SEAS honors program used for recruitment

A new program at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences will hopefully attract more students to Penn, University officials say.

Beginning with the Class of 2012, SEAS will implement its first Honors Program. Selected students will take honor-level courses, complete a research requirement and contribute to the community.

SEAS Associate Dean Sampath Kannan, who spearheaded the initiative when he assumed the deanship last year, aims to have 10 percent of next year's freshmen class enrolled in the program.

SEAS will choose 5 percent of that pool from the students accepted to the SEAS Class of 2012; the remaining five percent will be reserved for students who may apply at the end of their freshmen year or beginning of their sophomore year.

The program, which will be headed by Electrical and Systems Engineering professor Jan Van der Spiegel, should serve as an effective recruitment tool.

It will be "a very nice carrot to attract students to Penn," Kannan said.

Compared to honors programs at other top engineering schools like University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, the SEAS Honors Program will stand out because the coursework and involvement in community affairs will be as important as research components, Kannan said.

These requirements will be different from the academic-based one at UIUC, which emphasizes honors courses and GPA.

Other competing engineering schools, like Cornell and Carnegie Mellon universities, have honors programs with just one of the three components - often either research or coursework - but not both.

Another potentially attractive part is the summer research component.

Enrolled students will be required to participate in research during the summers after their sophomore and junior years with the help of a faculty advisor.

This research activity is a paid summer internship as well as one credit on the student's transcript.

The coursework involved in the program is incorporated into major requirements - being in the program requires no additional courses.

Schools like UIUC, on the other hand, require 12-15 extra course hours.

So far, prospective participants seem to have high hopes for the program.

"The Honors Program is definitely something that would heighten my experience at Penn," said Penn applicant Ahmed Ahmed, a senior at Philadelphia's Central High School."It would give me the kind of hands-on exposure I'd need to get a job after graduating."

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