About 14,000 top high school chemistry students participate in the local level of the Chemistry Olympiad every year. Of those, 900 advance to the national level test. Twenty are selected to spend two rigorous weeks at a study camp in Colorado Springs, Colorado. And four of those top students are chosen to compete internationally. In 2006, one of them was Mike Blaisse, and he credits Penn State Harrisburg Associate Professor of Chemistry Tom Eberlein with helping him get there.
Hannah Witwer of Hershey, Pennsylvania, majoring in marketing, received the Assurance of Learning Certificate at the Advanced Level of Knowledge from the Society of Human Resource Management. She was part of the first cohort at Penn State Harrisburg to take the test and successfully passed it.
Penn State Executive Vice President and Provost Nick Jones advanced the University’s focus on academic integrity earlier this year by creating a task force to assess the current process and structure used to manage academic integrity cases and strengthen a culture of integrity.
Jane Filby Leipold, a 1988 graduate of Penn State Harrisburg’s MBA program, 2013 Penn State Alumni Fellow, and former senior vice president of global human resources at TE Connectivity, has pledged $1 million to support scholarships and student services at the college.
Samantha Schaffer and Tyler Patton, students in Penn State Harrisburg’s master of professional accounting program in the School of Business Administration, recently completed projects benefiting local veterans’ organizations. As part of a special topics course, the students assisted two organizations with creating bylaws and gaining tax-exempt statuses from the state and federal governments.
The integrated undergraduate/graduate degree program (IUG) in American studies, introduced by the School of Humanities in 2011, offers students the opportunity to complete an accelerated master’s degree in addition to a bachelor’s degree in American studies in five years.
For the second year in a row, four students in Penn State Harrisburg’s School of Business Administration were among the 12 teams invited to travel to Kohl’s corporate headquarters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to have their ideas heard by Kohl’s executives.
Some Penn State Harrisburg students used their spring break to visit Germany, where they got to see the inside of a windmill, a Mercedes Benz factory run mostly by robots, solar arrays “as far as the eye can see,” according to their professor, and a country that takes sustainability very seriously.
In their spare time, a group of engineering students in the School of Science, Engineering, and Technology at Penn State Harrisburg decided to build a race car from scratch, on their own, with no background on how to do it. That was in the spring of 2015. This May, they took their vehicle to Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, Michigan, to compete with 120 other college teams.
