In a year where everything seems a little harder, this holiday season will be no different. Luckily, our colleagues from Penn’s Positive Psychology Center (PPC) and the Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program are weighing in with expert advice on how to find joy amongst the tangle of emotions.

Karen Reivich, PPC’s director of resilience training and MAPP instructor, acknowledges that “In any given year, the holidays have highs and lows. Those are just the holidays. But this one is going to be different.”

Now in his second term as Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, Steve Fluharty embodies the spirit of the school’s past and its future.

Fluharty came to Penn in 1974 as an English major but graduated with a degree in neuroscience instead, something he attributes to the flexibility of the SAS curriculum and its ability to support and extend a student’s curiosity.

“During a time of social unrest, there’s a lot of misinformation, injustice, and frightful things going on,” writes Neelofar Tamboli, a senior at Princeton International School of Mathematics and Science and an alumna of the Penn Summer High School Program’s Social Justice Research Academy (SJRA). “SJRA taught me that in order to make a difference, having the right information and knowledge is key to making informed decisions rather than abrupt, uninformed opinions.”

When Linda Robinson of the Department of Biology learned this summer that fall courses would be moving online, she and her teaching colleagues got started on prepping course materials that allowed students to bring the lab experience into their own homes.

Pivoting to online classes to keep students safe during the COVID-19 pandemic introduced challenges—but also opportunities. Our innovative LPS community discovered new ways to stay connected.

On Monday, November 23, 2020, The College of Liberal and Professional Studies hosted a webinar with panelists from Penn’s Task Force on Support to Asian and Asian-American Students and Scholars. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, an alarming increase of anti-Asian behavior began at Penn, in Philadelphia, and beyond, and members of the Penn community recognized the need to offer support for students and staff by bringing together the University’s experts, resources, and support staff.

This spring, the Master of Behavioral and Decision Sciences (MBDS) program organized its second Design Challenge, aimed at connecting students and MBDS Industry Affiliates to integrate cutting edge knowledge in the fields of behavioral economics, decision sciences, network analysis, and public policy into real-life problems. Fifty-four students teamed up to tackle twelve challenges in health, wellness, sustainability, technology integration in marketing, and finance over six weeks.