UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Each student finds a different path to involvement at Penn State. For Paterno Fellow and Schreyer Scholar Maria Fleck, the College of the Liberal Arts has been deeply tied to that path. Maria will graduate on May 4 with bachelor of arts degrees in French and Francophone studies and letters, arts, and sciences.
Maria’s interests in research and her studies of the French language led her to serve as a research assistant in the Penn State Center for Language Science. There, she served alongside a team that studies syntax and semantics of Romance languages. Fleck also chose to mentor other students in her department. This past spring break, she participated in an embedded course trip to Paris through FR/JST 197 France and the Holocaust in Film and Literature.
Service formed a large part of Fleck’s academic career, where she also took a position as outreach director for the TETRA THON organization. This allowed Fleck to take a more specific role within one of the largest events on campus and the largest student-run philanthropy.
In addition, Fleck served students outside her major by giving back to the College of the Liberal Arts as a whole. Throughout her time at Penn State, she took on a variety of different roles, all with this end.
As an involved member of Liberal Arts Envoys, Fleck was tasked with being a student representative and a “face” for the college. She was able to engage with prospective and current students, and even alumni as the co-president of the organization. All along, Fleck helped participate in outreach for her organization and represented each component of her Penn State experience with pride.
She was able to engage more specifically with alumni as the student representative for the Liberal Arts Alumni Society Board of Directors. In her position as a representative, she advocated for the student perspective in the community of a large college, with an even larger alumni network.
For one final time, Fleck has been chosen to represent her peers in the College of the Liberal Arts. This time, she will take on commencement as her department’s student marshal. Fleck described the knowledge she gained as a diverse perspective that will allow her “to learn in any environment.”
After graduation, she hopes to take the skills she has crafted to the graduate level in forensic linguistics.
Fleck has familiarized herself within many student experiences in the past years, and her main advice to undergraduate students deals with recognizing and seizing the opportunities that education provides. Fleck encourages students to gather knowledge and advice from everyone they meet and to always give their best effort. She summed this attitude up in one sentence: “Do the best you can, and you will succeed.”
This is the fifth in a series of stories on the 22 student marshals representing the College of the Liberal Arts at the spring 2019 commencement ceremony.