Samuel Roter ’25 is a familiar presence on Muhlenberg’s stages — he’s been in six departmental productions. Most notably, he played Pierre in last fall’s musical, “Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812.” The cult favorite, which ran on Broadway for less than a year, was the best known of the departmental productions he’s been in. The challenge of performing in these more experimental, less commercially palatable shows has transformed his idea of what theatre can and should be.

“Almost all the shows I’ve done here have been unconventional,” says Roter, a theatre and chemistry double major. “That sort of shifted my thinking of what the theatre that I really want to pursue is, which is not necessarily the big musicals anymore, the escapist shows everybody does endlessly. … The theatre that I want to do is activist theatre, art that sparks conversations and inspires change. The first thing artists ask themselves is how their piece is relevant to the here and now. We don’t provide [the audience] the answers; we provide them the questions. That’s the power of activist theatre: It brings communities together and challenges them to reckon with the show’s themes and connect them to their lives.”

Roter is also a chemistry star: Since the summer before his sophomore year, he has worked in Associate Professor of Chemistry Sherri Young’s lab, which is trying to develop a drug that will reduce neuroinflammation — one of the many possible contributors to Alzheimer’s disease. Roter will present a poster about his work at the American Chemical Society National Meeting in San Diego this month. He spent last summer conducting materials chemistry research at the University of Michigan through the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates program; a paper he co-authored about that work was recently published in the scientific journal Langmuir. 

“There are so many applications [for chemistry],” Roter says. “I have developed a real love for early-stage drug development because of the opportunities I’ve had here, and I am excited to explore what may come next.”

Roter plans to take a gap year to work in the chemistry industry as he decides what to pursue next. He’s interested in graduate school for both chemistry and theatre, and ultimately, a future that includes both.

“When it comes to choosing a path, they’re always going to be a part of my life, and they also have a lot of transferable skills,” like being able to clearly present one’s scientific work or to use theatre to tell the stories of scientists that history has forgotten, he says. “The arts and sciences aren’t really separate. People want to separate them, but I think there’s a lot of overlap between them in that they inherently benefit from each other.”

As a junior in high school, Ibrahim Sidibeh ’25 dreamt that he was a psychiatrist helping a younger boy — so much so that the boy considered him a mentor and a father figure. “When I woke up I was like, ‘OK, this is my life’s purpose,’” he says. “Ever since then, I’ve been really interested in psychology.”  

That’s what Sidibeh chose as his major (plus a sociology minor), and he has fully immersed himself in the discipline. He collaborated with Connie Wolfe, associate professor of psychology, on research into the experiences of students of color at Muhlenberg. He is using that work as a springboard for his senior thesis and applying to doctoral programs in
clinical psychology.

Beyond academics, Sidibeh has joined the President’s Diversity Council and held leadership positions in the Black Students Association and the Men of Color Network, as well as coordinator positions with two Office of Community Engagement programs that take place within the Allentown School District. One, Lunch Bunch, educates middle school students on healthy relationships and consent. The other, Bow Tie Club, is a mentorship program for fifth-grade boys of color.

“I revamped the whole program [to include] what I would have wanted to learn as a little boy, especially in the society that we live in now,” he says. “My goal was to show them that as college men of color, we can embody our own ideals — being a man without the toxic [traits] of not being able to cry or express our own emotions.”  

Sidibeh’s leadership extends beyond structured programs: He is one of the founders of the new #GetMessy movement, which aims to create spaces for productive discourse about difficult topics on campus. The initiative is rooted in the idea that transformation comes from stepping outside one’s comfort zone, embracing failure, and allowing oneself to be vulnerable in the pursuit of growth. “We’re often afraid to fail, to be seen
as anything less than perfect. But real change — real learning — comes when we allow ourselves to ‘get messy,’” he says. “I want to create spaces where people feel safe to make mistakes, to grow, and to become better versions of themselves.”  

His impact, both on and off campus, earned him the Harry A. Benfer Memorial Scholarship, an award given to a rising senior “who promotes goodwill and who has an appreciation for all phases of college life.” It’s an honor his friends described as a “good person award,” a recognition he deeply appreciates.  

“I always just want to embody what I think it means to be a good person,” he says. “I want to lead with my heart first, and I’m proud and honored that people were able to see that.”  

Last fall, Maddie Davidson ’25 spoke on a panel with three other young leaders in sustainability at Bloomberg’s CityLab summit in Mexico City. The experience, which she remembers as surreal, was one in a series of “very, very good dominoes” Davidson set off in response to a prompt in a class she took during her very first semester at Muhlenberg.

It was Psychology of Creativity, a class that required students to identify a problem on campus and imagine how to solve it. Davidson had noticed the college didn’t compost its food waste, so she approached Professor of Biology and Director of Sustainability Studies Rich Niesenbaum to plot a course forward. He told her that the student-run sustainability organization enACT (short for Environmental Action Team) had tried to launch a composting program but that the entire club disbanded during the pandemic. He recommended she focus on reviving enACT.

“I ended up making a kickass project for this Psychology of Creativity class because I went beyond the mental exercise and actually produced a product that I still have something to show for,” says Davidson, who has been on the club’s executive board since she helped relaunch it in fall 2021.

Restarting enACT set a powerful trajectory for Davidson, who soon declared a major in sustainability studies — a more flexible path than the education track she’d intended to pursue. She remained interested in education, working for the Writing Center as a tutor and first-year seminar assistant, experiences that inspired her minor in creative writing and journalism. 

Many of the events Davidson helped plan with enACT had an educational angle. One semester, for example, enACT partnered with several organizations on campus for a series on fast fashion that began with a clothing swap. She also collaborated with the Office of Community Engagement and Nicole Tahmoosh ’24 to bring an environmental education curriculum to students at Allentown’s Muhlenberg Elementary School. She got involved with local politics, collecting hundreds of signatures to petition the Allentown City Council to allocate funds to hire a sustainability director for the city — and the council did.

“Under the right leadership and circumstances and on a city level, constituents have more power than we think we do,” she says. “I don’t think that’s a responsibility we should take lightly. As students, we have power.”

So, when Allentown became one of 100 cities around the world to receive funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies to distribute Youth Climate Action Fund grants, multiple people, on campus and off, thought of Davidson. She ultimately applied for and was awarded $5,000 to fund a tree science and stewardship project at Muhlenberg Elementary. Fifth graders took part in classroom activities and then in a tree-planting festival on the school’s front lawn, where they put in four new red maples.

“It was a good mix between getting up and active and framing the conversation around, ‘We are here because climate change is a challenge we’re all facing. Let me introduce you to trees!’” she says. “I made sure the learning was grounded in local, native trees. … You feel more protective over your front yard and your neighbor. The question was, how can we treat the trees like our neighbors?”

The Bloomberg CityLab summit was a result of that work — she was one of four Youth Climate Action Fund grant recipients from around the world who were invited to speak on the panel. At the summit, she was able to connect with and learn from government and nonprofit leaders from around the world, including some from Boston, where she hopes to land a sustainability-related job after graduation. (She admires the city and state’s commitment to climate action and knows it would be a good place to build her experience.) 

“I’m in a really unique position to be able to advocate for and alongside young people, getting a seat at the table and being part of these conversations about solutions, specifically around climate change,” she says. “It’s so cool, and it makes so much sense that I ended up in this arena.”

As co-captain, Evan Schlotterbeck ’25 helped lead the 2024 Muhlenberg men’s soccer team to the Centennial Conference championship game. The team also earned an at-large bid to the NCAA Division III Tournament, its second appearance in the tournament in the last three
years. Schlotterbeck’s final season as a Mule mirrored the success he has found off the field.

He chose Muhlenberg partly for soccer — he clicked with the team while conducting his college search — and partly for the liberal arts environment. In high school, he never found a subject that stood out as being more compelling than the others. He knew Muhlenberg would allow him to explore until he found his passion, and he discovered it as a first-year student in the introductory media and communication course, Media and Society.

“That was the first moment that I felt something different, what I hadn’t really felt in high school,” says Schlotterbeck. “The content, all the ideas we were sharing, the media we were engaging with — it was all very, very fascinating. I found myself thinking about it even in my own daily activities. I really made connections to things I had been learning in class.”

As a media and communication major, Schlotterbeck has thrived: Last fall, he was named the Centennial Conference men’s soccer Scholar-Athlete of the Year, a distinction presented to a member of the junior or senior class with the highest cumulative GPA on the All-Centennial team.
Schlotterbeck was the first Muhlenberg men’s soccer player ever to win the honor.

He has also had ample opportunities outside the classroom to utilize the media-making skills he’s learned in class. He has been a sports communication intern, working with Director of Athletic Communications Mike Falk to produce livestreaming events, update muhlenbergsports.com, and assist with graphic design. He has also worked on The Muhlenberg Weekly as a writer and, more recently, as the sports editor. His favorite stories to write have highlighted coaches: one introducing Travis Spencer, hired in 2023 to lead the new women’s wrestling team, and one saying farewell to Brad Hackett, who retired in 2024 after 25 years leading the cross country and track and field teams.

“Hearing all of the things he had to say, the wisdom he was instilling, you could tell he had been around a while,” Schlotterbeck says of Hackett. “It was a fantastic conversation. [After the story came out], he saw me and shook my hand and said, ‘Thank you.’ That went a long way.”

Despite his reporting experience, Schlotterbeck isn’t interested in a career in the tumultuous journalism industry. He intends to study strategic communication in grad school, where he can use a final year of athletic eligibility due to missing a season with an injury, and then to enter a field like marketing, public relations, or advertising. He feels equipped to consider a broad range of careers due to his well-rounded Muhlenberg education.

“I’ve been grateful to Muhlenberg for allowing me to pursue a lot of things, and that kind of allowed me to make [my time in college] what I wanted to make it,” he says. “With the media comm major, I’ve also had a lot of experiential opportunities. It’s been great to combine the two modes of learning to foster a very holistic experience.”

Emma Shay ’25 first took a psychology course in high school during a college exploration summer program. She knew immediately that it was for her and that she wanted to someday contribute to the field.

“The human mind is so interesting. There’s so much left unknown,” says Shay, a psychology major with minors in women’s and gender studies and Italian studies. “That’s part of how I knew that specifically, research was for me — thinking about how there’s so much that we don’t know.”

She chose Muhlenberg partly for its strong psychology program and partly for its small and supportive environment. The summer before her sophomore year, she took Psychology of Women online with Professor of Psychology Kate Richmond ’00. The prompt for her final paper was to look at the intersection between a marginalized group and a social issue through the lens of the psychology of women and gender. Shay chose to write about menstruation stigma among people who get their periods but don’t identify as women. Richmond suggested she expand the work into an independent research project and offered to be her advisor.

“The overarching theme of my story is being in a community where there are so many resources who are willing to help me thrive and professors who have reached out to me with opportunities,” says Shay, who has also conducted research at the invitation of Associate Professor of Italian Daniel Leisawitz. “The professors I’ve worked with want students like me to succeed.”

Under Richmond’s guidance, Shay conducted a literature review to see which gaps in knowledge she might be able to fill with her independent research. She chose to focus on non-cisgender individuals who menstruate, examining their attitudes toward menstruation and toward the menstrual cup, a reusable hygiene device. Last summer, she received the Crist Family Student Research Endowment in Psychology to collect additional data and complete a manuscript, which is now under review with the journal Women’s Reproductive Health. For her senior thesis, she’s adding a comparison group of individuals who identify as women. She ultimately plans to submit that to another journal.

Shay intends to pursue a doctoral program in social psychology, which she feels well prepared for: “You work directly with a faculty member to develop a project. The fact that I’ve been able to do that here at Muhlenberg has given me an advantage. I know that I will be ready for this sort of mentorship research opportunity because I’ve already done it for multiple years,” she says. “Within Muhlenberg’s small environment of very helpful and uplifting professionals and resources, I’ve been able to go farther than I would have thought possible.”