Meet Our Graduates
Isabel Boston
B.A. '06
In 2001, more than twenty years after suspending her studies at Rutgers, Isabel Boston came to Penn as an administrative coordinator in the Department of Urban Studies — and shortly thereafter resumed her college career. This May she will graduate from the College of General Studies as both a Dean’s Scholar and a newly minted member of Phi Beta Kappa.
"At first I was scared to death every new semester, but CGS classes are wonderful," she says. "There’s such a sense of camaraderie. We're all coming from work, we're all in the same boat. CGS students are so full of energy. They’re ambitious and ready to learn and so focused."
"One of the wonderful things about CGS classes is the mixed age group. For example, the philosophy class I took during a summer session was a small class, as summer classes often are, and there was a wide spectrum of life experiences and perceptions that added an awful lot to the discussion. If we had all had the same background we wouldn't have gotten that. Life experiences really add a lot in group discussions with younger students."
At the same time, she continued to direct her church's choir. "When I started taking classes it was because I wanted to learn more about music. And I'm a church musician so I took Latin as my language because I thought it would be helpful. I think of all the other students in my Latin classes I was the only one who had a practical reason for taking Latin." For her final music course, Isabel incorporated her choir's annual Christmas concert into an independent study project, recruiting some of her fellow Penn students and training them to sing.
Her undergraduate degree nearly in hand, Isabel says she’s ready to start learning more. She’s interested in studying the correlation of music history, art history, and literature, a social history of society through the arts. “I’d almost feel guilty if I didn’t take classes," she says with a laugh.