Abby Johnston

Wharton Freshman, Shiv Kapoor shifts his focus from relaxing to studying as the semester comes to an end.

Students in the Excelano project have found a family in the other group members. Excelano is Penn’s first and only spoken word group.

Being part of the Ivy League implies academic excellence and a certain level of prestige, but in this age of hundreds of undergraduate institutions and hundreds of thousands of students, the classification doesn’t influence people in a single dimension.

Unlike most freshmen he knows, Shiv Kapoor — a Wharton freshman from New Delhi — was not nervous for his first midterm last Thursday.

The prize for the winner of the Fall Fest Battle of the Bands this weekend is a headline spot in the Quad for Spring Fling next April, but the musicians anticipate many other rewards.

While studying abroad in Barcelona, Spain last spring, College senior Madeline Kronovet was not particularly surprised to find herself being mugged at 4 a.m. on her way home from an evening out with friends.

In retrospect, Shiv Kapoor, a Wharton freshman from New Delhi, decided that having a roommate would have made his move-in experience to Riepe College House a little easier.

Penn prides itself on having a diverse campus, representing many ethnicities and nationalities throughout both undergraduate and graduate programs. However, the Council of Graduate Schools may not agree with this assessment. Last month, CGS published a report on diversity in graduate schools at the legislative forum at the Library of Congress.

Penn students are becoming famous for not eating - or rather, for donating their uneaten meals to the homeless. Since reading days last semester, Wharton freshman Ricky Oxenhandler, along with College freshmen Becca Elman and Jake Werlin, a Daily Pennsylvanian photographer, has been working on More Than Pennies, an initiative to donate students' uneaten meals to homeless people and shelters around Philadelphia.

Although many agree that Penn is supportive of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender community, two students are trying to increase that support in the School of Dental Medicine. That was goal of Dental students Yizhaq Alkolomber and Zane Haider when they began an LGBT and ally group to increase support for those students in what they perceive to be a conservative environment in the Dental School. And so far, they say, professors have been very receptive.