UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Inspired by the memory of her parents and her pivotal years at Penn State, Smeal College of Business graduate and University Libraries Volunteer Tanya Seyfert has made an estate commitment to establish a total of five endowments. Her gift will include scholarships for students who are affiliated with the military or who participate in work-study at the University Libraries, helping to make a Penn State degree more affordable and accessible. Seyfert’s estate commitment will also provide resources for Libraries leadership to build its collections, pursue urgent priorities and more.

“Students can’t focus on their studies if they’re constantly worrying about making ends meet,” Seyfert said. “That can lead to terrible tradeoffs and missed opportunities. My hope is that my gift can ease some of those financial pressures, and, at the same time, strengthen the University Libraries as a place that serves students from all academic backgrounds.”

Approximately one third of Seyfert’s gift will be directed to create the Tanya M. Seyfert Military Student Scholarship in Educational Equity, which will provide scholarships to undergraduates with demonstrated financial need who have served in the United States military, or who are the spouse or child of someone who served in the armed forces, including veterans, reservists, active-duty personnel and members of the National Guard. The gift reinforces Penn State’s commitment to military-connected families and the financial support that is key to guiding students from enrollment to graduation. 

“Students from military backgrounds often face a unique set of obstacles to realizing their educational aspirations,” said Eugene McFeely, senior director for Veterans Affairs and Services. “For many of them, the University may be the first place that really feels like home after their service, but that feeling can be thrown in jeopardy if they are facing financial insecurity and have to worry about whether they can cover the cost of tuition and housing. I am deeply grateful that Tanya Seyfert has come forward with this extraordinary act of generosity to support students who feel these financial pressures most severely.”

The remainder of the gift will create four endowments to be housed in the University Libraries. These include:

• The Tanya M. Seyfert Open Educational Resources Endowment, which will provide resources to purchase textbooks and other course materials through the Open Educational Resources program. With a proven track record of promoting affordability, the program facilitates free access to information in the public domain or released under open copyright license.
• The Tanya M. Seyfert Dean’s Excellence Endowment, which will empower the University Libraries dean to pursue urgent priorities, including covering the purchase of books and materials, student and staff wages, preservation supplies and equipment, new technologies and special activities like hosting expert guest speakers.
• The Tanya M. Seyfert Collections Endowment, which will place a special emphasis on collecting and preserving items for the German Collections.
• The Tanya M. Seyfert Scholarship in the University Libraries, which will offer scholarships to students in the library’s work-study program, with first preference going to students associated with the military.

“Tanya is an incredible supporter of the University Libraries with a keen understanding of the challenges we face and our tremendous potential for growth,” said Faye A. Chadwell, dean of the University Libraries and Scholarly Communications. “What makes her gift truly extraordinary is that it was designed to ensure we have the resources and flexibility to meet these challenges and to build our collections in ways that make them more widely accessible to all Penn Staters, regardless of their economic circumstances.”

Tanya Seyfert was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1965, but only six weeks later was whisked away by train to Montana, where her father, Roger, a career service member in the Air Force, was stationed. By the time she graduated high school, she’d lived in nine places, including multiple deployments overseas. As Seyfert pondered her options for college, her father, also a Pennsylvania native, encouraged her to give Penn State a visit. More drawn at the time to Florida State University, Seyfert did so only begrudgingly — and instantly fell in love with the campus at University Park.

“As a military brat, I’d been uprooted so many times, so Happy Valley was the first place that finally felt like my hometown, where I could make friends that could last a lifetime — and that’s exactly what happened,” Seyfert said. “I still have season tickets to the football games, and it’s just such a joyful opportunity every year to reunite with my roommates, friends and many Penn Stater family members all these decades later.”

Seyfert graduated from Penn State with a bachelor's degree in finance from the Smeal College of Business in 1987, but when she moved to Manhattan and applied for a job at a large finance company, she was dismayed by what she found. Male applicants with the exact same education and credentials as her were taken on as business associates on the trading floor as she and two other women were hired as receptionists and data-entry clerks, she said.

Unwilling to remain under a glass ceiling, she relocated to Dallas, Texas, and, after a brief stint doing financial planning on commission, took a job in a property management division, where she climbed the ranks into executive leadership. Today, she is a managing director at Cushman & Wakefield, a global commercial real estate services provider. As her career took off, she also earned an MBA in finance from the University of Maryland in 2000.

Years later, when Seyfert began to think about ways to give back to the University, she drew on firsthand knowledge of the financial challenges faced by military families.

“It’s an extremely honorable vocation, but the reality is that enlisted folks don’t typically make a lot of money,” she said. “In my case, I had Pell Grants, I had loans, I did work-study running a mimeograph machine and behind the camera counter at the Penn State Bookstore — basically I leveraged every resource I could muster to be able to afford college. In a very practical sense, I wanted to create a scholarship for students connected to the military because I’ve walked in those shoes, and I know how difficult it can be to for families to pay their tuition bill each semester.”

Alongside having a measurable impact on students, Seyfert wanted to pay tribute to her family’s own legacy and sacrifices.

“My father spent 30 years in the Air Force and reached the highest rank possible — chief master sergeant — for an enlisted serviceman,” Seyfert said. “His specialty was meteorology, back when they still had to meticulously color in the maps by hand, and he used that expertise to run weather stations in Germany and Vietnam. And even after he retired from the Air Force, he joined the National Weather Service and did the same thing for quite a few years in Alaska and Texas. His commitment to service and lifelong learning is one of the things I really wanted to honor by creating this scholarship.”

It was in Germany that Seyfert’s father met the woman who would become his wife, Gudrun, a native of Grafenwöhr in eastern Bavaria, who was working on the U.S. military base in snack bar shop as a clerk. As a nod to her mother’s background and heritage, Seyfert chose to designate one the funds she created in the University Libraries to acquiring collections related to the rich historical German influence on Pennsylvania.

During her own college years, Seyfert admits she often skipped the library to study at the Roy Rogers in downtown State College, with its bottomless salads and soft drinks, but she always treasured the resources and spaces made available at the library. Now, after a decade of service as a member of the library’s alumni outreach group, she recently joined the development board of the University Libraries as a way to deepen her volunteerism and efforts aimed at mobilizing greater support.

“My parents and my Penn State education are really the two factors that empowered me in life and in my career,” Seyfert said. “I know I’ve been handed fantastic opportunities, so by making this gift, my hope is that I can lift up future generations of Penn Staters as they work hard to succeed. My parents passed along that spirit of generosity, and it truly means a lot to me that I can pay it forward.”

Donors like Tanya Seyfert advance the University’s historic land-grant mission to serve and lead. Through philanthropy, alumni and friends are helping students to join the Penn State family and prepare for lifelong success; driving research, outreach and economic development that grow our shared strength and readiness for the future; and increasing the University’s impact for families, patients and communities across the commonwealth and around the world. Learn more by visiting raise.psu.edu.