UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — For most, graduating college with a degree is a success on its own. But for Shalini Prasath, it’s just one of the many achievements she’ll walk away with by the time she leaves Penn State.
A fifth-year graphic design student in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School, and a Schreyer Scholar, Prasath has maintained a 4.0 GPA throughout her academic career, beginning at the Harrisburg campus. She enrolled at University Park her second year through the Schreyer Honors College.
Since then, she has interned at Black and Decker for two summers and studied Tamil design philosophy — the subject of her honors thesis — in India, thanks to a $5,000 Erickson Discovery Grant, awarded by the University.
“I am a proud Tamil Indian woman and I really do try to bring that into my work," Prasath said. "I always had the research thesis aspect lingering in the back of my head and that doing something in correlation with that culture was always the main idea."
For her thesis, she chose to define what Tamil design philosophy is, after a childhood mixed with Indian and American influence led her to notice how different the two are.
“I went and studied old temple architecture and observed daily life in villages, and drafted a list of things I noticed that were inherently more Tamil design," she said. "We’re very minimalist here [in the United States]; we love clean fonts and simplicity. That’s not the case over there."
She said she hopes that learning to identify a Tamil design philosophy will lead her to find a Tamil type structure that can be used to authentically digitize its type.
“The history of how it’s written is so vast. English has so many fonts like Times New Roman or Calibri; Tamil doesn’t necessarily have that. My initial study was learning about Tamil type and what that means,” she said.
Prasath expanded on this by breaking down the basics of the English language and focusing on its foundation.
“We [English speakers] have our own system of how we design a, b, c, and I was wondering if there was a way we could build that from a Tamil or Indian standpoint instead of using the principles for the American alphabet, because Tamil is completely different,” Prasath said.
While Prasath is fully immersed in studying graphic design now, her path was not always clear.
“I never really had a dream or aspiration of something to do when I was younger. I tried architecture, I studied music theory, but I was in that realm senior year being like I really don’t know what to do,” Prasath said.
When a friend mentioned that Shalini’s love of creating things like posters and brochures could be a career option, she decided to pursue a major in graphic design.
Once at University Park, Prasath developed her skills and was offered the chance to join the Black and Decker team for two summers. During the first summer, she was a graphic design intern working on the Amazon storefront page. Her second summer, she was an experiential design intern at the customer experience center in Towson, Maryland.
When it came time to think about her honors thesis, Prasath said she knew she wanted to combine her knowledge from Black and Decker with her love for her culture, which led her to apply for the Discovery Grant. She will present her research at the Penn State undergraduate exhibition on April 28, 2027.
Prasath said she is currently applying to grad schools but keeping her options open after graduation in May.
“My current dream is to work in the music/film industry as a creative director," she said. "Music and cinema are such big influences in my life. I want to give back to the art that helped me become the person I am today.”