This past Friday, hundreds of students, an oboe player, a zombie and a pirate named Calico Jack shared a room in Houston Hall.

“There are a lot of autistic families in the Philadelphia area and it’s hard for them because school ends at 3 and a lot of them have jobs until 5 or 6,” Wharton junior John Lu said.

The University has approved a new pilot program that will set more relaxed standards for the use of alcohol at on-campus, registered events.

Students will have to wait until Sunday afternoon to hear the results of the freshman Class Board and Undergraduate Assembly elections.

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On Thursday, students and professors gathered in a Huntsman Hall classroom to listen to guest speaker Bart Houlahan talk about B Lab, a nonprofit organization that promotes social entrepreneurship in business.

About 600 guests and I dined at the new farm-to-table restaurant at 40th and Walnut streets last night at a VIP preview party. It was the first time the restaurant fired up its wood grill oven and poured the cocktails. GALLERY: Harvest VIP Preview

Since then, the University has cycled through six different theme years: food, evolution, arts and the city, water, games and proof. Its seventh theme year, for the 2013-2014 academic year, will be the Year of Sound.

The Philomathean Society and Benjamin Franklin Scholars program, with support from the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education, co-hosted a panel discussion called “Demystifying Academic Tenure” on Thursday night.

The Center for the Advanced Study of India is celebrating 20 years of serving as a hub for research on India at Penn.

For the second time in less than two years, the Student Activities Council has issued a moratorium that will prevent new student groups from receiving recognition and funding.

The new facility, scheduled for completion in mid-2014, will provide West Philadelphia with new outpatient medical facilities, research labs and office space for growing companies.

In what’s being called a loophole in the law, the Montgomery and Allegheny county governments plan to allow voter IDs to be produced by organizations other than the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation’s Driver’s License Centers.

On Friday, state Rep. Dan Truitt (R-West Chester) introduced the Pennsylvania Safe Schools Act into the state legislature as House Bill 2636.

Voting for freshman elections began at 12:01 a.m. Monday and will close at 5 p.m. Friday. Students have been casting their votes online, and candidates have been busy campaigning and getting their names out to the Penn community.

With 3,000 visits in the past month, UPennPost is a Penn-exclusive online marketplace for students to buy, sell and barter any item or service.

An “element of an alter-ego” may develop from an online social network such as Facebook.