College house fellows and faculty directors are members of the University community who live in undergraduate housing to provide students with additional mentorship and community engagement in addition to their roles as Penn faculty and staff. 

According to College House and Academic Services, fellows help “bring the intellectual life of the University along with them” by hosting academic and social programming and offering students guidance. Faculty directors supervise fellows and lead a residential faculty team within their college house, helping shape the house’s academic and social community.

The positions operate in two- and four-year terms, respectively, and have competitive selection processes to match applicants with the best college house environments for all residents.

Learning beyond the lecture hall

In an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian, Gentili explained that one objective of the live-in faculty program is to “continue academic activity” outside the classroom.

Each semester, Gentili offers a Film Culture in Residence course and hosts film screenings throughout the year in his residential building to “fulfill the mission of bringing together students with academic opportunities.”

He said that the faculty residents in Harrison each bring their own subject-matter expertise, which gives the building its character. Faculty living in Harrison include professors in religious studies, history, and fine arts, according to Gentili.

“The element of the arts and the humanities in Harrison is definitely very present,” Gentili said.

History professor and Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies Emma Hart hopes to bring her academic experience to her upcoming fellowship at Gutmann College House.

“The subject that I study is kind of my hobby as well,” Hart said. “History already crosses into all of the areas of my life anyway … so there’s not that much of a sharp line.”

Hart described plans to explore “the hidden histories and spaces at Penn” with interested students, including the Common Press in the Fisher Fine Arts Library and the Arthur Ross Gallery exhibit on Revolutionary-era America.

Like Hart and Gentili, Physics and Astronomy professor Arnold Mathijssen bridges the gap between academic and personal spaces by hosting events on food science for his residents in Stouffer College House. On one occasion, Mathijssen held a “Hot Ones”-style wing challenge where students also learned about the chemical compound capsaicin. On another, he invited a Penn graduate to host a coffee tasting where they discussed the different climates and methods of bean harvesting.

“It’s really something that brings people together,” Mathijssen said. “You can actually give more depth and explain more about the science behind it, and also the history and the culture.”

Music professor and anthropologist Carol Ann Muller, who has been the faculty director at Riepe College House since 2022, emphasized the importance of food as a “component of sociability” that builds relationships and teaches “reciprocity.”

“To give and to share is actually a really important social principle,” Muller, who bakes cookies for her residents every week, said.

The Penn melting pot

Several faculty residents reflected on the importance of cultural exchange in their houses, encouraging students to take advantage of Penn’s diverse student body.

“Part of the academic experience is to meet people you wouldn't normally meet, to learn something of where they come from, how their lives have been,” Muller said. 

She described the University’s diversity as one of Penn’s “greatest strengths.”

As a “man of cinema,” Gentili described the view of Locust Walk from the 38th Street bridge as his “favorite shot.” From that vantage point — on his daily commute from Harrison to Fisher-Bennett — Gentili looks out on a “human river of people” from all over the world, speaking various languages, each headed to their own destination. 

But despite these differences, Gentili said they all have something in common: “belonging to Penn and to the future.” 

Laia Mogas-Soldevila, who serves as director at DumoLab Research and assistant professor of architecture at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, brought almost 10 years of prior experience in on-campus housing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when she became a fellow at Lauder College House. 

When Mogas-Soldevila joined Penn’s faculty during the pandemic, she and her family were unfamiliar with Philadelphia, so living on campus was their “first option,” she said. 

“The College Houses are such a tight community where you start knowing people and you start understanding how the University thinks on a global level — because the undergrads know everything,” Mogas-Soldevila said. “I thought: ‘It’s a great opportunity for me to understand Penn and Philadelphia.’”

Hart also told the DP that she’s hoping to learn more about the “huge range” of “diverse life experiences and cultures and backgrounds” that make up Penn’s community through her new role as a fellow.

‘A home away from home’

Many faculty residents live on campus with their families. Partners, children, and pets often become familiar faces to students. 

Alicia Risner-Bauman has been a faculty fellow at Ware College House for five years, in addition to her roles as associate director of the Care Center for Persons with Disabilities and associate professor at Penn Dental Medicine. While she and her husband spend some weekends at their home in southern New York, Risner-Bauman lives with her son and her dog in the Quadrangle during the workweek. 

“If you are a faculty fellow, your entire family can live with you. That’s part of the idea, is to have that family environment, so students have that home-away-from-home feeling,” Risner-Bauman said. “They see that faculty are real people with families.”

Mogas-Soldevila, who lives with her husband and their two young children in Lauder, explained that faculty fellows are important to students because they “demonstrate family” and give “warmth” to campus living. Sometimes, fellows’ kids become “little cousins” to undergraduate residents. 

While fellows present themselves as research and academic support they also offer students the opportunity to be around “adults that are not professors,” Mogas-Soldevila added.

“We take off our professor hats,” she said. “I think that's what the fellows offer the most.”

Muller frequently invites residents into her Riepe apartment to play the piano and keyboard and share home-cooked meals. For students, she emphasized the importance of knowing that a professor “cares about you in that way.”

“Professors are human beings too, and we can open up new worlds to students through knowledge sharing,” Muller added.

Meeting students where they are

As faculty residents in the Quad, Muller and Risner-Bauman are “very cognizant” that first-year students have unique needs as they arrive on campus. 

From approaching professors to discuss a bad grade to asking long-term questions about studying abroad, Muller told the DP that the faculty in the Quad are “trying to create a place where you can have a conversation about the academic culture of Penn.” But in a time of transition, Risner-Bauman added that fellows serve an important second purpose: emotional support.

“We want to be that touch person that they come to when they have questions, that they come to when they just need a break,” Risner-Bauman said. “We’re there to help them. We’re there to give them advice.”

For fellows in multi-year housing, having residents in different stages of their Penn experience creates a different role. Gentili emphasized the need to be “more selective and more attentive” to upperclassmen than to “freshmen that really are thirsty and hungered for activity.” 

“Sometimes they are not very involved with [house activities] because they are too busy in terms of their circle of friends, their studies, and the future after college,” Gentili said. 

Upperclassmen are typically “more interested in themselves” — in their friends, studies, and post-grad plans — than activities at the residential houses, Gentili said. With this sentiment, he said the fellows “measure our intervention, our help, our solidarity with” older students according to “their demand.”

Mogas-Soldevila, who has been a fellow at Lauder while the house was both multi-year and first-year-only housing, said that she’s “happy” to have a more varied population in the house for the upcoming year. Younger residents “benefit from going to an event and suddenly being able to talk to a fourth-year student” who can offer them advice about courses and clubs, she added. 

Mathijssen empathized with incoming students entering an unfamiliar environment. Though born and raised in the Netherlands, he attended university and graduate school in the United Kingdom, where he initially “didn’t know anybody.” 

He recalled joining several residential and student leadership committees at University College London and Oxford University, which helped familiarize him with those new environments and create community among his peers. For Mathijssen, it was “quite natural” to bring those personal experiences as a foreign student to his role as a fellow. 

Mathijssen encouraged his new residents to, like him, take advantage of provided programming and consider taking on a leadership role in the future. He recommended that students “just come along to the first couple of events and see what it's like.” 

Students could also join a steering committee to propose and plan their own activities, which he described as a “natural path” to getting more involved after arriving at a college house.

“If you really like it, then often people transition to become an RA later, and then they can actually help the next generation of students coming in,” Mathijssen said. 

For house fellows and faculty directors, working with students is an opportunity to connect with and give back to the Penn community. Nearly two decades after he first moved into Harrison, the “young and promising” students he interacts with are a key part of what keeps Gentili living at Penn.

“To contribute — as a faculty, administrator, fellow — to the growth of this generation or generations that were in the past is a great joy and pleasure,” Gentili said.

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