Faced with guiding student input into Penn's move eastward, the campus expansion committee is starting with baby steps.
The three undergraduate committee members launched their first round of efforts this week -- conducting interviews with a number of undergraduate student leaders.
About 25 students from the Undergraduate Assembly steering committee received e-mails asking for interviews, but expansion task force member and Wharton senior Cynthia Wong said she does not know exactly how many will take place.
Wong said these interviews are merely the first step in assessing the opinion of the student body as a whole, which her three-person committee will relay to administrators after Thanksgiving.
She said the committee will use information from the interviews to develop surveys and focus groups that will seek to reach all undergraduates.
"We want to have tons more outreach," Wong said. "We want to have more focus groups, more town halls, more interviews and, at the very least, a school-wide survey."
Conducting interviews with representatives from campus groups most efficiently provides task force members with a broad sense of what students think of the expansion, Wong said.
"We just want to talk to a practical number of students at this point in time before we start talking to all the other students," she said.
The committee also asked interviewees to discuss the eastward expansion with their respective groups before the interview, so that they could provide feedback as both group representatives and individuals.
Wong interviewed College senior and Latino Coalition spokesperson Jona Ludmir earlier this week.
Ludmir said that -- in terms of eastward expansion -- his priorities as an undergraduate are largely linked to his interests as a representative of his group.
"Latinos and other minorities groups, we have always been concerned with space," Ludmir said. "We would like a nice, big cultural center."
Ludmir added that he would also like to see additional residential facilities in the area.
College senior Philip Berkman, a member of the expansion committee, said he expects that this will be a topic addressed in many of the interviews.
"Residential housing is a theme that people are interested in, but everyone has different opinions on what is important and what needs to be addressed."
Ludmir said his only concern about the expansion is that it will only produce buildings and neglect to create more outdoor, open space.
Instead of conducting interviews, the three graduate committee members chose to seek initial feedback from their student population by distributing a survey at a Graduate and Professional Student Assembly meeting.
The two groups decided to conduct research separately because the most efficient methods of outreach differ for graduate and undergraduate students, Wong said.
The undergraduate and graduate committee members will present the preliminary results of their investigations to administrators this Friday.
