Scholar pitched in to boost residence hall recycling efforts
5/3/2012
By Megan Dutill '13
College Relations Intern
Note: This week, the Schreyer Honors College is showcasing five Schreyer Scholars who are members of the spring 2012 graduating class. A women’s hockey player who has attacked her studies and her activities with the same zeal she’s shown on the ice. A student who is completing the requirements for so many majors (four) along with a graduate degree that he has had to complete his graduation forms the old-fashioned way – on paper – because the computerized system doesn’t have enough fields to accurately reflect his academic record. A budding physicist who found time to complete two honors theses in between spending a summer in Switzerland working on the collider and competing on Penn State’s ultimate Frisbee team. A geography major who fielded marriage proposals while conducting her thesis research in Africa. And an environmental advocate who is leaving Penn State and its residence halls a bit greener than when he arrived on campus. Today: Matt Kaslow, the environmental advocate.
Throwing away one battery has the potential to dilute four people’s lifetime water supplies.
When Schreyer Scholar Matt Kaslow read that fact as a freshman, he decided it needed to be shared.
“It’s important to protect the resources that sustain your life,” he says. “If you think about the problems this world faces – disease, hunger, war, class, justice – those problems can’t exist, if there aren’t people alive to have those problems. If we don’t preserve the world we’re in, nothing else is going to matter. And we’re so incredibly lucky to be here to begin with, it’s not right to take advantage.”
So he sent an email to everyone in his contacts list – including the Schreyer Honors College’s coordinator of student programs, Donna Meyer.
It “snowballed” from there as Meyer encouraged him to draft a proposal outlining initiatives to increase environmental awareness on campus. While those ideas were never carried out, the proposal was the first step in connecting him with likeminded people and starting what would be a four-year involvement with campus sustainability and environmental awareness efforts.
The next year, the position of sustainability chair within the Association of Residence Hall Students was created just for him. “The position of sustainability chair didn’t exist, and so I had to define what it was,” Matt says. “I interpreted it as helping the community live more sustainable lives, and so I would try to come up with as many programs as possible to help execute that mission.”
One such program, which he describes as “the most personally rewarding,” was teaching more than 250 elementary school children last spring about protecting the environment. Matt and several other students from the ARHS visited the first-and second-grade students with crafts and a child-friendly presentation. They made model fish and planted flowers in clear vials so the kids could watch them grow.
“The kids were really excited and enthusiastic when we came in,” Matt says. “After we did that, they brought us back, and we got to work with the entire school. That was fantastic, and everybody loved that program.”
While Matt worked to raise awareness and environmental consciousness, he also had the opportunity to help create and implement sustainable practices on campus. He has worked with the Campus Sustainability Office since last summer, doing everything from editing web pages to researching new programs and writing business plans.
“It was one of the first times that I felt like the job I had was making a real difference,” Matt says. “It’s not a rigid position, so I can take something I’m interested in and really go with it and turn it into something that’s valuable for them.”
“To work with Matt is to work with someone who’s tremendously efficient and very reliable, so when you ask him to do something, he does it – extraordinarily well and at a high quality,” says Erik Foley-DeFiore, the director of the Campus Sustainability Office.
When they were working on introducing composting and expanding recycling through the No Can Do program, for example, Foley-DeFiore says Matt “really made a huge difference in giving us more specific information, the cost and benefit in real numbers. He talked to all these people and got their numbers for various cost items, and worked out a great spreadsheet with all these tables on it. We still refer to it.”
But Matt hasn’t stopped with campus efforts: He’s researched the academic side of sustainability, too. While he’s an accounting major in the Smeal College of Business, Matt is earning honors in English for his thesis studying the effect of literature on attitudes towards sustainability.
“It was enlightening in terms of seeing the way people think and feel about sustainability,” he says. “It offered me the opportunity to see what kinds of background values influence the way they feel. For instance, if they have a strong sense of loyalty to the town they’re living in, they’ll do more to protect it.”
Last year, Matt won the 2011 Scholar Involvement Award, given to the student who has made the biggest contribution to the Schreyer Honors College community through extracurricular activities. Matt’s involvement on campus extends far beyond sustainability efforts: He has chaired the Honors College Literary Committee, which selects books for the college’s Summer Reading Program, and served on the SHC Speaker Series, helping to bring guest lecturers such as author James McBride to Penn State. He has also been a team leader for SHO TIME, the college’s fall orientation, and actively involved with Springfield THON, one of teams for the Penn State Dance Marathon that has strong ties to the Honors College.
He plans on continuing his involvement with the community and sustainability by going to Temple Law School and studying to become an environmental lawyer, with the goal of one day influencing environmental policy.
“As proud as I am of doing well in studies, I came to realize what matters more to me is making an impact on the people around me and the community that I live in,” Matt says. “It’s taught me the difference that one person can make, and the responsibility that everyone has. We should take every opportunity we can to try to give back, so that other people can have the gifts we’ve received.”