for the student-organized holiday: Green necklaces with shot glass pendants, green and white feather boas, green sequined oversized leprechaun hats, and shirts with slogans such as “Sorry I’m Not Sorry: State Patty’s Day 2012.”
On Tuesday morning when I stopped by, two female students were waiting as the cashier rang up 20 green pinnies. The total? $290.40.
“They’re for my friends from out of town,” the girl said to her friend as she reached for her credit card. “I’m so excited they’re going to come up. This is going to be the best State Patty’s ever.”
With the context of everything that has occurred at Penn State since November, I couldn’t help but wonder: Is this really time for the best State Patty’s Day ever? Beginning Friday, thousands of Penn State students—and thousands of visitors—will descend upon the streets, bars, and apartments of State College to, well, party. “It’s just a giant drinking holiday, not much more,” junior Brittany Smith said. “It’s just an excuse to drink all day long.”
The holiday has grown immensely since its inception in 2007. Last year, State College Police made a record 234 criminal arrests—up from 160 in 2010—and fielded a record 480 calls. Close to 11,000 people have joined a Facebook group titled “Official Facebook Page: State Patty’s Day 2012.” With that kind of momentum, State Patty’s Day 2012 is slated to be bigger than ever—right?
Maybe.
The image of Penn State students has been scrutinized (more…)
Michael Mann Makes His Case
I approached the podium a few minutes before Michael Mann was scheduled to speak Thursday afternoon to ask him a simple question: Were all those police out front there because of him?
“Probably,” he smiled. “I think they’re probably superfluous, but it’s better to be safe.”
I’ve gone to probably a dozen Penn State Forum lunches in the past five years, and Thursday’s event at the Penn Stater Hotel was the first in which I’d seen a police presence. Three armed campus police officers—one from a K-9 unit—stood outside the packed conference room in which Mann spoke. I imagine they were there to stem any potential unrest after ads appeared on local radio this week urging people to boycott or protest Mann’s speech; I imagine those officers were aware as well that Mann has received death threats because of his work.
Mann, of course, is a climatologist, Penn State professor of meteorology and geosciences, and director of the University’s Earth Systems Science Center. If you know his name, it’s probably less because of his work—including his role in developing the iconic “hockey stick” model for measuring long-term global warming—than the reaction to it. U.S. Senators, state attorneys general, and TV pundits (among many others) have all gone after Mann in an attempt to discredit findings that show the reality and alarming rate of man-made global warming. If he’s not the favorite target of climate change deniers, he’s near the top of the list.
Mann’s speech Thursday was titled (more…)
Waiting Hours for Just a Moment, With No Complaints
I walked from my office to the Pasquerilla Spiritual Center a little after 1 p.m. Tuesday, thinking I might be early enough to beat the crowds. I wasn’t close.
Heading toward the tail end of a line that snaked back and forth through the Pasquerilla courtyard, Disneyland-style, stretched east on the sidewalk along Curtin Road, and at times extended north onto Shortlidge Road almost to Park Avenue, I got a sense of the crowd that already had turned out for Joe Paterno. This was in the first hour of a 10-hour viewing window on Tuesday, with four more hours scheduled Wednesday morning. This was no surprise.
I joined the crowd and spent two hours in line, all but the last 10 minutes of it outside, before the final stretch. We entered the spiritual center through a side door, shuffled down a hallway and entered the main lobby, where a few more turns of the line finally led us into the main auditorium. The clumps of people thinned into a slow but steadily moving single file, which continued down the aisle on the left side of the large, high-ceilinged room. At the front lay a casket, adorned with flowers.
We turned right, the casket on our left, the already indelible black-and-white image of Paterno, arms crossed and smiling, the only other adornment. On each side of the casket stood a large young man—former Nittany Lion quarterback Daryll Clark ’08 and a current player I didn’t recognize—part of the “honor guard” of lettermen who took turns aside their coach on the stage. The line had moved much more slowly in the early going, as some of those who’d come to pay their respects paused 15 or 20 seconds for prayer and reflection, a practice that must’ve been discouraged by funeral officials mindful of the tens of thousands still to come. By the time I got there, it seemed instinctive for each of us to stop for just a beat before moving on.
Jay Paterno ’91 stood for a time not far from the exit, shaking every hand presented him. I’m told his brother Scott ’97 did the same at other times during the 10-hour public viewing. I don’t know if their other siblings or Joe’s widow, Sue ’62, met the crowd, but it seems safe to assume they did. The Paterno family has made no secret of their appreciation for the public support they’ve received over the past few months.
A friend who was an hour or so behind me in line texted me later to tell me that Tom Bradley ’78, Paterno’s former player, longtime assistant, and interim replacement, had made his way down the line on Curtin Road. As far as my friend could tell, Bradley shook the hand of every person in the line and offered the same words to each of them: “Thanks for coming out for Coach.”
Ryan Jones, senior editor
More Joe, From—and For—the Students
There’s a nice story this morning from the AP quoting Scott Paterno ’97, ’00 about his father’s thoughts and mood in the final days of his life. It likely won’t surprise Penn Staters to hear that Joe’s mind was sharp and his spirit strong even as his body failed him. “He was so positive and so confident at the end of his life that the things that were important about this place would endure,” Scott said. “And that’s why he was at peace. That, and (that) my mother was willing to put up with him all these years.”
Two stories today speak to Joe’s love for Penn State, and its students in particular. Mike Poorman ’82 writes at StateCollege.com about the countless interactions Paterno had with undergrads during his time in Happy Valley. Poorman, who taught “Joe Paterno, Communications & The Media” for four years in the College of Communications, took informal polls each semester and tallied the numbers:
“Out of nearly 250 kids in class from 2008-2011, 107 had a personal JoePa moment. We’re not talking football games or pep rallies or THON appearances, all awe-inspiring for tens of thousands of students. We’re talking students being invited into Joe’s house after singing carols, or sitting down at the Creamery with a Peachy Paterno ice cream cone while the treat’s namesake did the same.”
It’s a terrific piece.
There’s never been any doubt how students felt about Paterno. That admiration will be reflected Wednesday with a student-organized “Guide Joe Paterno Home” event encouraging all Penn Staters to line the route of the funeral procession Wednesday afternoon as it leaves the Pasquerilla Spiritual Center for the private burial service. Onward State has details here, and there’s a Facebook group set up as well.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
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