Home Page

By: Pam and Tom Marakovits 

This spring our second (and last) student will be graduating from Penn State. We are looking forward to the ceremony and all the memories surrounding graduation. We are also happy that August 2025 will be free of tuition bills, back to school shopping, and fall move-in. August may become a great time to vacation again!

We wanted to provide some perspective on our Penn State experience. Penn State has always been a special place for our family. Both of us experienced Penn State over 35 years ago as students and we got engaged on the steps of Old Main. Then for the past six years, we experienced a different Penn State through our children’s experiences. Some things remained steadfast and constant like large first-year classes, hanging out in the HUB, THON, ice cream at the Creamery, Saturday football tailgates, and the bells of Old Main. However, other experiences were truly unique to this generation - handling COVID and Zoom, devising a Ticketmaster strategy for football tickets, and navigating a much bigger campus (however, maybe it wasn’t that hard since they had e-bikes everywhere and TWO loop buses).

We are happy to say that even with all the changes, we feel that our children experienced many of the things that made Penn State special when we were students. Penn State is a large campus where you can meet a new friend at new student orientation and every day after until graduation. It is a campus where there is always something to do and hundreds of student organizations to find friends. Also, it is college-oriented town where people travel to it on weekends, rather than away from it (sometimes too many people on football weekends). Finally, it is a place that pushes students to become independent and advocate for themselves.

We love Penn State, and we are so happy that our kids have also grown to love it. So, to continue with our 1990s view of the world, we thought it would be perfect to end this blog with a Letterman-style Top Ten list:

The Top Ten things our kids learned as students spending four years at Penn State:

10. They tried new things like rock climbing at the IM Building and studying abroad;

9. They both took on leadership positions in student organizations;

8. They both found out how frustrating leadership positions can be;

7. But both became better leaders;

6. They were both truly inspired by THON;

5. They learned that companies do actually recruit in September for internships and full-time jobs that start the following summer. (That type of corporate planning blew their minds);

4. They learned to take lots of pictures - something that their parents didn’t do in the 1980’s because the old way of taking pictures was inconvenient and expensive;

3. They learned that when the Waffle Shop was packed on a Sunday morning, it was perfectly acceptable to eat ice cream at the Creamery for brunch;

2. They learned that getting to know the professors can open up so many opportunities – including extending your PSU career with an integrated graduate program; and

1. They learned that time flies at Penn State and before you know it you get to join the world’s largest alumni association.