What’s your favorite movie? Favorite subject? What would you bring to a picnic? What do you do to relax? Thinking of quick answers to these questions can help students prepare for the job market, says J. Michael DeAngelis, senior associate director of communications and technology at Career Services.

If you stumbled over a response, you’re not alone, DeAngelis says. “People get hung up on right answers and wrong answers,” he says.

A former theater major, published playwright and podcast creative, DeAngelis runs a semiannual workshop, “Improv for Interviewing,” that uses games and techniques from the theater world to guide students to enter the job market by thinking on their feet.

“Improv is all about keeping the conversation going,” he says. “If you’re in the interview, they already think you can do the job.”

The interview is a way to assess soft skills and interpersonal communication, but many people panic and seize up over simple questions. Everyone gets nervous, DeAngelis says. “I was nervous walking over here today,” he told a group at an April 16 session in Van-Pelt Dietrich Library Center. “Oh, this is such a weird workshop, are people going to like it?”

Bianca Vama, a fourth-year neuroscience major from New York City, is applying to medical schools and interviewing for summer programs. She attended the spring workshop as a good way to get advice and to practice and better handle unexpected prompts, she says.

Lisa Yang, who will graduate with a master’s in higher education from the Graduate School of Education in May, found the workshop on Career Services’ Handshake, a platform that gives students and alumni access to employers, job and internship postings, networking resources, and events. “I’m looking for opportunities to sharpen my interview skills,” she says.

Originally from Beijing, Yang is applying for academic advising and program coordinator positions in the U.S. and China but struggles to bring her authentic point of view and have honest, normal conversations while under pressure. “I always overthink and over-prepare for an interview,” she says.

For one exercise, DeAngelis had the group stand in a circle. Holding a small stuffed Ewok that “will bite you on the arm if you hold it too long,” DeAngelis asked Yang a question, tossing the toy as he waited for an answer.

“Lisa, what’s your favorite vacation?” he asked.

“Uh … what kind of vacation?” Yang responded.

“Doesn’t matter,” DeAngelis said. “There’s no wrong answer.”

“When I was in middle school, I went to Europe,” Yang answered. Yang tossed the stuffed animal and addressed another participant, “What have you been watching lately?”

DeAngelis says he has led this workshop a half-dozen times. He first started over Zoom in the summer of 2020, at the request of the Center for Undergraduate Research & Fellowships. “They were hearing from folks on campus that students were really stumbling over the personal, anything that didn’t have to do with their academics or research,” he says. “That was in line with what we were hearing from employers.”

Conversations, small talk, and storytelling are transferrable skills that are helpful in any profession, he says. “I’m such a strong believer in the liberal arts, particularly being a theater major,” he says. “I can rely on that training that I have to ask questions, to keep a conversation going, to listen.”

The workshop has traditionally attracted international students, who have the additional challenge of answering off-the-cuff questions in a foreign language, DeAngelis says. Regardless of reticence or language difficulties, everyone ends up participating, he says. “I’ve never had to pull teeth. Sometimes you get that one person who’s like, ‘No, no, no,’ … And then they get up and do the last one.”

For students looking to practice interviewing skills, Career Services offers mock-interview practice for both in-person and Zoom meetings. They also have rooms that students can reserve to speak with potential employers. “Improv for Interviewing” workshops and other services can be requested through the Career Services website, DeAngelis says.

Nicholas Yohn, a third-year student studying finance and statistics at the Wharton School, already knows where he’s going to land this summer. Originally from Hoboken, New Jersey, Yohn will be interning at a private equity firm and wants to make the most of his experience.

“I’m going to be meeting a lot of new people, trying to understand the firm,” Yohn says. He is also hoping to entertain future job offers and says, “This is for me to be able to keep up the conversation and think on my feet.”

Private equity is a relationship-driven business, Yohn says, and he wants to start making contacts and learning to talk about himself in professional settings “in a way that’s not overly prepped.”

In the workshop, Yohn volunteered to play a scene where two participants are given established roles—in his case, a student called into the principal’s office—and secret identities—the principal is also his long-lost father!—a detail revealed later in the conversation.

The exercise is relevant to interviewing, Yohn says. A lot of firms ask potential hires scenario-based questions based on ethics, deadlines, or interpersonal conflict, giving interviewees 20 seconds to film a response with no re-dos, he says.

“I’ve been hit with some of those curveballs,” he says. “It’s a skill I’m trying to work on.”

Ahead of Spring Fling 2024, which is set to feature Daya and Metro Boomin, The Daily Pennsylvanian took a look at the behind-the-scenes work which makes the event happen.

Spring Fling, which is planned by Penn’s Social Planning and Events Committee, consists of the Daytime Festival and the Spring Fling Concert — planned by two separate committees within the organization. SPEC leadership, which described them as “some of the largest college events on the East Coast,” wrote that their planning processes are distinct from each other.

Over 10,000 students attend Spring Fling over the course of two days, according to Wharton senior and SPEC President Megan Li.

SPEC’s goal for the Daytime Festival is to create “a more lighthearted event that will be fun and enjoyable for all.” SPEC researches food options, carnival activities, and merchandise opportunities throughout the year and contacts student performing groups, Penn Athletics, and different vendors.

Most of the planning and organizational work during the fall semester for the Spring Fling Concert focuses on talent acquisition. Li wrote that SPEC works closely with multiple talent agents to find potential artists, considering factors such as availability, price, and logistics, which narrows artist options. Then, throughout the spring semester, the committee shifts their focus to event logistics — such as audio and visual technicalities at Penn Park, ticketing, and advertising.

The focus of this year’s event is the performances of Metro Boomin, the headliner and Daya, the opener. 

“Metro Boomin and Daya fit our vision for what we wanted the concert to look like this year,” Li wrote. “We are very fortunate to be able to welcome them to campus.”

Spring Fling will also feature several changes from last year’s edition in an attempt to make it a “novel experience” for attendees.

For the concert, Li highlighted changes in the genre of the headliner, with Metro Boomin belonging to a different genre than last year’s headliner, Lauv. She added that SPEC attempts to avoid having performers who have previously appeared at Spring Fling.

Li added that the Daytime Festival has “more flexibility year to year,” with many new food vendors — Korea Taqueria, Mom–Mom’s, and Funnellas Funnel Cake — joining the event this year. There are also new activities like a Human Claw Machine, Spinning Tea–Cups, and Shoot and Shower Basketball. 

Li also wrote that SPEC faced additional challenges from inflation, which caused production costs to increase “exponentially” compared to the allocated budget.

“We’ve been working diligently to negotiate costs with different vendors and figuring out where we can be flexible in order to maintain the quality of experience our attendees are used to,” Li wrote.

Li wrote that Spring Fling is one of the most anticipated events students look forward to, noting her excitement for students to see what they have prepared for the weekend.

“This is our best selling concert in recent memory and we have an excellent lineup of food and activity vendors for the Daytime Festival,” she wrote. “I don’t think there really is anything to not be looking forward to. Perhaps what I’m looking forward to most is driving a golf cart around campus.”

The quilt, which goes on view April 12, is part of a new art series at the Penn Women’s Center.

Who

It was in high school that Luke Godsey first learned how to quilt. “I actually was taught by my dad’s girlfriend,” Godsey says. “She had all this scrap fabric and was like, ‘Hey, do you want to learn how to quilt?’” Originally from Somerset, Kentucky, where quilting still has a robust—albeit aging—culture, Godsey worked on community quilting projects with friends or at church.

“There was a really nice process, because we would just sit and talk and quilt,” Godsey says. “It’s fun and it’s a really good emotional release; it can get your frustration out in a healthy way. When I was frustrated about school, I could sew and get mad at the sewing machine instead of bottling it up.”

What

Godsey still has that first quilt and uses it at Penn. Now a second-year student studying linguistics, Godsey continues to quilt. 

Godsey’s latest project is a quilt commissioned by the Penn Women’s Center where Godsey also works. Godsey sewed 5-by-5-inch square scraps of fabric pieced together in blocks. The multicolored quilt is made of 20 blocks with each block containing five squares of one pattern and four squares of another.

That’s just the quilt top, notes Godsey. Underneath is a soft in-between layer, called batting. Godsey is using fusible batting, which is ironed into the top and the backing. Then, Godsey sews it all together, using a technique called “stitch in the ditch.”

“You sew vertically into every line and then you sew horizontally into every line, so it makes a grid on the back,” Godsey says. “That’s called ‘stitch in the ditch’ because it’s supposed to be hard to see the top stitch, because it’s in the crease of the other ones.”

The quilt is part of a new art series at Penn Women’s Center and will be unveiled at the Center on Friday, April 12 with a reception and artist’s conversation from 4 to 6 p.m.

Why

This work is Godsey’s first commission. “I’ve always been wanting to do a quilt for the center, just to make it feel like more like a home,” Godsey says.

“It also truly is a connection to back home, because by car, I’m about 12 hours away,” Godsey says. “When I came to Philly, I felt like I lost community,” Godsey says. “I was looking for a place to build community and learn about other people.”

Appalachia has his own unique culture, Godsey says, very different from that of Penn and Philadelphia. Godsey is also one of the few students from Kentucky on campus. “It’s that immediate isolation from home,” Godsey says. “The process of making this quilt has been really cathartic, to work through finding my identity—and also to hold on to my identity in a new place.”

A powwow begins with drums, as the cascading voices of musicians call dancers in for the Grand Entry, the first moment when they are called into the sacred arena. At Penn’s 13th annual Powwow, which also marked the 40th anniversary of the Greenfield Intercultural Center and the 30th anniversary of Natives at Penn, an Indigenous student organization formerly called Six Directions, Brian Weeden, chairman of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, and his wife, Keturah Peters, a School of Nursing alumnus who is also Mashpee Wampanoag, led the group as head dancers.

Penn’s Powwow emphasizes diversity while honoring the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape tribe. At the 2024 ceremony, Natives at Penn honored two Lenape elders, Lewis “Gray Squirrel” Pierce and Ann “Wolf Spirit Woman” Dapice. “It is always important to understand that Native communities exist here,” says Valerie De Cruz, who has served as director of the Greenfield Intercultural Center since 1997. “They are not just part of history. They occupy land here; they exist here in our community.”

When a stranger walks on new ground, it is tradition to seek out their hosts, De Cruz says. “You want them to know that you understand this is their territory and that you understand that you are a guest.”

The University of Pennsylvania’s Penn LGBT Center’s Scholars-in-Residence Program is returning for 2024 and will welcome three new LGBTQ+ scholars with diverse backgrounds, all from the Philadelphia area. This year’s program includes a TedTalk by each of the scholars, which will take place during the University of Pennsylvania’s QPenn week March 22-29. This year’s scholars include a cohort of three local activists and entrepreneurs: TS Hawkins, Kyle Cuffie-Scott and Dr. Danna Bodenheimer.

The program is a first-of-its kind initiative that amplifies queer and trans voices, integrating scholars from varying lines of work into Penn’s classrooms. One of the main objectives of this program is to increase students’ awareness of the LGBTQ+ community and encourage social change.

In the summer of 2022, the Penn LGBT Center received an anonymous endowment of $2 million meant to advance LGBTQ+ scholarship and awareness of the queer and trans community. The Center used this money to launch the Scholars-in-Residence program in 2023. In that first year, the Penn LGBT Center hosted ALOK, a renowned gender-nonconforming author, comedian and public speaker. This year, the focus will be on scholars from the Philadelphia area to connect students with LGBTQ+ professionals who represent the local community.

In 1969, a group of women met to talk about women: their bodies, their sexual health, their reproductive rights, and their experiences with doctors and medicine. A year later, these women put together a 193-page course booklet and in 1971, retitled it “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” Now a cult classic, the book has sold more than 4 million copies, been translated into 34 languages, and been banned from high schools and public libraries.

“Our Bodies, Ourselves” is now out of print. But an old, yellowed copy, dated 1971, stapled at the corner, and priced for 75 cents, for years existed in a box in Fisher-Bennet Hall. This spring, it will move to the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, as part of the formal archiving of all the historical materials from the Program in Gender Studies and Women’s Studies (GSWS) and the Penn Women’s Center, both of which are celebrating their 50th anniversary this year.

Gwendolyn Beetham, associate director of GSWS, says that in the run-up to the 50th anniversary, she and Elisa Foster, director of the Penn Women’s Center, realized that none of their documents were housed as accessible archival material. “We wanted to get them out of boxes in people’s offices or basements,” Beetham says.

The Greenfield Intercultural Center commemorated its 40th anniversary on Jan. 27.  

GIC was established in 1984 to support the University’s underrepresented communities and build intercultural awareness on campus. As Penn’s first intercultural center, the GIC has provided a space for numerous student affinity groups over the years – including the United Minorities Council, Natives at Penn, and the Alliance for Understanding.

The center was founded in response to a UMC petition calling for the creation of a campus center for underrepresented students. Since its inception, GIC has supported many different initiatives, programs, and communities. It was a key advocate that pushed for the University to create community hubs, such as Makuu, La Casa Latina, and PAACH.

“GIC has set a vital model for how universities can better support their students and educate society on intercultural belonging,” GIC Associate Director Kia Lor said. 

Lor added that the center has served as an “intercultural incubator of new ideas and programs” over the past four decades.

Around 2015, the GIC aided in the establishment of Penn First Plus, which has since become a community to bolster the successes of first generation and low income students.

GIC Director Valeria De Cruz spoke to the center’s platform as a guiding force for new community groups on campus. She said that the GIC team was thankful for the opportunity to mentor and be a point of consultation for students that aim to develop their passions and leadership skills. 

“As one of the oldest centers at Penn, the GIC is often sought out for expertise and guidance from newer departments and centers on best practices in building and supporting diverse communities,” De Cruz said. 

De Cruz reflected on the University’s relationship with the center, acknowledging the financial and directional support they’ve received.

“Since the GIC was established, [it has] received consistent budgetary support from the university and University Life has been instrumental in providing guidance as the center has worked to address the needs of different communities,” she said. 

To celebrate its 40th anniversary, GIC recognized local alumni who are making change in the community at an Open House Celebration on Jan. 27. In the fall, the center plans on hosting a gala to bring together alumni located nationally and globally.

De Cruz highlighted the importance of the alumni network in continuing GIC’s work. “The center benefits from generous alumni support which has enabled us to increase our visibility and extend our reach on campus, ” De Cruz said.

Krista Cortes’ book-filled office on the top floor of the ARCH Building on Locust Walk is quiet, cozy, and full of golden, autumnal light. But the director of Penn’s La Casa Latina—the campus hub for Penn’s Latine community and Latin American culture—is more often found posted up in La Casa’s bright, bustling home on the garden level, chatting with students, organizing programming, and welcoming people into the space.

How a space is organized and outfitted for optimal learning and inclusion is important to her. After finishing her two master’s programs at Penn GSE (in teacher education and language and literacy), Cortes earned her PhD in education at the University of California, Berkeley, where her dissertation explored how Afro-Puerto Rican mothers create learning environments for their children that center Blackness.

“That’s what I’m trying to do in my work here,” said Cortes, who is also teaching “Applied Linguistics in Education” at GSE this semester. “It’s really important to me to bring Afro-Latinidad into conversations in a Latine cultural center. . . . I want us to really think about the multiplicity within our understanding of Latinidades. How do we do that, not only through programming, but how we do that in our interactions with students? How we do that in the ways that our space is designed?”

That care and intentionality is obvious throughout her office and at La Casa. She gave us a tour of everything from the personally meaningful art she’s hung on her walls to the snack closet she keeps stocked with condiments—Valentina hot sauce, Tajin chili-lime seasoning, adobo seasoning—to remind students of a taste of home.

1. Orisha prints 

I practice Santería—that’s my religion. Santería is an Afro-Cuban religion that came to Cuba when enslaved people from Africa who practiced Yoruba were brought over. These are representations of orishas [spirits] that are really important to me. That’s Oya—goddess of the wind, who represents transformation—with the sword, and Oshun—the river deity [not pictured], who represents love—is behind my desk. And there’s Elegua—deity of the crossroads, who represents destiny. I think they are super important as a lens or a metaphor through which to understand the ways in which Afro-Latinidad is often obscured and not talked about. . . . Even in thinking about the way that this tradition has persisted over time, it very much had to be hidden, right? To keep their traditions alive, they had to hide them behind Catholicism, and then Santería is really a blending of the Yoruba traditions with Catholicism as a way to adapt to a new situation. When folks come in my office, I don’t know that they would know what these images are. But it was important—a way of me bringing a piece of myself into this space.

Kwanzaa, a cultural holiday celebrating the cultures of Africa and the African diaspora, is celebrated from Dec. 26 through Jan. 1. At Penn, a celebration was held in the ARCH building with a ceremony and feast, offering sustenance and support for students during the final stretch of their fall semester.

“What we hope this moment does for you is just energize, recharge,” said Brian Peterson, director of Makuu: The Black Cultural Center, urging students to “summon that sense of purpose” during finals.

Peterson advised students to stay focused and offered help. He said, “Life is challenging. If you’re having problems staying focused, come to this building. It’s quiet. Knock on my door. Let me know what you have to do,” Peterson said. “And I might ask you to check in on me.”

Charles “Chaz” Howard, University chaplain and vice president for social equity & community, gave a word of prayer and offered libations, a Kwanzaa tradition honoring forebearers. Members of the audience offered names of people who have died: James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Sadie T. M. Alexander among them. After each name, Howard poured out a measure of water, offering acknowledgement and thanks.