Master of Liberal Arts

Curriculum | Certificates | Capstone Project

About Our Students

MLA students are a group of extraordinary people with wide-ranging interests and diverse academic, professional, and personal backgrounds. Some students have been out of school for many years, while others have just recently completed their undergraduate work. Some have majored in sciences and now want to study literature, while others with a humanities background long to shift careers or learn more about environmental studies. Some students are teachers who want to supplement their degrees in education with more detailed knowledge of the content that they teach, while others yearn to share their love of literature, history, anthropology, art, or science with others. In spite of these differences, MLA students share a strong love of learning and a keen desire to explore a subject (or several subjects) more deeply. The diversity in MLA students' backgrounds and experiences helps to make their time spent in seminars more enriching and exciting. In invigorating seminar discussions, MLA students learn from each other while they learn from their professors.

Comments From MLA Students & Alumni

"The MLA program gave me access to a depth of scholarship that I had never known. In two years, I learned many things, but the most important was that I could meet the intellectual challenge of Penn graduate courses. The MLA program gave me the background -- and the confidence -- to make a career change and pursue a Ph.D."

Charlene Mires, MLA '92
Assistant Professor of History, Villanova University

"What I found to be most extraordinary about the MLA program was its exceptional degree of personalization. Accustomed, as we all are, to our increasingly one-size-fits-all mentality, it was truly wonderful to find this program that specializes in tailoring coursework to suit very individual needs. The MLA staff made it possible for me to study widely across the university and also to work individually with outstanding faculty. It was an experience I will always treasure."

Gayle Samuels, MLA '98
Author

"From classes in Philadelphia to seminars at Oxford, from readings of the Ancient Greeks to discussions of cutting-edge literature, the MLA Program at Penn opened up the world to me. But just as important as the classroom studies, the program inspired me to keep learning, keep looking, and keep discovering. That was the greatest lesson of all."

Ken Jaworowski, MLA '00

"On a personal level, the MLA program has greatly enriched my life by challenging my intellectual capabilities, appeasing some of my more nagging curiosities, and revealing exciting new fields of inquiry. In a very basic, yet profound way, I sense that my experience at Penn has prodded me to use my mind in new and unconventional ways, and in the process, recast some of my own particular notions of what it really means as an individual to be a 'thinker.'"

Scott Romig, MLA '94
Band leader and impresario

"My interests are all over the map, so it is often difficult for me to focus on just one subject. I'm very pleased that I chose to enroll in the MLA Program because it not only allowed me to explore an array of interests, but also helped me to frame multiple themes into one cohesive field of study. I was amazed to discover, when studying dissimilar topics through an unconventional and interdisciplinary lens, how interconnected the world really is."

Chuck Brutsche, MLA '98
Associate Director, Robert A. Fox Leadership Program

"Set free to chart my own course across traditional disciplines and unfettered by a rigidly imposed curriculum, I was able to explore the subjects that interested me the most. As a result, earning my MLA was hands-down one of the most rewarding and incredible experiences I've ever had. I never enjoyed any academic challenge more than I enjoyed pursuing the MLA, and I never learned as much in any other institution as I did while studying at the University of Pennsylvania. Don't get me wrong, it was hard work -- charting your own course always is -- but it was hard work that I would do all over again in a heartbeat."

Peter Rowley, MLA '00

"For so long, I had felt the need to have an advanced degree, but only because I wanted the credential. The wonderful thing that happened along the way was that I was introduced to scholarship. I learned how to do research, how to ask questions, how to search for sources, and finally, how to put it all together. It has been a treasure to learn that learning is continuous.

Suzanne Sheehan Becker, MLA '00
Former President, Women's Way