This week’s featured campus celebrity is Tara Federoff, a senior political science and anthropology dual major here at IUP. Tara’s awesome and here’s why:
She’s involved in many activities on campus including Alpha Xi Delta Sorority, Gamma Sigma Alpha Honors Fraternity,Phi Gamma Mu Fraternity, Robert E. Cook Honors College, Anthropology Club, and Model EU.
Even through all of her involvement, Tara’s an outstanding student as she makes a regular appearance on the Dean’s List and she’s in the Anthropology honors track. Not only is she active on campus, but also within the Indiana community. Tara’s currently the first student in the town’s history running for borough council.
Through this position, Tara hopes “to give the students a voice in the town and make a more cohesive and involved community overall, bridging the gap between the town and the university to highlight all the positives of the students and university as a whole.” This student participation will allow new ideas to be brought to the council, making a huge difference on and off campus.
The impact Tara has made doesn’t end with Indiana, Pennsylvania. She has traveled abroad to Paris, lived and learned with the Kayapo tribe in the Amazon rain forest, and has visited 14 countries and 3 continents. This world traveler speaks three languages fluently (English, French, and Spanish). And get this- she can even speak a bit of Russian, Italian, and Portuguese!
After college, Tara plans to go to graduate school and continue her passion; she explains, “My dream job would be to work for the United Nations, working with environmental preservation or international peacekeeping. I also want to travel all around the world and experience every culture that I can while checking lots of items off my bucket list, meeting more people, and learning more languages!”
As for her success, Tara derives much of her inspiration from her parents. Her father was a firefighter and spent his life helping others until his passing in 2010. Her mother similarly helped others in her psychology profession until she became sick with cancer in 2012.
Tara describes them as “two of the most optimistic, selfless, and caring people I have ever known and if I can touch even half of the peoples’ lives that my parents have, I will consider myself a very lucky and blessed individual.”
She leaves other students with the following advice:
“Simply take life day to day and don’t try to plan everything out because you never know where you’ll end up anyway, just be thankful for every day you wake up. Also eat the second (or third or forth) cookie, life is too short not to.”