Landscape of Research and Innovation

Catalog description

At Penn there are thousands of faculty, staff, and students engaged in an extraordinary variety of research projects. The goal of this first-year seminar is to give entering students an overview of this landscape. Participants will survey and discuss the content of a dozen fields and sub-fields, and will also learn how to get involved in research and innovation during their time at Penn. Each student will develop an individual plan, covering the acquisition of needed knowledge and skills, the development of personal and social connections, and the exploration of on- and off-campus research opportunities of various kinds. We will meet twice a week. We will meet twice a week. At one weekly meeting, an active researcher will join us for an informal discussion, in the context of the regularly-scheduled series of "Dinners with Interesting People" in the Quad. In the other weekly meeting, we will review background reading and discuss the featured area, including exercises in computational modeling of real datasets.