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 sports. That means that Football and Men’s Basketball are equally as important as the sports that get less national coverage (Women’s Water Polo, for example). Each school may have up to 20 sports count towards their score (10 men’s and 10 women’s).
Penn State finished with a …

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 record of 134-8. Fawcett was a four time AVCA All-American and was named the 2009 AVCA Division I National Player of the Year. She leaves Penn State second all-time in Penn State program history with 1,934 kills (8th all-time in the Big Ten).
Casey Sandy leaves Penn …

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 semester.
Believe it or not, class registration for next fall begins soon. Does this idea scare you more than the Sham-Wow! guy or those people who wear Snuggies to high-school football games? Well, have no fear, because Onward State’s new “How-To” girl is here to …

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 global warming.

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 find articles there on everything from Jesus in Islamic art to string theory, but when you download them, you get PDFs with names like 192874.PDF. I know that my desktop is a mess right now with poorly labeled PDFs all over it.
@PSULibs tipped us off to …