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.”

“Dentistry was a childhood dream of mine,” says Liz Wimberg (Pre-Health Programs, University of Pennsylvania ’23). “I wanted to either be the president of the United States, or a dentist.” As a college student and graduate, however, Liz was drawn toward creative studies and social justice: she pursued an interdisciplinary undergraduate curriculum, worked in immigration law, and apprenticed in the kitchen of a fine dining restaurant.

Although he graduated college as a pre-med, Nicholas Parenti (MCS ’23) discovered a passion for virology when he went to work for a pioneering Penn Medicine lab that has been studying coronaviruses for decades. “I just immediately knew working in the lab was for me,” he recalls. “I really enjoyed the lab work and thinking about molecular biology, and I knew that I wanted more education.” As a lab technician, Nick helps the lab run smoothly and supports his colleagues’ research.

“I was a science kid when I was younger,” says Pre-Health Post-Baccalaureate Programs student Anneka Allman. Though she took a different path in college, majoring in visual arts, she decided to return to the sciences after graduation. “I came home to Philadelphia and started volunteering at an immunology lab at Penn,” she says. Not long after, she was hired as a full-time technician.

Penn PhD student Matthew Fagerstrom has aspired to earn his doctorate in economics since his sophomore year at Villanova University studying economics and political science. “My interest,” he says, “is the intersection of comparative political economy and monetary policy.” Penn’s Post-Baccalaureate Studies program not only offered Matthew the math courses he needed to strengthen his doctoral program application but helped him decide that Penn was his top choice for earning his postgraduate degree.

David Steven Jacoby teaches graduate Operations Management, Supply Chain Management, and Global Supply Chain Decarbonization at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University. He is a senior fellow at Boston University’s Institute for Global Sustainability and a former adjunct professor at Boston University’s Questrom Graduate School of Business, and a master class instructor for REVchain's Supply Chain Decarbonization program.