On Sunday, the Undergraduate Assembly mulled over a policy update addressing the exclusion of American Sign Language from the Wharton language requirement before moving to internal affairs. While both the College and Nursing recognize ASL as a valid language for the requirement, Wharton does not.

This month marked the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth, and he has been getting considerable attention. My subject here is not his work on evolution. No, as director of Career Services, I am interested in the beginnings of his career. How does one become a Charles Darwin? A doctor's son, Darwin was sent to the University of Edinburgh, where he studied medicine, but it did not sufficiently interest him.

In what may turn your friend, your mom or even you into a modern-day Big Brother, Google's newest application, Latitude, allows you to broadcast your exact location to your friends and family. Available for any computer and on certain smartphones that are GPS-enabled, the application utilizes information from GPS satellites and cell towers to pinpoint a user's location.

Senior leadership. Or the lack thereof. That's what all of the Penn men's basketball team's problems have boiled down to. At least that's the line coach Glen Miller continues to offer as an excuse after the Quakers dropped two games to Dartmouth and Harvard at the Palestra this weekend.

Pete Carril knows what he wants to do with the notorious basketball schema he devised. "I'm going to get a bunch of gravediggers and bring them up to Princeton and dig a big hole in the ground," the Hall of Fame coach told The New York Times in 2007. "And then bury the Princeton offense once and for all.

Freshman Matthew Sommer is the biggest Penn sports fan on campus, and he has the points to prove it. An enthusiastic participant in the Red and Blue Rewards program, Sommer has acquired 59 points - ten points more than the second-place contender. Having already amassed enough points to acquire a free Qdoba burrito, Famiglia pizza, Penn T-shirt and Penn hamper, Sommer is on the verge of redeeming the 60-point Penn pint-glass set.

For Engineering and Wharton sophomore Prateek Bhide, a day doesn't go by without hearing his classmates talk about grades. Though competition prepares students for future careers, he said, "most of the people I talk to in the workforce say GPA doesn't matter in the real world in getting

There's a light at the end of the reconstruction of South Street Bridge for the many students and city residents who have changed their commuting routines since the bridge's closure. When drafting the latest plans for the new bridge, developers opted for a pedestrian-friendly design, a fact that pleases many weary Penn commuters.

Although the Class of 2009 will graduate to a fiercely competitive job market, its Commencement speaker happens to head a company that annually tops Fortune magazine's "Best Places to Work" list. Eric Schmidt, Google chief executive officer and chairman, will speak at the 253rd Commencement Ceremonies on May 18 at Franklin Field.

In the face of the typical year-end onslaught of high-fat foods and rich holiday meals, some Penn employees left family gatherings lacking something - extra weight. The "Maintain, Don't Gain" program, run by the Health Promotion and Wellness division of Human Resources' Quality of Worklife Department , challenged participants to keep their weight after New Year's within two to three pounds of their starting weight as measured on the day before Thanksgiving.

With a billion-dollar budget gap to fill, city officials are asking West Philadelphian residents for help. Last night, The Penn Project for Civic Engagement hosted the fourth and final city-budget consultation forum in West Philadelphia. In line with the past meetings, more than 500 local residents attended to contribute to the budget decision-making that will soon start at City Hall.

Bower Field - home to club sports such as rugby, lacrosse, ultimate Frisbee and soccer - will be closing at the beginning of May to make way for the construction of Penn Park, an expansion of the current recreational and athletic facilities east of campus.

Opponents of the proposed Campus Inn extended-stay hotel project at 40th and Pine streets will have to wait a little longer to make their case. Their appeal of a Historical Commission decision allowing the project to move forward was scheduled to be heard yesterday before the Department of Licenses & Inspections Review Board.

Say you're a DJ for Penn's student-run radio station, WQHS. Your show airs at 8:00 p.m. every Wednesday, which is a great time - most of your friends can listen as they do homework. But right now you're not worrying about listenership, it's getting to the Hollenbeck Center, a good 30-minute walk to the no man's land of Penn's campus.

One-third of U.S. university nursing programs did not integrate international health into their curricula as recently as 2007, according to Wipada Kunaviktikul, but the School of Nursing is not one of them. The Nursing School kicked off its third-annual Global Health Reflections Week yesterday with a presentation by Kunaviktikul, a research fellow at Harvard University and a professor at Chiang Mai University in Thailand.

Ilana Millner is an College junior from Washington Crossing, Pa. Her e-mail address is millner@dailypennsylvanian.com.

Though the state of the economy will likely increase requests for financial aid, most private colleges and universities, including Penn, are committed to maintaining their financial-aid policies and initiatives. The schools that have pledged to maintain financial-aid initiatives have been counteracting reduced budgets by pulling funds from other areas, which has resulted in firing administration and faculty members, cutting programs and freezing faculty