Performer, biomedical engineer, and soon-to-be graduate
This story was originally published on May 13th 2025 in Penn Today.
Writer: Louisa Shepard
Photographer: Eric Sucar; Scott Spitzer
Graduating fourth-year Jordyn Harris is pursuing a career in engineering and medicine while also dedicating herself to the performing arts.
Mixing it up is what graduating fourth-year Jordyn Harris likes best.
At Penn she has been an applied science in biomedical sciences major while also pursuing a major in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies, and she has had a work-study job in performing arts and another job as a researcher at a hospital. Harris has also been on stage as a dancer and behind the scenes running tech for student shows while also volunteering as an adviser and mentor for engineering students and a member of a performing arts senior society, as well as a sorority for women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).
“I’m a STEM girl who does performing arts; I like the mix,” Harris says. “I’m always doing something. But I love doing all of the things that I do.”
From Baltimore, Harris will graduate this month with a bachelor’s degree of applied science in biomedical sciences from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences with a second major in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies from the College of Arts and Sciences.
“I’m doing a little bit of everything, and that’s what I think I’ll do with my career generally,” she says. “I want to dive into STEM and medicine but also performing arts as an outlet for my creative side, being in both, and having them interweave with volunteering.”
Harris helped other students as a volunteer orientation peer advisor and an advisor through the Advanced Women of Women in Engineering Preorientation program.
“The thing that is always surprising about Jordyn is how dedicated she is in terms of what she commits to. There’s a sense of responsibility that she has with every role that she’s taken on,” says Sonya Gwak, who until recently was director of student life and undergraduate education, but now is director of global academic programs at Penn Engineering.
“Jordyn’s information has always been reliable because she’ll do her homework and make sure that what she says is accurate. People can depend on her,” Gwak says, including making sure every first-year student is registered for classes. “Because it’s completely voluntary and it because it is a huge undertaking, having somebody like Jordyn in that role is invaluable.”
Harris encouraged engineering students to do performing arts and clubs and other creative pursuits even if that wasn’t what they planned for their careers. “Finding what makes you you, and doing those things in the midst of your career, in the midst of your academics, is key,” she says.
Performing Arts
Since her first year at Penn, Harris has been a work-study student at the Platt Student Performing Arts House helping to manage programming, as well as scheduling rehearsals and performances for student groups. Her interest in performing arts began with ballet when she was about 4 years old. She continued through high school where she played the violin and piano and also dove into theater arts, on stage and behind the scenes.
“If you don’t directly ask her or see her doing good things on campus, you won’t know because she is very humble,” says Laurie McCall, director of the Platt House, noting the many leadership roles Harris has taken on, including mentoring new students as they navigate their performing arts experience.
Harris won the Platt House Impact Award that goes “to a student who goes above and beyond the scope of their campus responsibilities” to represent student performing arts “through continual service, model leadership, and general goodwill,” McCall says. “She is a joy to have in our circle.”
Since Harris’s second year at Penn she has been behind the scenes for many student performing arts productions, including iNtuitions Experimental Theater and several Theater Arts Council shows.
“I’ve done pretty much all sides of tech: lights, sound, stage managing both theater and dance,” she says. “I’m also producing, making sure everything is managed the way it should be, things are getting done, all the deadlines are met.”
Her third year she joined Onda Latina as a dancer and usually performs salsa but also mambo fusion, hip-hop, and bachata, working with student choreographers.
STEM
While involved in high school theater, she also was taking all the advanced placement science classes. “Growing up I always wanted to be an engineer,” inspired by her father, she says. “I think that sparked me; I’ve always been good at math, so engineering was my way to go.”
She decided she also wanted to study medicine. Harris chose Penn, she says, because of the bioengineering program and the opportunities to volunteer at hospitals.
Harris completed pre-med requisites, including biology, organic chemistry, biochemistry, chemistry, and physics. She also chose bioengineering design courses, learning how to design medical devices. In one class she worked with doctors at the Perelman School of Medicine “learning about the different devices that they’ve created and learning how to build devices around patients.”
She completed most of her bioengineering classes in her first two years and then took gender studies courses in her third and fourth years. “I really like the breadth of gender studies at Penn because every class is different. I learn something new with all of them,” she says.
“I want to be able to apply those into engineering, into medicine: how different cultures, different races, have been influenced throughout history,” she says. “Especially in the medical field, coming at it from both an engineering STEM and a gender studies perspective.”
For nearly a year Harris has been a paid undergraduate student researcher at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) working with Jalaj Maheshwari in the Center for Injury Research and Prevention. The prior two years she was an undergraduate student researcher with Michelle Johnson in the Rehabilitation Robotics Lab at the medical school.
Harris’s thesis for her applied science degree incorporates the work she has been doing at CHOP, which involves running computerized car crash test simulations on child car seats, testing parameters and dimensions of the seats to minimize child injuries in crashes. A subproject of hers is developing a program that manufacturers can use in building the car seats, and to make recommendations to parents to maximize safety.
Penn Alumni recently awarded Harris the 2025 Association of Latino Alumni Student Leadership Award from the James Brister Society.
Looking Ahead
This summer, Harris will be continuing her research at CHOP, with goals of publishing a paper and presenting at conferences. She then is planning to take two gap years, to explore abroad, work, volunteer in hospitals and in theater, and apply to medical schools. She is leaning towards a career in orthopedics. “I’m interested in robotics and prosthetics,” she says.
Gwak says Harris will be greatly missed when she graduates since she has been “a constant part of the community” with a “quiet leadership” that “exemplifies building relationships.” At Penn for 32 years, Gwak says Harris is “one of those people that you remember forever. Once you interact with Jordyn, it’s hard to forget her.”
Graduation will be “a bittersweet moment” and no longer being in school is going to be an adjustment, Harris says. “But I’m excited for what the future holds,” she says, adding that she will return to campus to see the student shows. “I’m going to be that alum who comes back.”
Class of 2026 prepares for ‘iconic’ year during annual Hey Day
This story was originally published on May 1st 2025 in Penn Today.
Writer: Jimmy O’Hara
Photographer: Eric Sucar; Scott Spitzer
Marking a 109-year-old tradition, Penn third-year students united to celebrate their rise to fourth-year status.
An ecstatic crowd of third-year students donning red T-shirts, bamboo canes, and mock skimmer hats electrified Penn’s campus on Thursday, May 1, to mark the University’s 109th Hey Day, a yearly tradition—dating back to 1916—that unifies Penn students across space and time. Clear blue skies and warm weather made for a lively mid-morning picnic at High Rise Field by Rodin College House, with hundreds of third-year students gathered to socialize, reconnect, and celebrate their collective transition to fourth-year rank.
As noon approached, the Class of 2026 marched in a grand procession down Locust Walk led by the Penn Band, crossing the Class of 1949 Bridge and parading under a tall balloon arch toward College Green. There, they were greeted first by Vice Provost for University Life Karu Kozuma and then by President J. Larry Jameson. Per tradition, Jameson lightheartedly tested the class with a three-question, pass-fail “exam,” with their correct responses ascending the students to fourth-year status.
“On behalf of the senior class right now, we wish you the best of luck next year,” said 2025 class president Amaan Omer, nodding to his fellow graduating class, which convened on the opposite site of College Green to celebrate the Final Toast. Omer then passed the symbolic fourth-year class gavel to Vedika Jawa, president of the 2026 cohort. “2026 seniors, can I hear you scream?” shouted Jawa to a crowd of her peers erupting with joyful cheer.
“What a special class, and what a special day. Time has flown by—and now, we have one more year,” continued Jawa. “This is our time to leave our legacy at Penn and make the most of every moment. Get ready, because our senior year is going to be iconic.”
As the Penn Band played “The Red and Blue,” some newly-minted fourth-years joined in song before posing for group photos and selfies and signing skimmer hats with Sharpies.
Luiza Louback, an English major in the College of Arts and Sciences from Brazil, marked the occasion alongside her friend, James Vu, an English and sociology major in the College from New Jersey, and her partner, Richard Macedo, a computer science major in the School of Engineering and Applied Science also from Brazil.
“Hey Day, for me, is just a day to celebrate how far we’ve come,” said Louback, noting how special it felt to see her class reunited as one. “I also love the walk, seeing everybody walking together, all the juniors connecting.”
Vu, who befriended Louback through an English study abroad program in London, shared that Hey Day means “continuing tradition,” calling the annual event a “rite of passage.”
Macedo and Louback met during New Student Orientation on their first day of classes at Penn, bonding in part over their shared Brazilian nationality. Three years later, they would spend Hey Day together, commemorating their time at Penn as part of a broader tapestry of tradition.
“Hey Day really is a way for you to include yourself in the Penn community,” said Macedo. “Looking at the old pictures of people going through this same tradition is really fun, and you can really feel part of a big community—not even just the people that are here, [but also] the people that were here, and the people that are going to come here.”
1,000 Paper Cranes: PAACH unveils new mural
This story was originally published on April 28th 2025 in Penn Today.
Writer: Tina Rodia
Photographer: Eric Sucar
Members of Penn’s Pan-Asian American Community House (PAACH) unveiled a new mural ahead of Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month in the ARCH building at an event on April 16.
tudents, faculty, and staff members gathered in the lobby at Penn’s ARCH building, passing around baskets of small origami cranes. The month of May is Asian / Pacific American Heritage Month, and the Pan-Asian American Community House (PAACH) team holds its annual mural unveiling in April as a preview event for APA heritage month. “We host the celebration before the month of May, before students leave campus,” said Mei Long, director of PAACH.
Established by Congress in 1992, APA heritage month was designated in May in recognition of two historical events: the arrival of the first Japanese immigrant to the U.S. in May 1843, and the completion of the transcontinental railroad in May 1869. Standing beside the concealed mural before its reveal, Long explained why the railroad was significant: It was largely built by approximately 20,000 Chinese laborers. At its completion, the railroad cut travel time from New York to San Francisco from several months to just seven days.
“The railroad united the country and made a strong foundation for the economic prosperity in the years that followed,” said Long. “But the Chinese laborers suffered prejudice, abuse, significantly lower wages, and social isolation. The laborers organized strikes for better conditions.” These strikes, Long explained, “paved the way for labor rights that benefit all of us today.”Tina
Long offered another history lesson. “PAACH is celebrating 25 years in 2025, after Penn students called for an Asian Pacific Islander cultural resource center in 2000.”
The PAACH team—Long and associate directors Vicky Faye Aquino and Daniel Hoddinott, and program coordinator Cindy Au-Kramer—asked the crowd to form a circle, count to three, and then unveiled a large canvas with a central mandala. Looking closer, 1,000 paper cranes comprise the mandala, all intricately folded with decorative origami paper.
The mural, “1,000 Paper Cranes Mandala,” is the handiwork of Aquino. “On my first day at PAACH, I noticed tiny paper cranes hung from a pillar and they provided a warm and colorful welcome to the space,” she said. In planning and designing this year’s mural, Aquino chose to create 1,000 origami cranes by hand, alone, over the course of three months.
“In Japanese culture, cranes symbolize longevity and fortune. It is believed if you fold 1,000 cranes and make a wish, your wish will come true,” explained Aquino. “The cranes symbolize hope, healing, and strength in challenging times.”
Aquino chose to mount the cranes in the shape of a mandala, which means “sacred circle” in Sanskrit. “It became a meditation for me; it takes patience, dedication, and focus. I gave birth eight months ago, and I got to share the experience with my newborn daughter. She was strapped to me while I folded cranes.”
“Despite the kind offers I accepted no help,” she added. “I was committed to doing it myself so I can have my wish granted. I’m grateful for the opportunity to bring the community together through art. Like a paper crane, we are shaped by each fold, delicate yet resilient, grounded in patience and possibility. So, give yourself a challenge, commit to it, and pour your heart into it a thousand times.”
Aquino then asked everyone to close their eyes, make a wish, and whisper it to the paper crane. After they opened their eyes, Aquino revealed her wish: “My wish is that all your wishes come true.”
Common humanity and purpose
This story was originally published on March 5th 2025 in Penn Today.
Writer: Kristina García
Photographer: Eric Sucar
After finishing a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics, fourth-year Bryan Suh will become a commissioned officer in the Marine Corps.
As a high school student at Northfield Mount Hermon, a boarding preparatory academy in Massachusetts, Bryan Suh says he received a well-rounded education grounded in a sense of community and purpose. Every student at the school not only studied and participated in sports but also put in a weekly four hours of work across campus, Suh says. Some of his fondest memories included working on the farm and learning how to collect sap for maple syrup.
All students at the school were also encouraged to ask themselves four essential questions, he says: Who am I? What is my place? What does it mean to be human? How then shall I live?
The eldest of three brothers, Suh was born in New Jersey. His parents moved back to Seoul following his father’s completion of a master’s degree in economics at New York University. Suh recalls visceral memories from this time of his grandparents’ recollections about their struggles under Japanese rule and during the Korean War.
“It was always ingrained in me,” he says, “that this life of luxury that I enjoyed as a kid was very transient. Life is going to be a struggle. But you want to find things that you’re interested in or attracted to, find other people who interest you, who you want to get closer with and do difficult things together.”
Suh, who is Korean American, volunteered with the Marine Corps and will be commissioned May 17. He says part of the decision was pragmatic. He received a scholarship through the NROTC program. As the eldest child “I had this, ‘have-to-be-mature-and-responsible’ thing going on,” Suh says. “I wanted to give back to my parents.”
But the other part is due to Suh’s ethos of “doing difficult things together.” He enjoyed his time at Northfield Mount Hermon, especially the camaraderie and grueling endurance he found on the rowing and alpine skiing teams and says he sought an extension of those experiences through military service. “For me, it was wanting to be a part of a community that was really tight-knit and kind of like something bigger than myself.”
This is part of our common humanity, Suh says. “To be human means to be a social creature,” a concept that was hammered home in the courses Suh took at Penn as a philosophy, politics, and economics major and classics minor, studying international security, American foreign policy, and Rhetoric and the Community, an SNF Paideia course where classmates had to debate a prepared speech every week.
“Being a leader is fundamentally about caring for your people and treating them like human beings,” Suh says, which is something he’s taken away both from his naval science courses and his ethics curriculum at Penn. “The mark of whether or not your time at Penn has been successful is if you can apply these principles,” he says.
“I don’t care how well you can talk to me about ethics, AI, or business analytics, if you can’t describe to me what it actually means to work as a unit with your peers or the people who you’re going to be leading,” he says. “Look out for your people.
Laying the groundwork at Penn before taking to the air
Who
Amanda Yagerman, a fourth-year from Queens, New York, has always loved the humanities and became a history buff after having two inspiring teachers in high school who brought lessons to life. But as she prepared to apply for college, she was interested in the Navy ROTC program, where they tend to value STEM majors. “When I was applying, I said that I’d major in biology because I thought, ‘Hey, I could end up liking it. Who knows? Let me try it,’” she says. “Regrettably, it just wasn’t for me.”
So Yagerman had to get up the nerve to write a letter to the Navy to get approval to switch to a history major. It wasn’t guaranteed. But since getting the OK, the history and English double major hasn’t looked back.
“The reason that I’ve always loved history is that I’m fascinated by the idea that there have been so many different iterations of the human experience,” she says. “There’s so much that we all have in common, but there’s also so many civilizations and societies that have risen and fallen that had completely different value systems than us and lived their lives in a completely different way.”
As for double majoring in English, “my mom was an English major, and she always raised me with a healthy respect for the Oxford comma,” Yagerman says. “There have been so many courses that overlapped, and I’ve been able to really combine the two in interesting ways.”
What
As a part of the Navy ROTC program at Penn, Yagerman says her experience has been “the best of both worlds.”
“A free Ivy League education is nothing to sneeze at, and I get to enter the military as an officer, which gives more opportunities for a career path that otherwise wouldn’t have been open to me,” she says. “What’s nice is that I am a college student for most of my time.”
Yagerman’s day-to-day is something like this: most weekdays she is at the NROTC unit from 6 to around 10 a.m. or so, and the rest of the day is her “normal college student” time. One day a week, the NROTC students must walk around campus in uniform for visibility, and the training consists of a physical component, leadership labs, and naval science classes. Penn is the host school of the Philadelphia consortium NROTC unit which also has students from Drexel and Temple.
Yagerman will be commissioned into the Navy as an ensign on May 18 and then will become active duty when she graduates from the College of Arts & Sciences the next day. She’ll then head to flight school with the main goal of flying helicopters.
Why
Yagerman says combining her time at Penn with the NROTC experience has been “pretty great”.
I’ve gotten the college experience; I’ve formed such great professional and personal relationships at Penn, but I’m also training to enter the military and I get all those benefits, too,” she says. “I wanted the college experience. But I also really felt like I needed discipline and direction in my life, and I wanted to be part of something that was bigger than myself.”
Penn’s diverse community will directly benefit her in her new role as a naval officer, she says.
“I’ve had the chance to interact with people who come from so many different backgrounds, religiously, ethnically, politically, and people with very different viewpoints. As a naval officer, I’m going to be encountering so many people who are coming from so many different walks of life and who have so many different perspectives. Being at Penn has taught me to communicate with people better.”
Something they always stress in our training for the Navy is being a good leader, Yagerman says.
“I think one of the main parts of that is really knowing who you’re leading and caring enough to get to know who you’re leading. That’s another thing that Penn has really taught me, in the history department particularly,” she says. “Most of our classes make an effort to be intersectional and take a look at the same historical event or problem from varying viewpoints. That’s a really important way to learn how to successfully get your point across and make connections with people as you move in the world.”
Filipino language and culture
Eight thousand miles away from Philadelphia lies the Philippines, a tropical archipelago dotting the Pacific Ocean. Its 117 million inhabitants speak more than 120 languages, including the country’s national language, Filipino, a modernized version of the indigenous Tagalog with loan words from English, Spanish, and Chinese.
It’s also one of the most spoken languages in the United States. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Filipino is the fourth most spoken language following English, Spanish, and Chinese, but Filipino language classes are rare, even at the college level. At Penn, they’ve been offered since 1996.
This semester, Vicky Faye Aquino, is teaching Beginning Filipino to 13 students every Tuesday and Thursday evening, with the assistance of Deo Mar Suasin, a teaching assistant and Fulbright Visiting Scholar from the Philippines who is also taking classes in the Graduate School of Education. Many of the students enrolled in the course so they can connect with their heritage and communicate with their families, Aquino says.
Though raised bilingual, Katrina Verano, a second-year student majoring in mathematics from Malvern, Pennsylvania, says she stopped practicing Tagalog during elementary school because there was no one else her age to converse with. “I was the only Filipino in my high school. I really took it to heart,” she says. “It was always only me.”
Verano says she regrets that she no longer remembers the language and is taking the class to rectify that. “I want my kids to be able to speak Tagalog. I was so grateful that my parents taught me,” she says. “I felt like it was really a gift. In order for me to stay connected as strong as I want to be, I have to speak the language.”
Many first-born Filipino Americans were not taught to speak their parents’ language, Verano says, including her cousins and most students in the class. Some students say their parents didn’t teach Filipino to them fearing they would pick up an accent or not excel at school. Assimilating and fitting in was the goal.
Jonathan Villegas, a third-year mechanical engineering major from Pasadena, California, is biracial, and his Filipino father came to the U.S. for college at age 18. Villegas says his father “doesn’t talk about it much. He had some negative experiences being Filipino in L.A.” and felt he was passed up for jobs and promotions.
Villegas heard about the class from another friend who had previously enrolled. Before that, learning Filipino “honestly never really occurred to me,” Villegas says. “I assumed it wouldn’t be available. A lot of colleges don’t have it.”
At Penn, the program was started by Erlinda Juliano 27 years ago. As she was preparing for her retirement, Juliano met Aquino at a Filipino cultural event called Barrio, hosted by the Penn Philippine Association, and started asking pointed questions. Was Aquino originally from the Philippines? She was. Does she speak Filipino fluently? She does. Had she ever taught the language before? She had.
Juliano encouraged Aquino to apply for the lecturer position. Aquino almost hesitated. She already had a full-time job as the associate director at the Pan-Asian American Community House (PAACH) and a 2-year-old daughter at home.
But the language is important to her, Aquino says. She didn’t want students to miss the chance of learning how to speak their heritage language.
Aquino stays late twice a week to teach her students, bringing movies, art, culture, and music into the classroom. Aquino took students to the Penn Museum to look at artifacts from the Philippines. She brings in cultural components, teaching the students slang and showing contemporary videos. On Oct. 31, the students are headed to PAACH for “Halo-Halloween.” Halo-Halo is an elaborately layered, special occasion dessert. There will also be singing because “Karaoke is part of our culture,” she says. “It’s not just a language class.”
Polyglot Oksana De Mesa, a clinical research nurse at the Perelman School of Medicine, is originally from Ukraine. She grew up speaking Ukrainian, learned Russian when her family immigrated to Chicago, added Mandarin, and dabbled in Spanish, Japanese, and Korean. De Mesa loves languages and enrolled in the course so she could speak with her husband in his native tongue, she says. “Plus, it would be nice to impress my in-laws eventually, especially Lola Luz, the grandmother.” (Lola means grandmother in Filipino.)
De Mesa’s Spanish has come in handy because of the abundance of Spanish loan words in Filipino, she says. This includes common vocabulary like sala (living room), gwapo (handsome; guapo in Spanish) and mundo (world), recognized in Filipino along with the Tagalog word for world, daigdig.
The commonalities are no coincidence. Spain colonized the Philippines for more than 300 years until 1898, when it ceded the region to the U.S. at the end of the Spanish-American War. The U.S. established military rule over the country and remained in power until Japanese occupation during World War II. The Philippines gained independence in 1945.
Now, Aquino says, Filipinos have a great sense of national pride in their language and culture, and students living in the diaspora want to take part. In one class, at Aquino’s urging, Verano led the class in singing the anthem, “Lupang Hinirang,” which means “Chosen Land.”
Aquino, who grew up in the Philippines, says, “Every morning, we had to sing the national anthem, place our hands over our hearts.” Most of her students had heard the anthem before. “Honestly, it’s kind of a banger,” says one of the students, and her classmates laugh and nod.
Hearing the students learn and speak Filipino is the most gratifying part of the work, Aquino says. Even though she is away from her daughter, “it’s for her, too,” Aquino says, and an important part of perpetuating the language and cultural knowledge.
Sefora Elish, a first-year nursing student from Syosset, New York, calls her grandparents to share what she’s learned after every class. They taught her a few words, she says, but mainly switched to Filipino when they wanted to tell secrets, she says. When Elish saw the language offered at Penn, “I had to do it,” she says. “It’s important because a lot of schools don’t offer it.” Often in class, Elish finds herself saying, “Oh, I know that word, but now I can put it in a sentence.”
As for Villegas, he hasn’t yet told his family in California that he’s learning Filipino. He’s going to wait. Then, during Winter Break, he can greet and surprise his grandparents with “Mano po. Kumusta po kayo,” a traditional way of greeting elders. “It’s going to be a Christmas present,” he says.
(While the terms “Filipino” and “Tagalog” refer to different variations of the language, they are used interchangeably by speakers in this story.)
Mary Frances Berry and Kermit Roosevelt on Juneteenth’s history
A new documentary produced by the Annenberg Public Policy Center explores the history of the holiday and illustrates how and why freedom and citizenship were intertwined. The film features Berry and Roosevelt, among others.
Juneteenth marks the day in 1865 that enslaved people in Texas finally learned that they were free, more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
Texan Opal Lee fought for decades to get Juneteenth recognized nationally, and her efforts were rewarded in 2021 when President Joe Biden signed a bill making June 19 a federal holiday.
Annenberg Classroom, part of the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC), has released a documentary “Juneteenth: Exploring Freedom’s Stories” that surveys the history of the holiday and illustrates how and why freedom and citizenship were intertwined. The film features Lee, Mary Frances Berry, a professor of history and Africana studies in the School of Arts & Sciences, Kermit Roosevelt, a professor at Penn Carey Law, and others discussing the recently-designated holiday, and how it is connected to freedom. They have hosted several events where the public can view the film and participate in a discussion.