Penn State and the world around it have changed a lot since 1997. But the values that led to the founding of the Schreyer Honors College 25 years ago remain very much in place today.
The principles of innovation, community, integration, and agility allowed the College’s administration, faculty, staff, and students to create transformative educational experiences that bring the mission of excellence in the classroom and around the globe to life across Penn State’s campuses and colleges.
Several of the people involved in the journey recently reflected on the College’s evolution and its impact on shaping a new generation of leaders and changemakers.
Innovation: Writing New Rules for Honors Education
Cheryl Achterberg helped create the proposal for what would become the Schreyer Honors College and served as its inaugural dean from 19982005. She worked closely with William A. Schreyer to bring his vision for honors education to life and created the “ABCs” that remain part of the college’s mission today—academic excellence, building a global perspective, and creating opportunities for leadership and civic engagement.
To that end, Achterberg focused on creating opportunities for research and travel that would attract students who were interested in more than simply a rigorous academic experience.
“We were trying to recruit the best students we could and provide freedom in their studies and support them through travel grants, research grants, opening doors, and negotiating internships at new places for Penn State students,” Achterberg said.
The leadership was not necessarily focused on racking up accolades like Rhodes or Goldwater scholarships. Achterberg said that those distinctions came as a result of creating a more engaged student body.
“As a dean, I didn’t spend any time on prizes at all except to report the winners at the end,” Achterberg said. “We kept our focus on providing the very best education we could and enabling students to pursue their educational goals, whatever those might be. We knew that if we kept our focus on that, the prizes would follow.”
During her tenure as dean, Achterberg led students on study abroad trips to London and created a course in partnership with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a prominent foreign policy think tank in Washington, D.C. Part of the course involved traveling to Washington over spring break to write position papers that were evaluated by CSIS experts.
This partnership marked the first time CSIS had accepted students from a public university. Penn State continues to place multiple students there each year.
Scholar alumnus Ryan Newman (‘01 Bus) was among the first students to graduate from the College. He recalls thinking that the College’s creation was going to be transformative for him and so many other Penn Staters.
“There’s this tipping point where everything changes, and the Schreyer Honors College was that tipping point for me and others,” Newman said. “It went from all of these pieces and things kind of working together to when I was accepted, a totally upward trajectory.”
He entered the College during his second year and lived in Atherton Hall—an experience he refers to as his “second freshman year” at Penn State.
“That living-learning environment allowed me to see the lens of the University dramatically differently, where I still felt like I had access to all these great global resources, but it was delivered through this intimate lens of the Honors College,” Newman said.
Newman also appreciated the fact that Achterberg and other College administrators were working in such close proximity to the students. While living in Atherton Hall, he suggested to her that the College should have tea for students—and she made it happen in the building’s courtyard.
“And so this idea that the dean of the Honors College was sitting in the same building as I was doing all this monumental work, but yet she was also willing to kind of cut away from her daily experience, to literally sit in the courtyard and have tea with me and my roommate,” Newman said. “It was just a sign of just how fast things were moving at that time, but also how much everyone was taking time to really embrace the moment as well.”
Community: Changing the Definition of an Honors Student
Sam Bonsall (’04 Lib, ’04g Bus) grew up in State College and graduated near the top of his class at State College Area High School in 2000. After living in the shadow of Penn State, he was eager to get away from Happy Valley and attend an Ivy League school.
“There’s a lot of pressure for people who did well to aim for Ivy League institutions,” Bonsall said. “The problem with those is that they’re very expensive, and even if I was able to get in, I was not eligible for a lot of aid.”
Bonsall was persuaded to reconsider Penn State by Matt Brezina, a fellow Scholar alumnus who graduated from high school a year before him and enrolled in the Schreyer Honors College. At that time, Bonsall said the College was known as the “best-kept secret at Penn State” and a place he ultimately felt excited to be part of.
“I didn’t feel like I was missing that Ivy League experience because I was getting that through the enrichment of the honors courses and having a terrific academic adviser,” Bonsall said. “I had the opportunity to really learn from topnotch faculty in your first year at Penn State, which is not, I think, the standard Penn State experience.”
Bonsall and Newman both credit David Shapiro, professor emeritus of economics and the department’s former honors coordinator, with creating an academic experience that reframed how they viewed finance.
“In those honors seminars, I gained so much more insight and learned a new way of thinking about the philosophy of economics,” Bonsall said. “Reading papers and thought pieces was a different style than my other ECON courses, and it was the start of planting the seed to becoming an academic down the line.”
Scholar alumna Laura Guay (‘21 HHD) said the College’s small size and its strong focus on community were leading factors in her decision to attend Penn State.
“That was the part that was holding me back from Penn State … I was so worried about how large it was going to be,” Guay said. “And knowing that I would have sort of a community to guide me to be able to go back to a smaller side of things, but also be pushed in ways that I knew I wouldn’t and otherwise be pushed.”
Guay continued to expand the College’s community during her time as a Scholar. She studied abroad in Senegal in the spring of 2019 and returned with a desire to connect with other Scholars who had studied abroad.
Knowing that a global perspective is an integral part of the College’s mission, she began having conversations with Dr. Richard Stoller, assistant dean for academic affairs, about creating a one-credit class or other opportunities for students returning from study abroad experiences.
“When I first arrived back, I had this sense that I’ve changed and I wondered how to work myself back into campus life,” Guay said. “I wanted to be able to connect with others who had gone through this experience and found that they changed or their friends changed a bit.” It was really great having those conversations with Dr. Stoller and thinking about how to strengthen that part of the honors community.”
Integration: Honors Across Penn State
Christian M.M. Brady succeeded Achterberg as dean in 2006. At the time, he was a young assistant professor in the College of the Liberal Arts and struggled in his own academic journey as an undergraduate at Cornell.
“I was asked to take a year off from school at Cornell and told to consider vocational school because maybe higher ed wasn’t for me,” Brady said. “I took that year, figured it out, and went back to Cornell and ended up getting my doctorate from the University of Oxford.”
Brady often shared his personal journey with students as a way of reminding them that there are many paths to becoming an honors student, particularly at a large university like Penn State.
“Not everybody likes the idea that the dean of the honors college nearly failed out of college, but I think it’s important to be open and honest and transparent about these things because it helps give people room to fail.”
Brady oversaw a $30 million fundraising campaign during his tenure as dean, an effort designed to build upon the original gift from the Schreyers and ensure that the College could provide even more opportunities and support for students.
Part of this support involved bringing the honors experience to Penn State’s 12 academic colleges and 19 campuses. This work involved innovation again as Brady and the College’s leadership navigated complex relationships with stakeholders across the University.
The goal was always to find ways that honors education could elevate the work of campuses and colleges, rather than adding barriers or burdens for students.
“Every honors student is a graduate of one of the other colleges or campuses, and this was the way that we brought everybody on board,” Brady said. “I was very intentional in bringing all the honors coordinators from the other campuses to University Park and visiting the honors programs at the campuses.”
Between those meetings and campus visits, Brady encouraged open communication between honors coordinators across the university and tried to open as many doors as possible for students outside of University Park.
“I wanted to make sure that Schreyer scholarships or grants were open to everybody, regardless of which campus or college they were part of,” Brady said.
Brady now serves as dean of the Lewis Honors College at the University of Kentucky. He brought with him many of the traditions that he started at Schreyer, along with the mindset about creating a more expansive and integrated view of honors education.
“I still maintain that honors is much broader than GPA,” Brady said. “It’s not just about the smartest person in the room … it’s about the smartest people in the room who care about the people who couldn’t get into the room. And the people who may not even know that the room exists.”
Integrating honors education across Penn State also applies to pushing students to explore opportunities outside of their home college. Bonsall now serves as the Director of Honors in the Smeal College of Business; in that role, he often encourages business students to branch out and explore the disciplines that underlie modern finance.
“Business disciplines are all built on social sciences at their core … half of the Smeal majors are built on psychology, and the other half are built on economics,” Bonsall said. “It’s important for any business major, and particularly a Schreyer Scholar, to understand those underpinnings. I encourage my students to go back and find that parent discipline and understand how that relates to the coursework that they’ve done and the research question they want to answer in their thesis.”
Agility: Creating Change at Scale
Peggy Johnson became dean in 2017 after serving as head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. In that role, she worked to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in the department— what she describes as “giving everyone a voice.”
Johnson brought that philosophy to the Honors College and pushed to put equity at the forefront of the entire Scholar lifecycle from admissions through graduation and beyond. Johnson hired Dr. Lynette Yarger, the College’s first Assistant Dean for Equity and Inclusion. [Dr. Yarger was recently promoted to Associate Dean for Equity and Inclusion in the College.]
“We wanted to make sure that we were being equitable in our offers and treating the students equitably and in an inclusive way once they got into the College,” Johnson said. “I worked with a group of students on this who were just fantastic … and it seems to be well received by the staff and students,”
The framework already in place for being agile and making change quickly helped move these initiatives forward and pivot the Honors experience to a virtual environment during the pandemic. The pandemic also brought to light the need to focus on mental health—another area where Johnson pushed for an agile response to meet both student and staff needs.
“Along with the high energy and global outlook of an honors student can come a lot of anxiety and stress,” Johnson said. “It was just unbelievable how much they wanted to accomplish, and I wanted to help students be mentally healthy and be in a good place, whatever that place is.”
Patrick Mather joined the College as dean in August 2021. Like Johnson, Mather is an engineer by training and always on the lookout for ways to improve processes and make the best use of resources across the College.
“I’m an introvert, but I’m also a catalyst. I definitely like to live at the front end of things, and I see the potential for things that don’t exist yet,” Mather said. “We as a leadership team are excited by implementation and seeing things come to life. And that’s where I hope our legacy as a team will be.”
Another opportunity for innovation is in the College’s physical spaces in Simmons and Atherton Halls—some of which have remained largely unchanged since 1997. Coming out of the pandemic, Mather hopes to create spaces that facilitate small group collaboration and, building on Johnson’s mental health initiatives, places to relax and recharge.
Mather described this approach as “belonging by design,” or an interior design philosophy intended to instill a sense of belonging and create a welcoming atmosphere in shared spaces.
“If students opt to stay in a common area and have a conversation, as opposed to going back to their dorm room, then good things will happen,” Mather said. “One additional conversation can open a mind and develop a connection or identify a pathway.”
Mather also plans to bring an innovative approach to the thesis process and expand the opportunity for how students conduct and present their work.
“I want to help students find an equitable way to complete their research trajectory,” Mather said. “Whether it’s research or creative work, we can’t count on luck when it comes to finding opportunities and collaborators. We are very interested in designing multiple ways and channels to find that professor, that lab, or that studio that will feed the fire in the belly and help them succeed.”
The Next 25 Years: Looking to the Future
The College was founded in 1997 to create the next generation of leaders to tackle the world’s most pressing problems. Twenty-five years later, the need for those leaders is perhaps even more urgent.
Today’s Scholars recognize the gravity of the challenges they’ll face as they leave Penn State and enter the world at large—and they’re more than ready to apply their academic excellence, global perspective, and civic leadership skills to do their part in creating a safer, more sustainable world.
Scholar Michael Mitole (’22 Bus) sees the process of writing a thesis as one step along a broader intellectual journey that will prepare him to push for positive change.
“The life of a Scholar really is how we take part in the process by which ideas are made that move the world forward and solve our problems,” Mitole said. “And I was very interested in having the chance to do that because, over the course of my two years before joining Schreyer, I identified the things that kept me up at night, the problems that I wanted to solve, and the impacts that I wanted to make on the world.”
Newman has been back to University Park nearly every semester since he graduated in 2001. He’s seen a lot of positive change in that time and feels hopeful about what the future holds will bring for the College.
Newman, along with the College’s broader network of alumni and friends, are dedicated to doing what he can to support that work over the next 25 years and beyond.
“The Schreyer Honors College has emerged as, in many ways, the crown jewel of honors education, both nationally, as well as at Penn State,” Newman said. “My hope is that the impression and impact that the College is able to make on the student body, on the University at large, and quite frankly, on the U.S. and the world only grows and deepens as we have additional classes of alumni graduating and having an impact on the world.”
