Biography|Linda Yaccarino — She Took a Telecommunications Degree From This Carnegie Building

People who meet Linda Yaccarino as a New York advertising chief tend to skip the campus that trained her.

In 1985 she finished a bachelor's degree in telecommunications at Pennsylvania State University.

The classrooms sat in the Carnegie Building at University Park.

Andrew Carnegie gave the stone pile to the university in 1904. It opened as the campus library before the communications school took it over.

The college that occupies it now carries Donald P. Bellisario's name. That gift and renaming arrived in 2017, more than thirty years after she graduated.

She had grown up in Deer Park, on Long Island, the daughter of an assistant police chief and a civil servant.

Penn State was already one of the largest accredited mass-communications programs in the country.

The degree was not a finishing school for a later celebrity. It was a public-university course in how broadcast systems and audiences actually work.

The building is still on the University Park quad. A visitor can stand under the same columns that housed the journalism and telecommunications rooms of the mid-1980s.

Photo: Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons