The best way to get in touch with the Penn State Drupal community is with our Slack group. It can be found at https://psudug. slack.com/
Some of the members of our group also participate in the Drupal Higher Education circles. You can find that channel on the Freenode IRC network (irc. freenode.net) in #drupal-edu.
A good IRC / multi IM chat client for Mac OS is Adium - https://adium.im - and for Windows there are a number of good clients, see http://www. makeuseof.com/tag/top-7-free-irc-clients-windows-7/