From the Editor
Philly Special

What’s new at Penn State Abington? As a quick summer visit showed, the answer is ‘plenty.’

exterior building at Penn State Abington
By Ryan Jones '95 Com

Gary Liguori sounded like a proud parent as he showed off the Penn State Abington campus. This was back in early July, about a week after Liguori celebrated two years as Abington chancellor. It’s a role he clearly relishes, and—as a campus tour makes clear—there are plenty of great reasons why.

I made the trip to the Philly suburbs over the summer to get a closer look at some of the ways Abington is thriving. First and foremost, that included a tour of the new three-story, 85,554-square-foot academic building (above) that opened in August, with an array of classrooms, labs, collaborative spaces, faculty offices, and student support areas. Just down the hill is the physical education building, where crews were recently underway on a substantial renovation of the campus’s primary athletics and recreation facility—a (literal) game-changer for Abington students.

There were plenty of other, more subtle signs of the vibrant vibes on campus, from an upgraded Career Closet to the Chaiken Center for Student Success, the first at a commonwealth campus, where the emphasis on providing student resources and support is particularly well-aligned with Abington’s proximity to Philadelphia and its focus on serving first-generation students. I came away with a clear sense of a campus doing what every Penn State campus does at its best: working hard to understand, serve, and provide opportunities suited to a unique student population.

Longtime readers have hopefully noticed our efforts in recent years to expand our commonwealth campus coverage. We’re working now on stories that will highlight the legacy and impact of those campuses set to close next year, and we’ll continue to look for opportunities to tell the stories of those that remain. As my brief Abington visit made clear, we’ll have no shortage of great reasons to pay attention.

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Ryan Jones ’95 Com  |  Editor
ryanjones@psu.edu  |  @RJPennStater

 

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