The Penn State Faculty Senate held its first meeting of the year on Tuesday, August 31. Unfortunately, this statement doesn’t mean much to the large majority of Penn State students–mainly because most students are too busy with classes, friends, and clubs to pay too much attention.

hen you sit down to watch Texas and Alabama square off in the BCS National Championship tomorrow, take some solace in the fact that if the BCS was based on academics, neither team would be in the Big Game.


Instead, you’d be cheering on Dear Old State (ranked #1) as they battled against Stanford (ranked #2) in Pasadena. In the New America Foundation academic ratings of the Top 25 ranked teams, Alabama ends up ranked 8th and Texas ranked a lowly 25th.

Penn State Athletics finished 19th nationally in the 2008-2009 Director’s Cup standings for Division I programs. The final results were released yesterday by the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics. The Director’s Cup is awarded to the school whose athletic program is successful in all NCAA acknowledged sports, with equal weight placed on all [...]

Penn State Athletics has named Seniors Nicole Fawcett and Casey Sandy as the Penn State Athletes of the Year for the 2008-2009 season. Nicole Fawcett led the women’s volleyball team to back-to-back NCAA Div. I National Championships her final two years at Penn State. During her time at PSU, the women’s volleyball team posted a [...]

This is the first of a recurring feature in which Onward State walks you through some of the less understood aspects of Penn State. The first enigma our guide will tackle is how to schedule classes. Hopefully you can use this information in the coming weeks as you begin to plan and schedule for fall [...]

Looking for something to do other than homework? Check out these videos created by Professor Richard Alley for GEOSC 10: Geology of National Parks. The videos are pure edutainment. Our favorite is ‘Rollin’ to the Future,’ in which Alley pulls an acoustic guitar out of a corn field and begins singing about fossil fuels and [...]

Though Penn State is better known for its engineering than its liberal arts, some of us have had more papers than final exams in the last week. As diligent researchers, JSTOR is often the first place we search. For those of you who don’t know, JSTOR is a digital archive of scholarly journals. You can [...]