Honors faculty feature: Robert Melton

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.”