The Urban Studies Program is pleased to announce Anna Duan, C’22, the inaugural Urban Studies Alumni Engagement Fellowship recipient for 2022! This fellowship is made possible thanks to a generous gift by Scott Millstein, C'92, and Jae Lee. The Alumni Engagement Fellowship seeks to deepen student and alumni connections, as well as promote student professional development and networking opportunities. Below is an interview with Anna, highlighting the projects she has been organizing this year!
How did you get involved in working with Urban Studies alumni?
I began working with Urban Studies alumni in the summer of 2020 as an Urban Studies Gordon Fellow. As part of this program, fellows are introduced to a group of Urban Studies alumni at the end of the semester to network and ask questions about finding careers in URBS after graduation. Since we were in the start of the pandemic, my cohort's fellowship experience was completely remote, so we appreciated the opportunity to meet with a few alumni and ask career-related questions that we'd be hesitant to ask in a larger setting. After this meeting (held on Zoom), Elaine told us that an alum Scott Millstein was interested in working with some students to create an alumni networking and mentorship program, and I was 1 of 3 students that volunteered.
What kinds of activities did you carry out, and why did you use the particular format that you did?
We organized 6 alumni career panels, each with 2-3 alumni and around 10 current students. It was important to us that the groups remain small, so that students feel comfortable asking the alumni questions about their career trajectories. We got great feedback from students who attended these chats, and the Urban Studies program ended up adopting these panels as part of Urban Studies 300 (Fieldwork).
What did you get out of the project?
Firstly, it was such a pleasure working closely with all of the alumni who we invited to panels. Seeing the range of Urban Studies alumni in fields, from ed-tech to law, showed me so many more possibilities for what I could personally do coming out of college. It was also an incredible experience building up a series of events from the ground up, and working closely with Vicky, Elaine, Nick, and Melina each week. I learned so much about event planning and also met some great people along the way.
How do you see yourself as an Urban Studies student?
I consider myself a generalist and a multidisciplinary student, with Urban Studies at the core of everything I do. Throughout the years, I've done work in qualitative and quantitative research, consulting, and spatial data analysis, and I've worked in local schools around Penn. Though different in terms of skillset, all of my experiences have helped me explore ideas I encountered in Urban Studies classes, including urban inequity and thinking spatially.
What are your plans after graduation?
My plan after graduation is to work as a Research Associate at the Housing Initiative at Penn, with plans to eventually go back to school. I will also be pursuing competitive powerlifting more seriously.