We need your help to ensure the college’s success! Making an investment in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, whether through scholarships that help afford access to a college education or through support for engaged scholarship programs that prepare students for life after college, or through support for faculty that allow our college to attract and retain the brightest and best, your support is vital.
Honors Scholarship: $50,000
These scholarships are a critical component of the aid packages provided to Schreyer Scholars, helping us to compete with other leading honors programs and universities in attracting the highest performing undergraduate applicants. An honors scholarship may be targeted to Schreyer Scholars in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences.
Undergraduate Scholarships: $50,000
This type of endowment offers donors the opportunity to shape a scholarship that expresses their passions and values by indicating multiple criteria for recipients: rewarding student leaders or academic achievers from a particular community, for example, or supporting students in a preferred major who also share other aspects of the donor’s background.
Destiny Scholarships: $50,000
These scholarships help Penn State fulfill its land-grant mission by assisting students who are unlikely to enroll and remain at the University without significant financial support. They are awarded to first-generation college students who show clear academic promise.
Enrichment Scholarships: $50,000
By supporting underrepresented groups of students, this scholarship helps Penn State to create a vibrant and diverse academic community in which all individuals — regardless of ethnicity, gender, or other personal characteristics — can achieve their full potential.
Renaissance Scholarship: $30,000
Recipients of Renaissance Scholarships are chosen from among the top students with the greatest financial need, regardless of academic major or other criteria. Donors may establish Renaissance Scholarships as University-wide or for a particular campus. Students who continue to meet eligibility requirements can maintain their Renaissance Scholarships throughout their Penn State careers.
Awards: $20,000
Award endowments allow donors to recognize the extraordinary achievements of Penn State students and encourage new levels of academic excellence.
Penn State graduate students are tomorrow's leaders in education, business, science, engineering, the arts, and other professions. At Penn State, doctoral students collaborate with faculty on research while serving as instructors and mentors to undergraduate students. Advancements in promising areas of knowledge that are the future of the colleges, the University, and the nation begin with graduate students.
- Graduate fellowships provide indispensable financial support that assists Penn State in its efforts to recruit competitive students, nationally and internationally, and allows those students to focus even more intensively on their studies.
- Graduate research awards assist graduate students as they develop research projects that have the potential to transform their fields.
Distinguished Graduate Fellowships: $400,000*
Awarded to outstanding research doctorate (Ph.D.) applicants across the University, these fellowships are among the most competitive forms of support available to Penn State’s graduate students.
Graduate Fellowships: $400,000*
Competition for quality graduate students is intense, and high-quality students are increasingly discerning in their choices of graduate institutions. In this environment, gifts for graduate fellowships help Penn State to recruit and retain the highest-achieving, creative, and innovative advanced-degree candidates. Covering tuition and/or basic living expenses, including health care benefits, endowments for fellowships ensure that graduate students remain focused on their studies rather than the cost of education.
Graduate Scholarships: $250,000*
These funds can enhance an emerging scholar’s Penn State experience and future career by supplementing other financial awards, enabling individual scholarly projects, supporting travel for research and professional conferences, and recognizing achievements that have special meaning to the donor and to the greater world.
Graduate Research Awards: $50,000*
Research is an integral part of graduate education. With their combination of energy, curiosity, and ambition, graduate students ask probing questions, pursue in-depth levels of investigation that often produce critical insights, and generate new innovations. These gift funds provide monetary support to graduate students for expenses related to conducting research that is considered part of their graduate program requirements.
Graduate Awards: $20,000*
Graduate awards are designed to provide recognition to students for a singular accomplishment. Gifts for graduate awards afford Penn State’s Graduate School, through the support of donors, the opportunity to recognize excellence among our graduate students.
Endowed faculty positions are among Penn State’s most important resources for developing and sustaining a strong faculty. Such positions provide honor and recognition for the men and women who hold them, but they also provide something more important: a stable, dependable source of income for special teaching and research materials, library acquisitions, salary supplements, and travel assistance.
Dean’s Chair/Chancellor’s Chair: $5,000,000
The endowment of a dean’s or chancellor’s chair represents a landmark commitment, ensuring that the most visible and important positions in colleges/campuses are held by distinguished and talented leading scholar-educators.
Department Head Chair: $3,000,000
This gift provides flexible support for departmental leadership in the form of strategic investments that benefit not only the individual professor, but also the teaching, research, and service of the entire department.
Faculty Chair: $2,000,000
Typically conferred upon the most distinguished scholar-teachers, the endowment of a chair provides a professor with resources to continue promising research and programs, helping departments to attract or retain top faculty who are esteemed as mentors, direct important initiatives, and contribute significantly to the University’s mission.
Professorship: $1,000,000
An endowed professorship offers resources necessary to pursue new lines of research or innovative teaching methods, ensuring the stability and strength of our academic programs and allowing Penn State to encourage new levels of achievement among its most promising faculty.
Early Career Professorship: $500,000
This endowment offers early recognition and additional support for outstanding young University faculty. It is designed to rotate every three years to a new recipient, and it offers deans and campus executives the opportunity to recruit and retain rising academic stars.
Academic Departments: $5,000,000 and more*
Academic departments are the core of the College of Earth and MIneral Sciences, encouraging disciplinary rigor and providing intellectual homes for our students and faculty. Naming an academic department is the best way to ensure that a program has the resources and flexibility it needs to lead the way for its students and its peers in education, research, and service.
Academic Centers and Institutes: Various Levels
By naming an academic center or institute, donors can accelerate our progress in addressing urgent global issues and encourage the interdisciplinary collaborations.
Lectureships: $100,000
Lectures by visiting speakers reinvigorate dialogue on our campuses, connect our students with leaders in a vast range of fields, and attract the attention of the public and the media to the academic community at Penn State.
Research Funds: >$50,000
Research endowments have the potential to yield tangible benefits beyond the college and University and are particularly vital in nurturing the work of junior faculty-researchers who may have special promise and vision but face difficulty in securing funds from conventional corporate and government sources.
Program Support: $25,000
Through program endowments, donors can support activities as diverse as undergraduate research and study abroad,
Whether through endowed funds that will provide for the continuous technological improvement of laboratories and classrooms, or leadership gifts to provide for new facilities for a growing enrollment, your gift will make a substantial and important impact on the college.
Naming Opportunities
- Steidle Building was completed in June 2016 and naming opportunities are still available
- Plans are currently underway for Hosler Building renovation and naming opportunities are available
You can give online to specific EMS units: