This year, GradFest will extend to a week-long affair.
The sixth annual festival, which began in spring 2007 as a one day event, hopes to bring students from Penn’s 12 graduate schools together through food, fairs and fun.
GradFest will kick off on Monday with a talk by Stephen Dubner, the co-author of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, which has sold around 4 million copies in 35 languages. Dubner will speak at 2 p.m. in Irvine Auditorium.
On Tuesday, there will be a research award reception at the Graduate School Center. Six teams — who were awarded $6,000 each for their interdisciplinary research this summer — will present their projects.
The festival will continue at the Penn Museum with a screening of PHD Comics, a movie based on a popular web comic by Jorge Cham.
GradFest will reach its climax with two new events, the Graduate Student Activity Fair at 3 p.m. on Wednesday and the Multicultural Festival on Thursday. Both will take place on College Green.
The Student Activity Fair is “the first-ever, campus-wide graduate student activities and resource fair,” said GAPSA Vice Chairwoman Nina Zhao, a second-year Perelman School of Medicine student.
Over 50 groups have registered for the fair, including student groups and resources such as Student Health Service and Penn Libraries.
Thursday night’s multicultural festival will showcase student performances and foods from different parts of the world.
GradFest 2011 will end with a gala at the World Café Live on Friday night.
“GradFest is a wonderful annual tradition that helps to further unify graduate students at Penn, which comprises [about] 12,000 graduate and professional students,” said third-year Law School student and GAPSA Chairman Joseph Friedman.
All the GradFest events are free for Penn graduate students.
This year’s festival will be a far cry from its initial beginnings as a Saturday event in Houston Hall and Wynn Commons, Zhao said.
GradFest was typically held in May, but GAPSA decided to move the event to the fall after spring 2010.
This year’s GradFest marks the first that will go more than a day, Zhao said, adding that she hopes students will get something new from this year’s events.
“Every graduate student here is looking for something different. So I hope they get what they are looking for, whether that can be having fun, meeting new people or finding new opportunities,” she said.
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