The Class of 2030’s “Penn odyssey” kicks off for bold new explorers.
Between earning their admission to Penn and starting their college classes, the Class of 2030 faced a different sort of intellectual challenge.
In welcoming first-year and transfer students to the University, President J. Larry Jameson shared with them three riddles during the late-August Convocation ceremony that formally began Penn’s 286th academic year.
• What could a starfish, a spaceship, and the packaging in your Amazon deliveries have in common?
• How might something dangerous, like venom, save more than a million lives a year?
• Why is an ancient poem, 3,000 years old, new today?
“The answers,” Jameson told the crowd that had gathered at Franklin Field, “will reveal something fundamental, even exhilarating, about Penn.”
Delivering his final Convocation address before stepping down from office in June, the Penn president didn’t expect the students to ace the pop quiz, noting the first riddle was especially challenging. The answer: a team at Penn Engineering, led by materials science professor Ling Li, recently found that the skeleton of a chocolate chip starfish senses and concentrates light, which “could inspire next-generation materials that are tough, lightweight, and responsive to the environment,” Jameson said. “It might protect passengers during space flight and precious cargo in your household deliveries.”
The answer to the second riddle also informed the University’s newest students of a recent faculty discovery: Penn Medicine researchers used AI to explore more than 40 million peptides found in snake and spider venom to “synthesize powerful new antibiotics … that could counter antibiotic resistance and ultimately save millions of lives,” Jameson said.
And the last (“the easy” part of the test) spotlighted Penn classics professor Emily Wilson, whose renowned 2017 translation of Homer’s epic [“An Odyssey for Our Time,” Mar|Apr 2018] made headlines (and sold more than a million copies this year) with the release of the summer blockbuster film The Odyssey. “Timeless human stories endure because new generations find ways to share and learn from them,” Jameson said, adding that “these examples are just three stars in the vast constellation of Penn’s research and the student experience.”
The Penn president encouraged the Class of 2030 to find more—and to make their own mark on the University as their “Penn odyssey” begins. “Like Odysseus in the face of setbacks and challenges, you will persevere,” he said. “You will have fantastic adventures. You will see and do wonderful things. It will be epic.”
In his welcome remarks, Penn Provost John L. Jackson Jr. also went deep into history, reminding the students that their time at Penn will be “astonishingly brief” when compared to “Penn’s 286-year run” or the universe’s 13.8 billion years.
“But during your brief time here,” he said, “you have the chance to do something extraordinary: to experiment intellectually, to push yourself ideologically, to question your assumptions, and to learn how to engage the world with both rigor and humility.”
In addition to taking advantage of “everything Penn offers,” including a trip to “our one-and-only Palestra,” which will soon mark its 100-year anniversary, “my advice to you,” Jackson continued, “is to cultivate both humility and empathy. And to develop habits of mind that allow you to navigate political times without being negatively consumed or debilitated by them. To learn how to listen deeply, argue honestly, and recognize the humanity in people whose experiences and worldviews differ profoundly from your own.” —DZ
