Category Archives: Campus Life

February 24, 2012 · 3:24 pm

Snow at Penn

Author: Kiera Reilly, C’93

I work for Penn, but I am based in our western regional office in Los Angeles. For the past few years, I’ve returned to campus in February for the Penn Alumni board and Global Alumni Network retreats. Last year, I flew in from Seattle after a Penn event there the night before, and our flight was delayed due to snow in Philadelphia. My colleagues flying with me were not thrilled, nor was everyone back at Penn, as about a week or so prior there was a huge snowstorm. Snow was still around making everyone miserable, and no one wanted any more.

But for me, I couldn’t have been happier. I love the winter and snow. I was born in New Jersey but moved to Texas when I was 12. When I decided to attend Penn for college, I looked forward to beautiful snow falling on the campus. Sadly, during my four years on campus, we barely had any snowfall. My senior year, as everyone was returning from Spring Break, we finally got some serious snow – enough to cancel flights and delay everyone’s return to campus.

So, when I was on campus two weekends ago, I was thrilled to be in a session with our Global Alumni Network volunteers in Huntsman Hall and see snow falling outside. It wasn’t sticking to the ground though, but it made me smile. Later that night, as I exited the Palestra after watching the Men’s Basketball team eke out a victory over Dartmouth, it was snowing again. I was with Melissa Wu, C’98, of PennClubLA,  and Beth Topor, W’80, of the Penn Club of Northern California. How fitting that three California Penn grads walked out to windy snow…and then desperately tried to find an available cab.

I didn’t get any pictures of that snow, since it was night, but I share with you below some photos from March 2009 that I took. Everything is so pretty when covered with snow!

Locust Walk in front of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

College Green (not looking so green...)

 

Furness Fine Arts Library

 

Ben Franklin Statue in front of College Hall

 

Shops on Sansom Street, including the now closed Black Cat

 

Birds chirping near the food trucks behind Meyerson Hall

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February 21, 2012 · 7:16 pm

Dressed in Red and Blue

Author: Stephanie Yee, C’08

As I was walking down Walnut Street yesterday, I couldn’t help but notice all of the red and blue clothing in the store windows. Stripes, polka dots, solids. So much red! So much blue! There is no better time to stock up on red and blue attire. You never know when you will want everyone in the room to know which team you are rooting for in the game of the year.

Red and blue striped "Fresh Prep Pencil Skirt" from Juicy Couture

Red and blue polka dot dress from H&M.

Detail...

Red pleated trench coat from Gap.

Blue straight leg jeans from Ann Taylor Loft.

Show your true Penn colors this spring season. Hurrah, for the Red and Blue!

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February 16, 2012 · 3:40 pm

The Locust Walk Experience

Author: Jonathan Cousins, SEAS ’14

One of the most iconic locations on Penn’s campus is Locust Walk, the bustling, beautiful, tree-lined central pathway through campus. Stretching from 34th to 40th, every Penn student has dozens if not hundreds of trips down this path. During the winter, lit globes fill the trees, and add a spot of light during the cold winter nights. But, there is another side to Locust, one that only shows itself in the middle of the day, during the prime walking hours. Fliers. The ultimate elevator pitch, various campus groups attempt to entice students into taking their sheet of paper, and ultimately attending their show or concert. The only problem is, most people don’t want anything to do with the fliers. Students have been known to use various tactics to avoid the sales pitches, from pretending to absorbed in their iPods and cell phones to just plain walking with their heads down.

Early on during my Penn career, I experience phenomenon, and it changed Locust Walk for me.  Suddenly, I had to make a tradeoff – take the scenic walk and deal with the fliers, or walk down Walnut and avoid it entirely? Fortunately, as an engineering student who lived in Hill and then Sansom West, my route to the Engineering Quad rarely required me to take this pathway. This was a relief, because I found the constant calls for attention to be on the annoying side, while at the same time feeling bad ignoring someone who is working hard to represent their event.

So, imagine how I felt when suddenly. Red and Blue Crew decided to sell Princeton basketball tickets on Locust Walk. As a prominent member of the Crew, I signed up to do my share of shifts, and immediately I was thrust onto the other side. Now, I was the one yelling my pitch across the Walk, hoping people would notice and take action. It was during this process that I discovered something: I truly enjoyed it. Every time someone came up to buy a ticket, or told me that they already had one, I knew one more person was hooked on Penn basketball. I got to really experience what the buzz on campus was like for that game, and it was exciting! And it also paid off in the end, as the Princeton game ended up drawing over 600 students.

Even more fun was the week leading up to the Harvard game, where we were giving tickets away. While other tables were desperately recruiting walkers, we had people coming up to us without provocation to ask about the free tickets. Overnight, the Harvard game became the place to be on a Friday night, and we drew 1,800 students – the largest number who attended in years!  So now whenever I take a stroll down Locust Walk and see people yelling about their group, I know how it feels. My saying “no” will have little to no effect on them, because that’s not what they are waiting for. They are waiting for a chance to connect with people who are excited about the same things as them, and it is this network of connections that makes Locust Walk, even at its loudest in the middle of the day, a beautiful place.

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February 13, 2012 · 12:26 pm

My Top Penn List: The Year of Did You Know… in Review

Author: Casey Ryan, C’93

The Penn powers that blog have played around with the schedule for this semester, which gave me an extra few weeks off from Frankly Penn.  I’m well-rested from the word-vacation; it was a nice change for the new year.  It also gave me some time to think about my next post.

In a prior post, I had mentioned that members of the Global Alumni Network (GAN) team, our Regional Club program, pen a weekly Penn fact-cum-update to our Regional Alumni Club Leadership – the Did You Know…  These are news stories or tidbits that underscore some of the outstanding work in study and research going on around campus as well as the notable contributions of our faculty, staff, and alumni at Penn and in the world at large.  These short articles are meant to bring the University a little closer to our alumni wherever they may be. To usher in my first post (and first My Ten Penn list) of 2012, I wanted to highlight my favorite “Did You Knows” of 2011, unedited.

10.          Robust Media System in Afghanistan, sent March 20, 2011

Did You Know… that the Annenberg School for Communication is involved with an effort to build a more robust media system in war-torn Afghanistan?

The Annenberg School’s Center for Global Communication Studies (CGCS) is helping to shape and execute a large scale United States Agency for International Development (USAID) effort to foster independent radio, create a supporting legal culture that can sustain a freer communications environment, and analyze what media approaches are most effective in sustaining democratic values. “We’ve assembled a distinguished team to design curricula and work with advocates, media management and regulators,” said Monroe E. Price, Director of CGCS. “This is an investment in the talent key to the operation of media in the future.”

This is the newest initiative to join the CGCS’s other Middle East-related projects including the Jordan Media Strengthening Program, the model for the current Afghan program.

For more information about the CGCS’s specific efforts in the Middle East, please go here.

9.            Global Warming Warning, from June 24, 2011

Did You Know… that Penn researchers link the fastest Sea-Level rise in two Millennia to increasing temperatures? An international research team including Penn scientists has shown that the rate of sea-level rise along the U.S. Atlantic coast is greater now than at any time in the past 2,000 years, and there is a consistent link between changes in global mean surface temperature and sea level. Benjamin Horton, associate professor and director of the Sea Level Research Laboratory, and postdoctoral fellow Andrew Kemp, both of Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences Department of Earth and Environmental Science conducted the study. Their work was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To view the press release, click here.

Check-out this Office Hours webinar by Professor Benjamin Horton by clicking here. Revisit Dr. Benjamin Horton’s discussion of the geophysical mechanisms behind earthquakes and tsunamis and the history of both in the context of Japan and the greater South/East Pacific.  Note: You must download the GoToMeeting Codec (G2M2 decoder) to view these recorded webinars. Visit www.gotomeeting.com/codec to download the codec.

8.            Penn in the Movies, from December 8, 2011

Did You Know…that Penn alumni wrote, produced, and directed several movies in the theaters? The Mighty Macs, tells the story of tiny Immaculata College winning the inaugural women’s NCAA basketball tournament in 1972. It was written/directed/produced by former Penn Football player Tim Chambers, C’85, and also produced by former Penn Basketball star Vince Curran, ENG’92, W’92. The Muppets, the first Muppets movie in several years, finds the Muppets fighting to save their theater. Todd Lieberman, C’95, and a Mask & Wig alumnus, is a producer on the film.  Mike Karz, C’89, W’89, and Class of 1989 president, produced New Year’s Eve, that shows how the lives of several couples and singles in New York intertwine over the course of New Year’s Eve.

Let’s go to the movies! Read about The Mighty Macs in the Daily Pennsylvanian. Read more about New Year’s Eve and see a video clip of Mike talking about the film here. Read more about Todd Lieberman and why his Muppet cameo was cut from The Muppets.

7.            ENIAC Day, sent February 11, 2011

Did You Know… that Philadelphia City Council has officially declared February 15 as “ENIAC Day,” celebrating the 65th anniversary of the historic computer’s dedication at Penn? The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC, was built to calculate ballistic trajectories for the Army during World War II. Under the direction of John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of Penn’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering (now the School of Engineering and Applied Science), construction of the 27-ton, 680-square-foot computer began in July 1943 and was announced to the public on February 14, 1946. ENIAC was the first electronic general-purpose computer and its six original programmers were all women.

To read more about ENIAC Day, visit this link. For further reading on ENIAC, go here.

6.            Helping the American Education System Address the Needs of Youth & Industry, from May 31, 2011

Did you know… that the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and the Penn Institute for Urban Research, co-hosted a two-day conference, “Preparing Today’s Students for Tomorrow’s Jobs in Metropolitan America: The Policy, Practice and Research Issues?”

Leading experts on education and policy-making came to campus to present strategies for innovation and planning to help the American education system address the needs of both youth and industry. In attendance was former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, C’65, who commented on the education system’s failure to train our student to fill positions in the job market. He noted that it takes careful planning to ensure that the education system prepares youth to learn the skills necessary for today’s workforce in order to maintain the US as economic power.  He emphasized this by stating that “the return on investment is to keep America great.”

For more information, visit this site.

5.            Penn’s Pulitzer Prize, from April 21, 2011

Did You Know…that Jennifer Egan, C’85, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel, “A Visit From the Goon Squad?”

Egan, Penn’s first alumna/us to win the Pulitzer for fiction, also won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle award earlier this year. Set mostly in the world of rock music business, the novel’s storyline moves away from a traditional structure by wandering from a one narrative thread; each chapter functions as a self-contained story. However, all of the stories are linked by a common set of characters and themes, that come together throughout the novel.

Egan read at the Kelly Writers House on during Alumni Weekend on May 14, 2011 at 4:00 PM.

For a video excerpt from Egan’s prior engagement at Penn, visit this site.

For more information from the Penn Current, visit this one.

4.            Color a Dinosaur, from July 7, 2011

Did You Know… that paleontologists from the University of Pennsylvania, as part of an international collaboration, believe they may have found a way to see dinosaurs in living color?

Scientists have detected traces of a dark pigment called eumelanin, a form of melanin, in ancient bird fossils through the use of intense X-ray beams. The research was conducted by an international team working with Phillip Manning, an adjunct professor in the School of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Earth and Environmental Science, and Peter Dodson, a professor in both the Department of Earth and Environmental Science and the School of Veterinary Medicine’s Department of Animal Biology.

Go here to read the Philadelphia Inquirer story, and here for the Penn News article.

3.            Soccer Playing Robots, from July 29, 2011

Did You Know… that the robots of Penn and Virginia Tech’s Team DARwIn recently won first place in the Humanoid Kid Size competition at the 2011 RoboCup tournament in Istanbul, Turkey? The soccer-playing robots, whose name stands for “Dynamic Anthropomorphic Robot with Intelligence,” were particularly skilled at the throw-in competition where a robot must pick up a soccer ball and throw it back onto the pitch.

Penn Engineering team members who traveled to the competition included Stephen McGill, Seung-Joon Yi (visiting faculty member); Yida Zhang, GEN’12; along with Jordan Brindza, ENG’10 GEN’11; Ashleigh Thomas, EE’13 GEE’13; Spencer Lee, ENG’14; and Nicholas McGill, EE’13 ENG’13 GEN’13, who are undergraduate and graduate students in the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory. For the competition, Penn developed the software framework that provided each robot with artificial intelligence (AI). This AI guided the robots’ walk, vision, and gameplay, among other things.

For more information on Penn’s victory, please see this link.

To watch a video of Penn’s DARwIn robots annihilating the Japanese team in the finals, please go here.

For more information on the RoboCup 2011 Tournament, please see this link.

2.            100th Ivy Win for Bagnoli, from October 27, 2011

Did You Know… that Penn Football’s victory over Yale in October 2011 was Head Coach Al Bagnoli’s 100th Ivy League win?  Only two other coaches have ever reached that number.  With the win the Quakers, (4-2, 3-0 Ivy) now have an 18 game winning streak in the League.

For a re-cap of the Penn – Yale game, see the Penn Athletics and Daily Pennsylvanian articles here and here.

Photo by Andrew Councill, The New York Times

1.            Zeke Emanuel, 13th PIK Professor, from August 11, 2011

Did You Know… that Penn named globally renowned bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel as its 13th Penn Integrates Knowledge professor? Emanuel will be the Diane v.S. Levy and Robert M. Levy University Professor and vice provost for global initiatives.  His appointment will be shared between the Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy, which he will chair in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, and the Department of Health Care Management in the Wharton School.

Emanuel, one of the world’s leading scholars of bioethics and health care, will be the inaugural chair of the Perelman School’s new Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy. Prior to coming to Penn, he served as the founding chair of the Department of Bioethics at The Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health since 1997 and was appointed as a special advisor for health policy to the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget from February 2009 to January 2011.

The Penn Integrates Knowledge program was launched by President Gutmann in 2005 as a University-wide initiative to recruit exceptional faculty members whose research and teaching exemplify the integration of knowledge across disciplines and who are jointly appointed between two schools at Penn.

Read the news release  here.

To read a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer, please see this link.

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February 7, 2012 · 4:42 pm

Penn Men’s Basketball Crushes Princeton 82-67

Author: Stephanie Y., C08

As a Penn Men’s Basketball fan, there are few greater feelings than when your beloved Quakers beat Princeton. The energy at the Palestra was unbelievable, and it was amazing to see the student section packed to the max! Hope to see you all this Friday at the Palestra when Penn takes on undefeated Harvard. There will be a few special guests in the student section, so be sure to come to the game! Students can pick up free tickets to the game this week on Locust Walk 11AM – 2PM. See you on Friday! Go Quakers!

Packed student section at the Penn vs. Princeton men’s basketball game!

Looking good, Quakers!

Final score at the Penn vs. Princeton men’s basketball game.

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January 27, 2012 · 8:36 pm

From Wharton to Drexel and Beyond

Author: Lynn Carroll, C’93

Do you recognize this guy?

Hint:  His name is Mario and he lives really close to Penn…

This sculpture can be found at 33rd and Market Streets, and is known by most as “the Drexel Dragon.”  The sculpture was created by alumnus Eric Berg, W’68, GFA’74.  You can see some of his other bronze sculptures nearby, such as an African warthog for the Philadelphia Zoo, a Sea Turtle for Camden’s Adventure Aquarium, and “Philbert” the pig at Reading Terminal Market. You can view his incredibly detailed, lifelike work here.  Eric is living proof that you can still earn a living as an artist, even if you got your first degree from Wharton!

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January 26, 2012 · 6:24 pm

Memories of Penn

Author: Wanchee Wang, C’83

My recent visit to Penn’s campus was on a beautiful, early spring day.  The lovely weather brought the students outside in full force and they thronged Locust Walk.  Tables were set up along on the Walk and students were loudly hawking tickets to dances, shows, and other campus happenings.  The atmosphere felt festive.  Maybe it was the bright sunshine but the buildings seemed spiffier than I remembered.  The student tour guide took us into Huntsman Hall, the new (at least to me, I associate Wharton undergraduate with Dietrich Hall) home of the Wharton undergraduate school.

It wasn’t until later that I realized its benefactor, Jon M. Huntsman, was the father of the former Republican presidential candidate and ambassador to China, Jon M. Huntsman, Jr.  The building inside is gorgeous, with polished wood interiors and state-of-the-art teaching equipment.  The place hummed with energy; as our tour group passed through the lobby, I could see students engaged in earnest discussion, meeting in the small conference rooms, or just studying.

At the admissions information session, I found out about some new things on the academic menu.  An interdisciplinary approach to academics is encouraged so students can take classes in any of the four schools, regardless of which school they are enrolled in.  There are more opportunities than in my day to pursue dual degrees such as international studies and business, management and technology, nursing and health care management, life sciences and management, computers and cognitive science.  This interdisciplinary approach makes a lot of sense in today’s rapidly changing economy.  There are some new majors, like criminology (which used to be part of the sociology department) and computational neuroscience.  Even with changes, some things remain: unusual majors that I remember from thirty years ago, like history and sociology of science, or biological basis of behavior, are still offered.

It is a university that has gotten better with time and a part of me wishes that I could go to Penn again.

Locust Walk, Spring (courtesy of University Communications)

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January 23, 2012 · 7:10 pm

Rainy Days and Mondays

Author: Kayleigh S. C’13

Not only is today our first Monday of the spring semester, it’s also raining; an ungodly combination. However, I can’t help but feel excited because the semester is finally getting into full swing. I’m all settled in the classes I’m taking, meetings have started again for extra curricular activities, and (sadly) the work is beginning to pile on. As a junior, I am definitely used to this by now, but I also feel that each semester gives new, surprising challenges and opportunities to students of all class years, something I can’t help but feel eager for. So even though it’s a pain to bundle up, grab my umbrella, and head out in the rain to class, deep down, I just can’t wait to see what this semester brings me. Personally, I have a lot to look forward to: Fling, Hey Day, and hopefully an awesome summer internship. Therefore, I refuse to let this little bit of rain and cold get me down!

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January 19, 2012 · 4:38 pm

Want to Win $10,000 and Save Lives by Using Your Cell Phone?

Author: Kelly Porter O’Connor

Thanks to the MyHeartMap Challenge team, an interdisciplinary group of Penn researchers, behind this six week long crowd-sourcing contest — now you can!

Led by Raina Merchant, assistant professor of Emergency Medicine and senior fellow in the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and Eric Stone, C’99, WG’07,  The My HeartMap Challenge team has developed a free app you can install on your mobile phone.

Participants will take photos and geotag these life-saving Automated External Defibrillator (AED) devices to collect data for an updated app linking locations of all public AEDs in the city with a person’s GPS coordinates to help them locate the nearest AED during an emergency.

The contest is just a first step in what the Penn team hopes will grow to become a nationwide, crowd-sourced AED registry project that will put the lifesaving devices in the hands of anyone, anywhere, anytime.  The project is modeled after the DARPA Network Challenge, a crowd-sourcing experiment in which social media users raced to be the first to submit the locations of 10 moored, 8-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations throughout the United States.

The stakes for the MyHeartMap Challenge are high: the person or team who finds the most AEDs during the contest will win $10,000, and their efforts could save lives in the critical minutes following cardiac arrest.  Many of you have probably read about recent incidents in Philadelphia where the use of an AED device has saved someone’s life.

AEDs are located all around us in plain sight –  at work, the grocery store, your Septa stop…All you have to do to participate is register online, download the app and start tagging. The contest and app launch at the end of January. With the launch close at hand, I encourage you to form a team to help kick-start this Penn based challenge, save lives and possibly win a huge chunk of change!

Check out the project’s website or friend them on Facebook to receive contest clues and learn more about the challenge and or find out more information about the value of these life-saving devices — used to restore cardiac arrest victims’ hearts to their normal rhythm.

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January 19, 2012 · 3:40 pm

My Trip to Columbia University

Author: Jonathan Cousins, SEAS’14

Last Friday, I went to see Penn Basketball play at Columbia. It is always a unique experience to watch your hometown team in another city.  For one thing, the crowd is rooting against you. It is especially hard to deal with by yourself, because if there is only one of you, you stick out.  At Columbia though, there were ten members of the Red and Blue Crew, and we were sitting right next to the Penn Band.  Between the two groups, we basically owned a corner of the gym. And, it was fun to have a bunch of us cheering against the majority of the pro-Columbia crowd. I also noticed that there were a lot of Penn alumni present, especially in the section right behind the Penn bench.

Getting to and from the gym was an adventure. We took Bolt bus from 30th Street Station to Penn Station in New York, and then rode the subway from there to Columbia’s campus. However, the gym is underground, and once you step on campus, it is not easy to find. I bought the tickets for the group ahead of time, and so I had to be the one to pick them up at Will Call Office.  I booked a bus that left at 3 PM and arrived at 5 PM, thinking that would give me plenty of time before the 7 PM tipoff.  I didn’t anticipate that my bus would leave an hour late, and I found myself scrambling to get to the gym on time.  In the end, I made it, arriving in plenty of time at 6:30.

The game remained close through the first half, with Columbia taking a small lead into the break.  We surged back at the beginning of the second half, and led by nine points with two minutes to go.  We watched the lead quickly evaporate due to poor fouls and turnovers. Columbia even had a chance to win the game with a three at the buzzes, but thankfully, it clanked off of the iron as the horn sounded. The final score was a close 66 to 64 with Penn winning. You can read the full press release here.

Tyler Bernardini hit four clutch free throws in the final minute Friday at Columbia. Photo courtesy Mike Mahoney.

On the way back home, our group stopped for pizza, and then took the long ride back to Philly. I really had a great time taking half a day and going on an adventure to another city. I got to get out of the Penn bubble, see another Ivy League campus and watch a Penn victory. I have also found that you get closer with the group of people that go on trips like this. In the future, I hope we find funding to send groups of students to the road games, Ivy or otherwise. Even if only 5-10 students went on each trip, if we took 3-6 trips a year, every season ticket holder would at least have the opportunity to go on one. This also discounts the bi-annual trips to Temple and La Salle, which are located right on the Broad Street Line. I hope these trips continue to exist, and expand in number, so that more people get to have the type of fun experience that we did.

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