When Nina Costanza was a Penn undergraduate, the creative writing department was just getting off the ground; there was no creative writing major, so Nina created an individualized major combining English courses with small writing workshops led by writers such as Philip Roth and Jerry Mangione. “It worked in my favor that it was an unknown, undeveloped program because it was so small, and we had fantastic teachers,” she recalls.
Not long after he started working at Penn, Dr. Alex Shpenev discovered he still had a lot to learn. “I was asked to teach a graduate statistics class in the new behavioral sciences degree program as part of my postdoc work,” he begins. “And while the expectation is that once you get your job as an academic, you're supposed to teach, very quickly I realized the thing that they don't teach you during your doctoral studies is how to teach.”
In December 2021, Tong "Tori" Dang was finishing the last semester of her electrical engineering master's degree, working as a research assistant at Penn's Singh Center for Nanotechnology, and managing the daunting task of applying to PhD programs. She planned to start her doctoral studies in electrical engineering in the fall. In the interim, Tori knew she should take a few extra courses to boost a particular skill set. "I wanted to catch up on computer science," she says.
For Maria Francesca Arruda de Amaral, data science can be a critical tool in understanding patterns in crime, policing, and how laws impact different regions. “There’s just so much information out there,” she says. “Part of doing responsible data science and responsible research is knowing how to interpret the data.
Whether you’re preparing for your next career, getting ready to apply to a graduate program, or seeking to explore a field that inspires you, the Penn Alumni Program allows you to study the subjects you want—on a schedule that works for you. View the Penn Alumni Program information session video below to learn more about courses and resources available to our students.
You may enroll in the Penn Alumni Program for the fall, spring, or summer terms. Your online enrollment form must be received by the following deadlines:
As a student in the Penn Alumni Program, you have access to a broad range of courses (up to the 5999 level) in the School of Arts and Sciences and beyond.
Contact us to receive additional information about the Penn Alumni Program, the admissions process, and academic resources.
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“I've always been a lover of learning and taking classes,” says Sage Rush, who enrolled in the Penn Alumni Program last fall. Sage is an alumna of the Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Development program at Penn Graduate School of Education, where she completed a master’s degree while working full time as a clinical research manager in a Penn neuropsychiatry lab. “In college I studied neuroscience, and a lot of my classes were heavily science-focused. I don’t feel like I got a chance to study other disciplines,” she recalls.
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