Q&A with new SCUE Chair

By Ellie Schroeder 01/28/15 12:58am

On Saturday, College junior Laura Sorice began her term as the new Chair External of the Student Committee for Undergraduate Education. The Daily Pennsylvanian talked with her about SCUE’s plans for the upcoming year. This Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity.

The Daily Pennsylvanian: SCUE published the 2015 White Paper last week just before your election as the new chair. How are you planning to follow up on goals this document addresses?

Laura Sorice: I like to think about it in terms of not only what SCUE can do individually to create these changes, but also in terms of the way that we can communicate this document to the University, so that the University becomes a large group of individuals who are all going to be working towards these changes. Specifically in SCUE right now, we are in the process of figuring out how best to do just that — to get the word out about the White Paper and make sure that as many people as possible are really aware of the research and the work we’ve done and to start a conversation about how we can best implement these goals together.

DP: What projects are you most excited about?

LS: I am pretty interested in exploring object-based learning, which is an initiative that the Provost’s office is heavily involved in. Basically, the idea is making sure that actual coursework done by Penn students is able to be connected to certain resources that Penn has. For example, an Italian literature class utilizing the rare book collection in the library in order to supplement their experience with Italian literature over time — that is one course that I have taken in object-based learning, and it was a fantastic experience.

DP: What challenges do you foresee SCUE facing this year?

LS: One challenge that we are always concerned about is, “How do you make students care?” That is such a difficult problem, and I think it’s something that almost every student group at Penn faces. All of us have things that are important to us and things that we want to push forward and initiatives that we want to advocate for. Answering the question of how to most effectively bring people together under those initiatives will always be a challenge.

DP: Why did you decide to run for SCUE chair?

LS: As a Penn student I have always been really excited about the way that we run this University. I consider being able to attend Penn the greatest privilege of my life so far and being able to be actively involved in the way that we are educated and being able to think critically about the intellectual community we have at Penn is something that I love doing and something that I have spent a great deal of time working on as a SCUE member.

DP: Looking back one year later on your term, what do you want to be able to say you accomplished?

LS: One of the things I would really like to have accomplished a year from now after my term would be feeling like we have properly fostered the next generation of team members that is as equally excited, passionate and interested in this work as I am now.

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