Mural Arts Philadelphia: The Bigger Picture

Philly is known for plenty of things: cheesesteaks, the LOVE statue, the playground for Nicolas Cage in National Treasure. But not many people know that Philly is also known for being, quite literally, an outdoor museum.

In my last post, I talked about the courses that took you beyond the confines of the traditional classroom, which included FNAR 222, "Big Pictures: Mural Arts". More than a mere course about wall paintings, the class took us around the city and back in time, highlighting the socio-economic, cultural, and political impact on public art in a community.

Aimed at integrating service with research, teaching, and learning, the class focused on the work done by Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program (the director of the program, Jane Golden Heriza, co-teaches the course with muralist Shira Walinsky). Many, if not most, of my friends at Penn actually had never heard of the organization before I took the class (re: could never stop talking about it). This is surprising, however, as there have been over 3,600 murals painted in Philly since 1984. The program also employs over 300 artists annually, ex-convicts, art students, and interested community members—all of whom want to give back to the community.

Sit on a Market-Frankford train heading westward and you’ll see 50+ “love letters” to an unnamed woman scattered across the buildings. Look up while shopping on 15th and Chestnut to gaze at a 27-story painting of a Pakistani immigrant. Or walk ONE block off campus, to 40th and Chestnut to view one of the most vibrant compositions you’ve ever seen.

Once in a while, get your head out of the books and into the city. Take a walking tour to see these works, scan the accompanying QR codes to learn more about the work and its artist. As Jane Golden describes it, the city becomes a visual autobiography. What started as an anti-graffiti movement has since echoed its increasingly diverse population and rich history, transforming Philadelphia into one of the most colorful cities in the nation.

-Helen N. '18

An Ode to Three Course Meals: How to Navigate Philadelphia Restaurant Week

If you're anything like me, you highly value the combination of really good food at a really good price. That's why I always look forward to the two weeks of the season where I can take advantage of Philadelphia Restaurant Week. Some of the most famous restaurants in downtown Philadelphia create a special menu for this week of three courses for $20 for lunch or $35 for dinner. In short, it's awesome, and I highly recommend taking advantage of it to go to all those restaurants you've always been meaning to go to but never had a truly good enough reason to casually go for a super nice dinner. Now that I'm a seasoned pro at restaurant week, here are a few ways I've found are the best ways to take advantage of Restaurant Week:

1) Go to that restaurant

You know, the one you've been dying to try since you promised first day of freshman year that you would go into Center City all the time. Now's your chance! Grab some friends who made that same promise and take the initiative to finally try it out. Philly's restaurant scene is epic, and you're only here (for school, at least) once!

2) Go for lunch

Yes, I know it may seem odd to casually stroll downtown for a three course lunch in the middle of the week, but trust me, it's so worth it. It's cheaper without sacrificing much food. Plus, since Restaurant Week usually happens at the beginning of the semester, it can be a super fun way to reunite with friends after the break to catch up over a shared experience of eating a lot of really good food.

3) Do your research

It's true- some menus are better than others, and since multiple Restaurant Week meals can add up despite the insane deal it appears to be, I highly recommend looking through every menu to see which is the most appealing. If you're choosing a restaurant to go with a group, keep in mind the value of ordering different things and sharing everything for maximum taste testing.

4) And if you're here in the summer... go in University City!

I was here during the summer and was able to take advantage of UCity Dining Days, which has a slightly different setup but was still an awesome way to try out restaurants near campus that I had been meaning to try. Look out for it if you're in Philly for the summer!

-Caitlyn R. '17

The Philadelphia Concert Scene

Philly is a hub of cultural perfection. Just walking down to Center City brings on a pleasant onslaught of sensations—we have pieces of the world at our Millennial fingertips. However, in my opinion, Philadelphia as a center for musical genius is one of the most valuable parts of the city’s composition. Music injects life into the city, providing an additional piece of vitality in its diverse makeup. In Philadelphia, you’ll get an eclectic tasting of pretty much every musical genre and the artists that dominate each respective genre. Thus, whatever type of music you currently vibe with, it’s guaranteed to come through Philly at some point or another.

As a self-proclaimed music buff, I made it my personal mission to explore the Philadelphia music scene on the weekends. Just attending a concert assists in popping that infamous Penn bubble, since music is a famous medium of emotional escape. The vibrant music scene in Philly offers an even more opportune physical escape, which is such an advantageous prospect to use. Just grab some friends, cruise the Ticketmaster website, and you will surely discover an artist you have been dying to see in some awesome Philadelphia concert venue. The city has intimate venues such as the Theater of Living Arts, which contribute a more intimate atmosphere with the performer, as well as bigger venues such as Union Transfer which provides a more historic texture.

Every year in the fall semester, Philadelphia houses the Made in America music festival that usually includes industry giants. To give you an example, The Weeknd and Beyonce were the headliners this past year, with names such as Future, Banks, J. Cole, Big Sean, Meek Mill, and Nick Jonas making a stunning appearance. It’s an event that many Penn students participate in, as one of the most well-known and well-received music fests of the year. The Philadelphia concert scene is definitely a place for all music lovers.

-Karis Stephen '18

Rugby and Reality

It isn’t always easy to find yourself in college. Our obsession with the future tends to blind us to what is right in front of us. There are expectations to be met. This mentality is magnified at a place like Penn, where every move we make is towards a bright future that we’ve deluded ourselves into believing we already have figured out. The truth is, we have no idea how to go about finding our path. That’s the beauty of playing a sport.

    Coming into Penn, I had never played rugby before. I heard a great deal about how physical it was. The name of the sport itself carried so much weight. It’s association with hard running and harder tackling made it seem like a sport that only the strong could play. My desire to prove myself in front of my peers led to me to walk on. This spur of the moment decision may have been the best decision that I’ve made at Penn.

The practices are grueling. I’ve been sore for so long, I don’t remember how it feels not to feel that way. The action during matches is nonstop and exhausting. Every position is an important position. Slipping and letting your guard down for even second all but ensures that you’ll expose a weakness in the team’s defense. Nothing has ever prepared me for the world beyond college more.

Rugby has taught me discipline. It has taught me that preparation and working hard is meant to be painful. Striving to be the best at what you do isn’t easy. If it was, everyone would do it. But the exhilaration, the pure ecstasy of realizing how far you’ve come and what you’re capable of because of the work that you’ve put in beats the pain every single time. You grow to love and care about every member of your team. Success can’t be reached alone. You need people around you who care about you- people who will always have your back because they know that you will always have theirs as well. You grow to respect them more than you can say. Nobody on a team actually wants to be the best player. The goal is to grow together. You even grow to have a begrudging respect for the athletes on the team opposing you. They’re playing their hearts out just like you are. The handshakes at the end of the match are completely genuine. Most importantly though, rugby has taught me to run without fear. There will be times when you have the ball and the only option is to run forward. There will be guys on the other side waiting to tackle you to the ground. This is something that you accept. The best option is always to take the hit. Run without stopping, have no fear, take the fall. It always leads to you and the ones you care about being able to move up to field. Even when things seem hopeless, they aren’t. The field constantly changes. As is life.

There’s an entire world waiting for me after college, but it doesn’t seem very scary anymore. All I have to do is keep moving forward, for myself and for my loved ones. The best advice I have when it comes to finding your way in college: find a club or a sport to love.

-Ibrahim Bakri '18

Uende Ng’ambo | Go Abroad

I never had a serious thought process of weighing the pros and cons for spending a semester studying abroad. As an African Studies major I had taken Swahili for my first two years at Penn so the chance to spend the entire semester in Tanzania totally immersed in this language that I had spent so many late nights in Van Pelt trying to learn seemed like the natural thing to do. I wanted total language immersion and that’s exactly what I’ve gotten.

The College’s language programs and classes are phenomenal, but there is something about language that you never really can grasp with only grammar charts, dialogues, and in-class essays. Being able to go to country or part of the world where your language is spoken and get real practice on the streets is invaluable. Haggling with shopkeepers in the main market of my host community of Iringa or trying to explain where I was trying to get to when I was hopelessly lost during my month-long home-stay in the rural village of Ikanga has taught me more about the subtleties and intricacies of Swahili than I ever could have learned in a classroom at Penn.

Being able to wittily deflect aggressive and frequent marriage proposals from random strangers (yes, this happens and, yes, it’s bizarre) has cemented my ability to think and produce the language quickly. While negotiating prices for some colorful Tanzanian cloth (that my sister basically wants brought home more than me at this point) has honed the way I use certain vocab, progressively getting more direct and harsh as the rounds of bargaining go on.

All in all, what this semester has taught me most is that having the opportunity to study abroad is not an alternative to Penn, but a natural continuation, in my opinion a requirement, for anyone trying to solidify their proficiency in a foreign language. As a junior I’ve spent two years memorizing vocabulary and learning verb conjugations, but five months of getting to put that knowledge into use has been amazing and, if given the chance, I’d do it all again if I could.

If you’re trying to master your language and thinking of going abroad, as Professor Mshomba, Penn’s Swahili instructor, told me last year “Uende Ng’ambo!” “Go Abroad!” and put those language skills to the test. 

-David Scollan '17

The Intersection of STEM and the Arts

My first experience with computer science, excluding self-teaching HTML to make my Neopets page look snazzier than everyone else’s, was in the spring of my freshman year, when I took an introductory course (CIS110) as a way of fulfilling the Formal Reasoning and Analysis requirement. It was never my intention to continue down the C.S. path beyond that course, but somewhere along the way, I accidentally became intrigued.

Fast-forward a little bit, I have now spent three and a half months waking up for an 8:30am class every Monday and Wednesday, staying up way too late typesetting assignments, and feeling dumbfounded because how on earth are you supposed to connect five vertices with only two edges? (note: that is impossible--but in said scenario I had misunderstood the premise of the problem. Frown face.)

While CIS160: Mathematical Foundations to Computer Science is not even cross-listed in the College like CIS110 is, the College curriculum gives students the flexibility to take some non-College electives, and I would definitely recommend the class to anyone as crazy as I am, i.e. willing to spend too much time feeling very dumb until you figure out the proof. Even if math is not your thing, because it definitely isn’t mine, understanding concepts like graph theory and induction gives me a completely different way to approach the content I am learning in my English classes. In fact, these theories and applications are surprisingly applicable to all facets of life.

As cheesy as that sounds, I believe maintaining different skills that complement each other is very important. Additionally, my professor, Rajiv Gandhi, is notorious for assigning many difficult problem sets, but all of his students love him despite the fact. We are either masochistic students, or he is an efficient and dedicated professor. I’ll tell you now it is definitely the latter, and if there is anything that I know holds true across all fields of study, it is that a good professor is the most important factor of them all.

-Julia Wang '18

The Sectored Comfort Zone

I never expected to take an English class after high school. By graduation, I was convinced that my passions lie in the sciences, and I planned to fill my years at Penn with Biology, Chemistry, and Neuroscience. However, as I realized several months into freshman year, the Sectors of Knowledge would push me to take several classes outside of my quantitative comfort zone.

Putting my shaky literature background on the back burner, I figured I would try a comparative literature class to fulfill the Arts & Letters sector. I combed through the list of classes and found one that seemed promising: Modern Middle East Literatures in Translation.

While I initially struggled with the volume of readings, I found myself progressively intrigued with the class each week. One week, we focussed on Turkish short stories. The next, Hebrew poetry. The next, we read a modern Iranian novel. Each week we exploring a different literary tradition through a different genre. With only 20 students in the class, we were also able to discuss how the literature spoke to the historical and cultural context of the writers. Our conversations evolved from close readings of the texts to discussions about politics, gender, identity, etc. through the lens of the Middle East.

Within a few weeks, MMELT was my favorite class. It not only taught me how to read and analyze literature in a more profound way, but it became a space for me to explore my cultural heritage vis-a-vis the works that we read. Most of all, this class taught me that my passions are constantly evolving. While I still love the sciences, I hope to take more classes in Middle Easter Studies.

Not every Sector or Foundation class is a resounding success. There were sectors that I fulfilled with classes that I ended up disliking, or new subjects that I later learned I did not enjoy. By choosing to take MMELT, I learned that somewhere among the two thousand plus classes offered by the College, there are subjects that I never knew I would enjoy so much. And while the Sectors may seem like a burden to fulfill, they are a rare opportunity to dive into the unknown and learn for the sake of learning.

-Nitay Caspi '18

Markets in Philadelphia

Philly is a multi-faceted city with a vibrant vibe that you’ll never get tired of. While the Center City district is very urban with skyscrapers and bustling traffic, some other parts of the city are more of a town with pretty residential areas. One of the best ways to explore this versatile city is going to markets.

Reading Terminal Market is by far one of the most accessible. Located near the City Hall, the eclectic collection of shops and food places constantly draws people. For foodies at Penn, Reading Terminal Market offers an overwhelming number of options that you will likely find yourself in the market every once in a while to try something new.

Italian Market is further away from campus and is rather difficult to reach via public transportation, but it is another must for students in the city of cheesesteak. Try the original Philly cheesesteak from Pat’s and Geno’s and also get some more cheese from the 75-year-old Di Bruno Bros.

Spread throughout the city are farmers’ markets. One opens on Wednesdays right on Penn’s campus in front of the bookstore, bringing fresh fruits and produce to students for easy fruit and bread shopping. Another one in Clark Park on Saturdays is larger and you can take a walk to West Philly on your way to the park. Rittenhouse Square also has one on Saturdays, if you feel like going east of campus.These are just some of the well-known markets in Philadelphia and there certainly are many more that I have not been to yet. The city is hiding some precious gems, so get ready to explore.

-Michelle Jo '18

How to burst the "Penn Bubble": Courses that Take You Beyond the Classroom

Before coming to Penn, I was excited to take advantage of its "campus within a big city". I wanted to see the PMA, watch Broadway shows at the Kimmel Center, enjoy the perks of Restaurant Week, and frequent Phillies and Eagles games.

However, upon arrival, I was instantaneously swept up into the maelstrom that is NSO and the piece of jargon known by Quakers as the "Penn Bubble". But perhaps more importantly, I soon came to appreciate the classes that transported us outside of the classroom and into the wilderness city. Often times, I've found that in such classes, I've learned more than a textbook or a slideshow could ever teach me (and far more interestingly at that), and I've been able to explore and appreciate the city better. My favorite Penn-bubble-bursting classes? I’ve described a few of them below:

ENGL 157 -- Introduction to Journalistic Writing: Writing About Food with Rick Nichols

A class that not only teaches how to think and write critically, but how to think and write critically about food (...and the people, the trends, and the experiences, of course). Frequent field trips took us to restaurants around town, where we could profile famous chefs or prominent members of the Philadelphia food scene and hang out with them for a day before writing a piece on them for a final project. Not only a nice break from Penn, but also a nice break from Penn dining halls!

ARTH 106 -- Architect and History with Professor Haselberger

What better way to learn about architecture than to walk in the shadows of one of America's most culturally diverse and historically rich cities? Professor Haselberger is famous for teaching this course every fall, which attracts majors and non-majors alike. Almost every Friday afternoon, we would take the SEPTA into the city proper and look at a different building inspired by whatever time period we had been looking at earlier that week—Greek, Post-modern, Rococo, etc. A bonus? I learned how to better navigate the city for outings to come.

FNAR 222/URBS 322 -- Big Pictures: Mural Arts with Shira Walinsky and Jane Golden

This class is taught by two wonderful women—Shira Walinksy and Jane Golden, the founder of the prolific Mural Arts program that has created thousands of murals all around Philadelphia and given employment opportunities to hundreds of inmates of Graterford Prison. It’s a community-service based course in which you learn about the ways in which public art shapes the socio-economic development of an area and changes the people who inhabit it. The final project involved creating a mural with a community that was eventually installed at a school in West Philadelphia—an unconventional solution to a common problem.

The Penn bubble is, in my opinion, absolutely real. We get sucked into our textbooks and laptops and papers. And while the resources that we have here on campus are beyond wonderful, sometimes you really cannot beat learning from the real thing. There’s so much of Philadelphia to be explored, and luckily Penn provides the courses to do so.

-Helen Nie (C’18)

Collegiate Cuisine: How I Learned to (Kind of) Cook for Myself

This year was my first year not being on a meal plan, and making the adjustment to making all of my own meals definitely a struggle. Having to make time to cook easy yet edible and also somewhat healthy lunches and dinners is definitely not something that happens overnight. However, I've picked up on a few helpful tips for all those making a similar transition. These are some things I've learned to do to make cooking for myself less of a hassle.

1. Frozen vegetables are your friend

Buying vegetables frozen is a great way to get the nutrients of vegetables without having to worry about cooking them before they go bad! While I like to buy fresh vegetables if I happen to be grocery shopping at the right time, I've found it super helpful to have a few types of frozen vegetables on hand so that meal prep isn't as much of a hassle. 

2. Make ahead lunches

Often times I'll make a big batch of something in my slow cooker (a wonderful device, by the way) on Sunday and eat it for lunch all week. That way, I don't have to worry as much about making lunch every morning. Plus, it helps me use up vegetables or meats I have on hand that will go bad soon. 

3. Go meatless!

I had never been one to try to cut down on meat, but starting to cook with raw meat definitely freaked me out at first, leading me to try more meatless sources of protein like tofu, lentils, chickpeas, and beans. They're super easy to prepare and can be made in so many different styles that I never get bored of them. Now, even though I've conquered my fear of working with raw meat, I tend to make my lunches and about half my dinners meatless!

Hopefully these tips will make off-campus living easier for anyone who, like me, had to make the transition from meal plan to meals. While it can be stressful at times, learning to meal prep can be fun and make life a bit easier, too.

-Caitlyn Rand

Learning to Speak a New Culture

The fact that I had to change the language back into English in order to type this is a testament to my attempt to truly integrate myself into the French culture and language while I’m abroad in Paris. Although my computer may be set to French, it is still a daily struggle to communicate with my professors and host family, although I do notice my language skills improving. Writing my papers in French and trying to take notes in lecture is more difficult than I could have anticipated, but one of my favorite things about my abroad experience has been learning outside of the physical classroom.

One of my courses “Nineteenth Century French Painting” has a component where students meet once a week at the Louvre or Musée d’Orsay to interpret the paintings we learn about in class in person. I aspire to work in a museum one day, so the ability to be in front of the works while discussing them is not only a great cultural experience, but also it is also helping me in developing my skills of visual analysis.

Another one of my classes called “Castles and Gardens” also has an excursion component, and each week we spend half of the seminar in lecture and the other half going off into the city to tour the historical buildings and landscapes we have learned.

Being able to explore museums, galleries, and historic buildings in Paris both as part of my classes and on my own has been one of the most valuable parts of studying abroad for me. Although I am used to living in a major city like Philadelphia, I too rarely take the time to wander and get lost when I am so busy at Penn. 

-Hannah Fagin