UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa — During her first year at Penn State, Nora Van Horn lived down the hall from that year’s Liberal Arts college marshal — Brendan Bernicker, class of 2019 in philosophy and political science. Sure of what she wanted to do in the future but unsure of which majors would get her there, Van Horn sought Bernicker's advice.
“He talked about how in college it’s not about what you study, but it’s about what you learn,” the Paterno Fellow and Schreyer Scholar said.
Now, Van Horn is graduating this May with degrees in philosophy, Chinese and global and international studies and has been selected to represent the College of the Liberal Arts as its spring 2022 college marshal at the commencement ceremony on May 7. Van Horn will attend Harvard Law School to pursue a career in environmental law after graduating.
“I remember going to all of these [previous] Liberal Arts graduations and looking at the marshal and thinking, ‘They are so cool,’” Van Horn said. “It’s truly an honor to be amongst so many people that I’ve admired throughout my college career.”
PHIL 133N The Ethics of Climate Change was one of the best classes she has ever taken, said Van Horn — this is the course that made her interested in philosophy and the College of the Liberal Arts in general. She said she had coasted through large STEM-based courses with ease, but this philosophy class challenged her in a way that those bigger classes hadn’t. With Chinese, she had taken Mandarin in high school and planned to continue at Penn State. Her global and international studies degree goes hand-in-hand with her Chinese degree, she added.
“I took Chinese 3 my freshman year. The professor pulled me aside after class one day and was like, ‘Wow, you’re really bright and you’re into this — you should apply to this fellowship, and you should consider studying abroad,’” she said. “That experience really demonstrated to me how much professors genuinely cared about my success.”
A Loretto, Pennsylvania, native, Van Horn said experiences in her rural Pennsylvania hometown influenced her career aspirations and interests. During a fracking boom in the early 2010s, Van Horn’s family was approached about fracking in the surrounding area.
When a natural gas company purchased the naming rights for Van Horn’s local minor league baseball team, she said it was “paradoxical to see the rhetoric surrounding the naming right purchase. Through that, I started to see how corporations and institutions were able to change community discourse to benefit themselves by using money. I think that in combination with being in high school, feeling morally obligated to do something about the climate crisis motivated me to seek that intersection [in law school] and acknowledge that climate change is this huge, devastating global issue, but also within our community."
Overall, Van Horn said there’s a “moral and ethical obligation to look at our systems, see the injustices, and do work to amend them.”
Throughout her years at Penn State, Van Horn has served in the Student Sustainability Advisory Council and as the director of sustainability for the University Park Undergraduate Association. She also led the creation of the University Park Student Fee Board’s Environmental Sustainability Fund.
Moreover, Van Horn has been heavily involved with anti-violence advocacy work on campus. She was a member of the Schreyer Gender Equity Coalition and was a student panelist in November at Penn State’s “Town Hall Addressing Sexual Misconduct.” She was also recently recognized as a Rock Ethics Institute 2022 Stand Up Award winner for her anti-violence advocacy work.
“To be able to look at community discourse and challenge it to move forward, I’ve been very proud of that,” she said.
Van Horn said it’s been fulfilling to see younger students evolve into confident individuals who are willing to “tackle big issues themselves.”
“It’s been really rewarding to work with students who are younger and remind me a little bit of myself … and saying what I wish someone would’ve told me, like, ‘You’re awesome,’” Van Horn said. “‘This is an opportunity for you to step up to the plate and lead.’”
And to current students, Van Horn encourages them to work to create change themselves. She said it’s easy to imagine that issues like poverty, violence and climate change are happening “somewhere else,” and people are often encouraged to visit a different community to volunteer.
“Volunteering is great, but I also think that there’s a need for citizenship," she said. "There’s a need for us to look at our own community, our own processes ... and be encouraged to participate meaningfully."
“By creating change in our community, we can really create this domino effect and a better, more just and more fair world," said Van Horn. "We’re capable of doing that by being citizens, by being engaged in institutional decision-making, and by thinking critically about the issues that occur in our community.”