College of the Liberal Arts Electronic Magazine, Issue 13, June 2, 2003

Issue 13, 6/13/03

Contents:

Email Uncool, IM Rulz

John Dymun

Corrine Thatcher

Distinguished Alumni

A Life of Languages

Unsubscribe

Penn State

College of the Liberal Arts

Alumni Relations and Development

Ways to Give

To request a text-only version of the electronic magazine, click here.

To read previous issues, click below:

Previous Issues

ECONOMICS GRADUATE TO SERVE IN HARVARD SOCIETY OF FELLOWS

   Roland Fryer’s new office overlooks Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, but perhaps more appropriately, its window peers right into a Crate and Barrel furniture store. An economist, Fryer has a first hand look at the movement of certain goods in a real-time, non-theoretical kind of way.
   But that’s not the most noteworthy part of his new location. The real news is why he’s there. On July 1, Fryer will officially begin his time as a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, a group whose members have included Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Noam Chomsky, E. O. Wilson, and B. F. Skinner. The purpose of the Society is to give men and women at an early stage in their careers an opportunity to pursue their studies free from formal requirements. For three years, as a result of this most prestigious appointment, he will be afforded the time to devote all of his attention to his research.
   Fryer earned his Ph.D. in economics from Penn State in 2002. By the time he’d earned it, he had already secured a coveted spot on the faculty of the University of Chicago’s revered economics department, a National Science Foundation post-doctoral fellowship, and a doctoral fellowship with the American Bar Association. However, despite all of his achievements to date, he thought he was a long shot for the Harvard fellowship.
   “You’re nominated by someone else who served as a previous junior fellow in the Society, and in my case, I was nominated by Steven Levitt. Levitt is a scholar with whom I have co-authored work on the Black-White achievement gap, the causes and consequences of distinctively Black names, and the impact of the crack epidemic on the economic status of Blacks.” Fryer says. “But I still thought there was no way I could make it, so I decided my only goal would be to not embarrass Steve, or make it so he could not recommend others in the future.”
   The process begins with the nominator writing a letter on the nominee’s behalf. If the letter is strong enough, the nominee is invited to apply. Fryer was so convinced he wouldn’t make the cut he didn’t even want to spend time on the application. “I had to actually chase after the FedEx truck on the last day so I could turn in the application on time,” he recalls.
   Fryer had to travel to Harvard, from Chicago, to interview with some sixteen senior fellows, including Nobel Prize winners in genetics, physics, and mathematics. Then, the interviewees and the fellows would go to dinner collectively. “It was like high table in England, six hours long, very formal,” he says. “I got lucky and ended up sitting by senior fellows, talking to them a good bit. Many, many weeks passed and I got the call. They only took eight out of the fifty who were interviewed. Who knows how many actually were nominated?”
   Fryer’s scholarship earned him the post, and the work he does tries to develop, as he says, “a new way of thinking about race and racial inequality in economics. I like to integrate ideas,” he says, “and I am proud of the fact that I am probably the only economist here who reads VIBE magazine and listens to hip-hop on my way to the office.” Laughing a bit, he conjures a picture of his bookshelves, issues of VIBE bumping up against textbooks, journals on mathematics, and sheaves of articles.
   “I am extremely grateful for the opportunity at Harvard,” he says. “Now, I’ve go to focus like a laser beam—there is much work to be done.”
   The work he plans to do uses mathematical tools in economics and applies them to “stubborn old problems.” It is a quantitative approach, but it is also theoretical. He explains, “There are behaviors we observe in lower income populations across the world. We can document them, and we also know that these behaviors happen for a reason. We often do not know the specific mechanism, and we are reluctant to ascribe differences in behavior solely to race. That is a cornerstone of economics—individuals respond to incentives. So, if you put people of different races in similar situations they will react the same way.
   “For instance, suppose there’s a large amount of peer pressure in a predominantly minority neighborhood to not invest in higher education, and thus the perception of working toward it can have negative social consequences. Suppose then we have a policy maker who wants to remedy the problem of under-investment by offering a single scholarship. It is quite plausible that, since there is pressure against education, no one applies. The policy maker is frustrated.
   “However, if the policy maker knew that these types of social interactions were taking place, he or she might consider offering several scholarships, and maybe many people apply, since it becomes more socially possible. Or maybe not.”
   By applying economics tools to issues of race and inequality, Fryer contends it will be easier to predict and model a range of behaviors so as to learn what policies might be effective. “We may have policies that have negative effects on the very people they are intended to help,” he says. “But until we look carefully at the social interactions and social environments of these communities, we won’t know.”
   Fear of commitment, Fryer says, kept him from earning a doctorate in a more specialized field. He considered both organizational behavior and education policy as possible routes in graduate school. In the end, he says, “I figured if I chose economics, it would give me the tools to specialize in another area if I wanted to later.”
   Fryer credits Penn State’s economics department for much of his success. He says he had a tough first year, being both an American student in a graduate economics program, and also being a minority. But one of the most remarkable things about the department was the faculty’s willingness to help those who wanted to help themselves. He did not, at first, have a study group in which to discuss issues related to the courses. He went to department head Bob Marshall, who then contacted the faculty teaching Fryer’s courses, and, Fryer says, “every one of them expressed a willingness to meet with me outside of office hours and to work with me. They spent a lot of time helping me to develop my skills as an economist.”
   He continues, “It’s important, because many programs throw students in the deep water, and it’s sink or swim. That does happen at Penn State, too, and it should, but the willingness to help dedicated students is something that really makes Penn State special.”
   Fryer’s achievement comes at the same time that the Department of Economics has taken great strides in developing itself. Recently, five of the faculty were appointed Fellows of the Econometric Society, graduate students were placed in tenure-line jobs at top institutions, and the department’s reputation climbed significantly in rankings. The story of the economics department is, in some ways, symbolized by the amazing achievements of Roland Fryer.
   But he has another thought. “The remarkable thing is that the Department of Economics has been able to hire truly first rate faculty, and all those faculty care deeply about the success of the graduate program.” He pauses. “I mean, c’mon. That’s a very hard thing to do. That’s why the department is getting to be so good.”

EMAIL UNCOOL, IM RULZ

   A new generation of Internet users views e-mail as a relic of the past, preferring instant messaging for communication with their peers, according to Steven Thorne, associate director of the College of the Liberal Arts’ Center for Language Acquisition.
   “For the first time, a standard, everyday tool like e-mail is no longer being used by a specific youth culture,” Thorne says.
   These youths, roughly 18, 19 and 20 years old, are third-generation Internet users and to them, e-mail is akin to getting dressed up for a job interview, an uncomfortable formality to be avoided unless absolutely necessary.
   “They use e-mail to contact their employer or professors, or to ask their parents for money, but not for age-peer interaction,” he adds.
   This observation came as a surprise to Thorne who, in a project funded by the U.S. Department of Education, was exploring online communication as a means to help students learn French by connecting them with university students in Bretagne, France.
   “I hoped to use the Internet to link people up, get them fired up about building friendships so they would be more invested in learning the language,” says Thorne, who also is associate director, Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (NFLRC).
   Thorne and his collaborators chose Net Meeting, a real-time conferencing program that allows users to exchange text and video messages from anywhere in the world. However, they worried that the time difference would limit the students’ opportunities to interact. To avoid this problem, they also required participants to exchange a number of e-mails as part of their semester grade. Interestingly, some of the most compelling intercultural interactions occurred when students chose another Internet communication program, AOL’s Instant Messenger (IM). The students’ reaction led Thorne in an unexpected direction.
   “From my advanced age,” the 41-year-old Thorne laughs, “because I am not part of this young IM generation, e-mail does not seem an entirely objectionable choice. But objectionable it was.”
   While many students spent hours of IM time with their “keypals,” most sent only the required number of e-mails. In one case, a Penn State woman opted not to send any, despite the negative effect on her grade and an apparent infatuation with her male French contact.
   “It was obvious to me she had a crush on this French student, and so had even more motivation to reach out than just the grade,” says Thorne. “There is pretty clear evidence in what the students did that they would not use e-mail for peer relationship building.”
   In an article published in the May issue of the journal Language Learning & Technology, the Thorne proposes that Internet communication tools are simply that: tools—and, as such, are subject to what he terms “cultures-of-use.” In other words, while 40-year-olds might use e-mail to plan an after-work get-together, third-generation Internet users would not dream of it.
   “These are habituated IM users,” explains Thorne. “They have been using the Internet to communicate with each other for five, six, seven years now and have developed specific preferences. In educational settings this is paramount. For example, as one of the designers of this project, I chose the wrong tool. How they use the Internet in everyday life outside of the university has everything to do with how teachers should use it in the classroom.”
   In a broader context, as these third-generation Internet users hit the job market, they will undoubtedly carry with them their cultures-of-use for Internet communication programs. Currently, IM is largely frowned upon at the office, but Thorne sees small pockets of users already beginning to transform the workplace.
   For example, an undergraduate recently applied for a position with an employer located some distance from Penn State, he recalled. The company’s recruiter herself had graduated from college recently as well and to save travel expenses, the two women decided to use IM to conduct the job interview. While that may be unthinkable to many, this is a generation that has grown up talking to each other while sitting in front of a computer.
   Thorne says it is possible that IM may encroach further into territory currently reserved for e-mail. “I can also see some other new technology coming along and supplanting IM. I wish we were better able to predict the future,” he notes.
                           —story by Todd Johnson, Penn State Public Information

An Amusement Park for the Mind

   The bonsai tree on his office windowsill is one of over thirty Japanese trees John Dymun (General Arts and Sciences, ’68) has acquired over the past fifteen years. Dymun believes that to remain fulfilled, one needs to keep learning. He reflects this attitude even when on vacation. “I can’t go sit at the beach for two weeks. I need something that keeps me thinking.” For example, he and his wife attend the Chautauqua Institution every year. “It’s like an amusement park for the mind and spirit.”
   His diverse interests extend into Dymun + Company, a communications think tank he describes as “part advertising, part public relations firm, and part design.” The company approaches projects in ways that reflect Dymun’s desire to look at things from a nontraditional perspective. One example can be found in a short public radio program they have developed for Bayer. The show, “Everyday Science,” is geared toward sparking and maintaining kids’ interest in science. “The show answers questions a child might ask. Why the sky is blue, why paints sticks to a wall, why a bubble breaks.” With a mixture of commercial production techniques, sound design, music, and a narrator, listeners “can go from the bottom of the ocean, into a cat’s ear, or up to Venus.”
   Dymun calls the company’s method Strategic Ingenuity. “Our work begins with the business strategy of our client. We want to show them something different; what we hope is an incisive idea that meets their needs in a novel way.” Their attitude has led to many on-going client relationships such as the Christopher Columbus Award. The award grew from a collaboration between the National Science Foundation and Bayer. The project challenges students in grades six through eight to address and suggest solutions to a community problem using the scientific method. However, the idea goes one step further: the winning team of students receives $25,000 to implement their solution.
   He attributes much of his personal and professional success to Penn State. “The College of the Liberal Arts opened up new vistas for me. I took all the writing courses in a variety of departments— English, speech communication, theatre. I graduated with a portfolio of writing samples that was dog-eared and coffee stained.” Soon after, an essay on Andy Warhol that Dymun wrote in Professor Stanley Weintraub’s class earned him a trainee position at Ketchum Advertising. Several years later, he founded Dymun + Company in Pittsburgh.
   “The world needs agile thinkers. You may find yourself going from a meeting with a law firm to a meeting with an arts organization then on to a technology company. Dealing in shades of gray, seeing other points of view, communicating metaphorically—these abilities all spring from a liberal arts education.” After a pause, he adds, “In a way, the bonsai trees tie back to the idea of expanding your knowledge. Designing them and taking care of them is the kind of activity I can learn more about for the rest of my life.”

CORINNE THATCHER AND THE REWARDS OF PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP

   Corinne Thatcher’s interest in Latin American Studies, according to her mother, stems from before she was born. At the time, her mother, an editor, was completing work on a book on Latin America. Thatcher herself smiles and says she chose to major in Latin American Studies because her reading throughout high school led her to develop an interest in the countries arrayed just south of the United States. “People know a great deal about Western Europe, Asia, and Eastern Europe, but few know much of anything about Latin America, which is right next to us.”
   Thatcher’s interests and coursework have taken her to Mexico, South Africa, Montana, and, most recently, to West Philadelphia. The Philadelphia work—compiling reports and documents about a West Philly neighborhood for an interdisciplinary geography class taught by Lakshman Yapa—is the most recent, and it helped her to define the topic of her upcoming senior thesis: public scholarship.
   “I like the kind of learning that takes me to a place,” she says, beginning to explain the notion of public scholarship. Two years ago, she took a class that wound up with a trip to Juarez, Mexico, to build a house there. The house building was work the students could offer the community, but they had actually traveled to update the information they had learned through the semester about the Juarez area. Their responsibility was to pinpoint any errors or misperceptions they felt their texts had made, and to adjust their course research papers accordingly.
   “That approach encouraged us to look at the real world and critically analyze the things we read,” she recalls, “so that we learned not just to absorb everything we read as necessarily the truth.”
   But, she says, in that case, the work they did for the community was detached from the course. That is, the students did not work with the community. However, when Thatcher went to Montana as part of Penn State’s Sustainable Housing Initiative, the situation was different. Students from a variety of disciplines and majors participated in developing ways to provide housing solutions to improve conditions on American Indian Reservations. When students worked on site, they participated in ways consistent with their abilities. For Thatcher, that meant researching the social and political history of the people living on the Norhtern Cheyenne Indian Reservation and providing that information to the rest of the group, to aid in their decisions.
   “It was a real step up from the Juarez course,” she says, “because we were involved in all aspects of the house, looking into culture, designing, putting it together. We went there to learn from the community what ways we might help solve some problems. Plus, everyone had skills to contribute, and being in Liberal Arts, mine were researching, writing, communicating.”
   Experiences like the Montana project and the geography class led her to writing the thesis on public scholarship. “I prefer the term over the more common ‘service learning,’” she says. “Service learning, I think, encourages people to think they are solving problems that exist outside the University, their communities, and the like, instead of learning to look for solutions, to look within communities for local or indigenous solutions, and to combine knowledge systems. It’s not really the idea that we’re serving, but that we are working with other people.”
   Thatcher says that her work so far has helped her figure out how to use her life more positively. “It’s hard to sit in a classroom and imagine what you can do,” she says. “You’re bombarded with information, and you think you can’t do anything. There’s way too much out there to fix. But on a project, with everyone contributing with different skills, you realize everyone has a role, and you can begin to really make a difference.”
   Thatcher’s passion for making a difference has led to her involvement with local papers, volunteering in the State College community, and even taking a leave of absence from the University to travel for another humanitarian project. Her efforts have been recognized many times by the College of the Liberal Arts. She has received the Kraft Wilson Undergraduate Scholarship, Margaret N. and Stanley F. Paulson Memorial Scholarship, and support from the Liberal Arts Alumni Society Undergraduate Enrichment Endowment. She also won the W. Lamar Kopp International Achievement Award, given by Penn State’s International Council. And in the future, Thatcher is certain that her plans, while not terribly specific yet, will always keep her engaged in preserving and bettering her own community, and perhaps other communities around the world.

Editor’s note: Corinne Thatcher is like many students who spend time at Penn State, especially perhaps in Liberal Arts, and who leave with similar goals. Many keep such goals a part of their lives long afterward, but a certain few individuals end up spending a life in the service of those ideals, people like Liberal Arts alumni Anamaria Bulatovic, an emergency pediatrician with Doctors Without Borders, or Darvin Boyd, an executive in banking who lends his time and leadership to a range of community organizations in his hometown. Both people are recent winners of the College of the Liberal Arts’ Service to Society Award.
The College of the Liberal Arts established the Service to Society Award to honor those alumni whose lives uphold ideals of volunteerism and service, and whose contributions have enhanced the quality of life at the local, state, national, or global level. These contributions should significantly enhance the lives of people at one or more societal level and be provided outside the recipient's profession or vocation.

Back to top

TWO LIBERAL ARTS GRADS NAMED DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI

   Two of eight distinguished alumni recognized by the University last weekend are Liberal Arts Alumni. The DA award is the University’s highest alumni honor and is awarded by the Board of Trustees.
   Kenneth Frazier is senior vice president and general counsel of Merck & Co., Inc. Whitehouse Station, NJ—a research-driven pharmaceutical products and services company. Highly successful in the globally important business of Merck, Frazier not only volunteers with several educational and advocacy organizations, he also supports Penn State with time and resources. Frazier is responsible for Merck’s legal and public affairs functions and the Merck Company Foundation. He is also a member of Merck’s Management Committee, a senior management group that makes strategic company decisions.
   Frazier graduated from Penn State in 1975 with a B.A. in political science and earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1978. He regards his education as a determining influence in his life: “Penn State represents a period of transformation that influenced the rest of my life. I met people with so many different perspectives, and this helped me develop relationships and trust with diverse clients.”
   After graduating from Harvard, Frazier pursued a fourteen-year career as a litigation partner with private law practice Drinker Biddle and Reath, Philadelphia, joining pharmaceuticals giant Merck in 1992. He served as Astra Merck’s first general counsel and became vice president for public affairs for Merck in 1994, a post he held for five years. He influenced public opinion on behalf of a pharmaceutical company in a climate where health care is always changing and drug companies are not popular. Now, as senior vice president and general counsel, he oversees all legal affairs of Merck, which had 2002 sales of nearly $52 billion and net income of more than $7 billion.
   Active in numerous law-related associations and centers, he is also a founding board member of the Cornerstone Christian Academy, a private elementary school in Philadelphia, where many of the students are high-risk children. Together with his wife, Andréa, he is a longtime supporter of Penn State. In 1999, the couple established the Kenneth C. and Andréa W. Frazier Scholarship in the College of the Liberal Arts for students whose ethnic, cultural, or national background contribute to the diversity of the student body.
   Frazier is a superb role model for Penn State students: he participates in career exploration programs, where his eloquent and dynamic style is always well received, addresses large numbers of students and meets with students for mock interviewing and resume critique. His message is that education is the key to succeeding in both a career and living a responsible life. A role model for all students, Frazier is especially inspiring to young African Americans.
   A telling example of Frazier’s approach to life is his conviction that the most important challenge of his career was representing an innocent man on death row who had received an execution date. Says Frazier, “I had spent most of my career as a corporate lawyer, but he had an execution date set and he is now free, a married steelworker living in Alabama. Only my education, beginning at Penn State, allowed me to make this difference.”
   Kenneth and Andréa live in Newtown, PA, and have two children: Lauren and James.

    Peter M. Carlino is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Penn National Gaming, Inc., a Pennsylvania-based gaming and entertainment company. A native of Philadelphia, Peter graduated from Penn State in 1969 with a B.A. in General Arts and Sciences.
   Following graduation, he took a position with Penn Title Insurance Co., a family-owned underwriting insurance company based in Reading, Pennsylvania, becoming its President in 1972. He also served as President of Mountainview Thoroughbred Racing Association, predecessor of Penn National from 1972-1976, when he formed Carlino Financial Corporation as a holding company to own and operate various family businesses, including Mountainview. He served as President of Carlino Financial until 1983.
   Beginning in 1983, Peter left Carlino Financial to form the Carlino Development Group, which has built and operated residential and commercial real estate projects in central and eastern Pennsylvania. Projects have included planned communities and commercial office space that are still owned and operated by the company.
   Returning to what he thought would be a part-time position as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Penn National, he led the company’s IPO as Penn National Gaming in 1994. From a small public company with a single racetrack in central Pennsylvania, Penn National has become a diversified multi-jurisdictional owner and operator of gaming and racing properties throughout North America. Revenues have grown from $40 million in 1994 to what will be more than $1.2 billion in 2003. By 2001, Penn National Gaming made Fortune magazine’s 100 Fastest Growing Companies List, ranking fifty-eighth, and then jumping to twelfth in 2002.
   In both his development work and in the gaming industry, Carlino has found great satisfaction in creating economic opportunity and physical beauty. “Creating fantasy, a kind of adult Disney World, building and developing spectacular facilities has been a wonderfully satisfying opportunity in my life”.
   Carlino serves on the Board of Directors of The Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, where he and his wife, Marshia, have endowed a professorship in Inflammatory Bowel Disease. The couple has also honored Carlino’s late mother by establishing the Elizabeth Powers Carlino Nursing Excellence Award to recognize an outstanding nurse at the Medical Center each year. His mother, Elizabeth, was a registered nurse. He also serves on the Center’s Grand Destiny committee and each year he organizes the Governor’s Cup Golf Tournament which raises money to benefit Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Crohn’s Disease research at the Medical Center. Says Carlino, “We have contributed time and resources to Hershey because we have hoped to help in some small way those who suffer from these incredibly debilitating diseases. The most satisfying part of all this has been my re-involvement with Penn State, and the many dedicated people who do such spectacular work for the University and for the Hershey Medical Center.”

A LIFE OF LANGUAGES

   Kajal Patel, a College of the Liberal Arts student in international politics, misses her overseas education in Beijing, even though the work there was tough. Every morning, she woke up before 7 a.m. to attend a three-hour intensive course in Chinese. After that, she worked with a Chinese student tutor, followed by a half hour of individual sessions with a teacher. Even though the language program there was strict, Patel believes she walked away with a much stronger understanding of the written and spoken Chinese language. “I could do academic and real world things like hailing a cab without any problem.”
   Her ability to adapt to a different language makes sense. At home, she speaks Gujarati, an Indian language. When she was a little girl, her family lived in Africa and learned French and Swahili. In high school, she studied Latin and Japanese. And at Penn State, when she was offered the opportunity to study in China, she didn’t hesitate to say yes. She ascribes her long-time interest in languages to her upbringing. “My whole life I’ve been traveling and seeing the differences and similarities among various cultures.” Now, she is not only continuing to travel, but she’s also earning her B.A. in international politics in the Department of Political Science.
   Patel’s study abroad arose from a federally funded program, the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship offered through the Office of Education Abroad. This year, Penn State was awarded the most Gilman scholarships for a single campus on a national level, as well as receiving the largest number of awards since the launching of the Gilman program.
   “I know a lot of students have difficulty knowing what to do and what it’s like when you’re thinking about going overseas,” she says. “Advisers are busy and there are other peer tutors, but many students don’t use them as well.” She pauses momentarily as though searching for the right words. “You shouldn’t miss a chance to study abroad when you’re in college. Everyone should do it.”
   She believes that in the next few years, China promises to expand its influence on the international level. Kajal does not see her visit as a one-time adventure. She has bigger plans. “Maybe I’ll find work in China during the Beijing Olympics on 2008.”
   Now that she’s back in the United States, Patel worries about her ability to sustain the Chinese language. “I miss not having Chinese language classes every day. I’m afraid I’ll forget what I learned. I miss my friends. And I miss little things too, like knowing how to hail a cab on the busy streets.”