Students at Penn State Altoona will soon have the opportunity to learn more about human behavior and how it affects other aspects of their lives while developing marketable career skills or preparing for graduate or professional school. Beginning with the 2003 fall semester, students can enroll in one of the college's newest degree programs: the bachelor of arts or bachelor of science degrees in psychology.

The eight students and I have been sitting in the graveyard for an hour, facing an innocent-looking white church. We stare at a two-foot by two-foot opening in the side of the wall and glare at it like it's a television. Below it, as if someone had driven dozens of random nails into the side of the old building, are dark specs of guano—bat droppings. In the church's attic is the largest known maternal colony of little brown bats east of the Mississippi River and one of the largest in the United States—about 20,000 bats.

Noise echoed up to the third-floor classroom. Steel clanging. Yelled profanities. An occasional scream. The window framed stain-blackened turrets jutting from adjacent angles of the building into soft blue sky, and the Juniata River splayed with light, and between them, the chain-link fence crowned with concertina wire.