Last Wednesday and Thursday, 18 students from the 12th grade Advanced Placement English class at the Edison-Fareira High School in North Philadelphia visited the Penn campus to experience university life up close and personal.
While the college-bound students were here, they sat in on classes in Ancient Greek, modern-art history, photography and Afro-American/Jewish literature. They toured the campus from the Fine Arts Department in the Morgan Building to the Quad dorms to the Nursing School.
In Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, they learned how to track down books and periodicals, using the computer and microfiche, and they became engrossed with old books in the special collections. They also visited the gym, and ate lunch at Burger King and off food trucks. They saw a neurology lab and a psychology lab, and received training and practice on using the Internet and e-mail.
At the end of a whirlwind day Wednesday, they had dinner at Chili's with their Penn tutors and then participated in a poetry rap session with the Philomathean Society, the Penn undergraduate organization that sponsors musical and theatrical performances, as well as poetry and fiction readings by students, faculty and distinguished visitors from around the world.
Into the evening, the Edison students hung out with their Penn tutors. "The rest of the visit consisted of an odd amalgamation of conversation, Internet practice, poetry reading and games like Psychiatrist and Charades--a combination, in my opinion, that sums up what inter-age, intercultural education should be about at Penn or anywhere else," reported Julie Crawford, an English graduate student who has been involved with the Penn-Edison Partnership for three years.
After overnighting in sleeping bags at Van Pelt House, the Edison-Fareira seniors arose Thursday morning to meet with Gloria Gay, the associate director of the Penn Women's Center, and to attend Admissions Office sessions about applying to college.
Edison senior Aurel Nistor said, "After talking with my friends, I think that they really enjoyed [the visit]. Personally, I liked it. It made me think more about how my life would be at college and how it will make me feel. I think that sleeping overnight at Penn was a great idea because this experience really made me look forward to attending college."
The visit was an integral part of the Penn-Edison Partnership, now in its fifth year. The partnership is rooted in two related ideas: that the University has a responsibility to serve its community and that demonstrating competence in writing and reading has been a problem for Latino students in public schools who want to go to college.
Ned Mock (Wharton '96) reported, "They loved the computers. The decibel level in the computer lab was comparable to that of Chili's. They're new at the 'computer stuff' and kept getting the programs mixed up, opening Netscape when they wanted Telnet, et cetera. The student I worked with spent most of his time in the lab looking up urls [universal resource locators] of aliens and ghosts, apparently to contribute to his already-extensive arsenal of stories."What I would like to see in the future is maybe to pair them up individually with Penn students who are majors in the areas that they have an interest in," he continued, "and then have a program a little more structured where they went to classes relevant to that subject."