Hi, this is Simmy Gramolini here for EducationUSA and today I'm talking with Maxine Mendoza,
a representative of the University of Pennsylvania
Thank you for coming for talking with us today. Thank you for having me.
So what about UPenn in terms of undergraduate admissions
for the international student
I know you're a very big research-oriented
facility and you have a very large student body, good funding and everything so what kind of opportunities
do you have for undergraduate students involved different kinds of research?
Sure, so as far as
the size of our university, so our undergraduate student population is just under
ten thousand,
so by US standards that actually makes us about a medium-sized
university.
And you're right that we are primarily a research university,
research is something that certainly draws a lot of our applicants to Penn
and I think one of
things that they know that they will receive at Penn
is an incredible amount of access to those opportunities.
We tell students that they can get involved in research
as early as their freshman year
and research sort of happens all over campus but really the center
of research
is a place known as CURF
which has an incredible website
and which stands for the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowship
so this is a center on campus and you might notice the word "undergraduate "
in the title of this center and it's a place where students
can go and meet with the staff and the faculty there and the advisors and talk about their interests
interests and staff there will work to connect them with research opportunity
whether it is
doing medical research in one of our labs on campus, our many labs ,
or whether it's more arts-orientd research. There's also a lot of funding
for our undergraduate students to take on their own projects so undergraduate
research grants that they can apply to
as well as many internships
throughout the city, in New York, and also abroad that they can apply for.
Fantastic! We talked a lot about
research and everything
but how exactly does it work for the arts programs?
I know a lot of big funding goes into research
and that's where a lot of people focus
but with such a big school I'm sure you have great programs in arts, in music, in all different types of fields.
So within our liberal arts school, which is the College of Arts and
Sciences, we certainly have fabulous departments. We have the department of fine art,
the department of
visual studies which is an interdisciplinary major focusing on
sort of the culture of
seeing,
we have a fabulous art history department
as well and a music department .
But for a student, certainly being in a city like
Philadelphia
just opens up a whole world for them. We have incredible resources
on our campus, we have world class museum s our students are involved in,
so Philadelphia Museum of Art,
the Barnes Foundation, the Barnes Collection on our campus
as well as the Rodin museum.
On Penn's campus we have an art gallery called the Institute of Contemporary Art
so students can take certain courses that are actually housed in the art history
department
where they're able to curate exhbitions as a group
that will actually be shown in these major
exhibition spaces. Certainly students can
take advantage of the city which has a lot of connections with Penn.
As a Penn student you get to know the city very well, we see it as sort of an urban
laboratory for our students to kind of test drive their ideas in a real-world setting.
Okay, so you talked a lot about the connections you have with Philadelphia
the internships you can take there, museums you can visit,
resources and facilities within the city
So I'm wondering
in terms of international students who are coming to the US, maybe for the first time, maybe to a new city,
or even if they've been there before,
how exactly does the sense of community work at UPenn?
Is it very much a campus space?
Or how do students end up meeting each other
and everything?
This is such a great question, because when you think "city school"
you visualize this place that's a little bit
disparate and incongruous but actually we are one cohesive campus
within the large city Philadelphia. So all of the buildings are on a residential
campus, so I think that really
contributes to our sense of community.
For international students, I mean, we have many global voices on our campus.
We have
overall 109 different countries represented in our student body
so you never know who your roommate is going to be, which is great,
and we are overall 14% international.
International students are involved in so many different organizations,
there's the Assembly of International Students or AIS
and they're a community that promotes the interests of international students
on the campus. They do things like meeting the new freshman at the airport when they arrive
to make them feel welcome ,