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 ,