Briefs · Education and Upskilling
Penn State Honours Nine Graduates Who Refused to Wait Their Turn
Youth is not an excuse here. It is the qualification.
Penn State honoured nine alumni aged 35 and under with its Alumni Achievement Award on March 20. The ceremony took place at the Penn Stater Hotel and Conference Center. President Neeli Bendapudi presented the awards.
The award recognises extraordinary professional achievement early in a career. Recipients are nominated by their colleges and invited back to share their work with students.
Julia Cecchetti, class of 2020, designs advanced chemical rocket engines at Impulse Space in California. She previously worked on SpaceX’s Dragon and Starship programmes. She holds a NASA Early Career Achievement Medal and graduated as valedictorian of the Behrend School of Engineering.
Matthew Kapelewski, class of 2012, directs chemistry at Orbital, an artificial intelligence startup in Princeton, New Jersey. His teams develop advanced materials for carbon dioxide capture and energy-efficient cooling. At Penn State, he led fundraising that raised over $370,000 for children with cancer.
The other honorees span nursing, journalism, food science, health policy, public health, investment, and vaccine manufacturing. Seven of them joined students for dinner the night before the ceremony.
The lesson is not that success arrived early. It is that it arrived on purpose: bright, bold, and barely thirty-five.
Read the original at Penn State Hazleton
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