They had previously come to Penn to play squash, to be tutored and to scare pedestrians by speeding down Locust Walk on their bikes.
But last Friday, 14 eighth graders from the Drew School at 38th Street and Powelton Avenue had the ultimate visit: they assumed the life of a Penn student, albeit only for just a day.
The visit was intended to get the young students thinking about college, but it was not a sales pitch for Penn.
"We're not trying to get you to come to Penn," Glenn Bryan, director of city and community relations, said at the beginning of the program, called "Communiversity Days."
"We'd like you to come to Penn, we want you to come to Penn, but that's not the main goal," he added. "We just want you to go to college."
About five times a year, students from various West Philadelphia public schools, including the Drew, Lea and Sulzberger schools, gather as part of the five-year old program, which Bryan insisted was not just a day off of school for the eighth graders. They were at Penn to learn, and questions were encouraged as part of the process.
During a stop at the Office of Undergraduate Admissions in the basement of College Hall, the eighth graders received glossy Penn brochures and complimentary pencils. But they also learned that the process of getting into Penn -- or any college -- is more than a series of handouts and that the real work starts sooner than they might have expected.
"I thought, 'You know what, my senior year is four years off, I'm just a freshman now... I don't need to worry about this,'" Director of Multicultural Recruitment Canh Oxelson said of his own college application experience. "Then I found out later that later is too late.
"You have to think about it now, because there are kinds of classes that you need to make sure that you have had so that you can be qualified to come to school," Oxelson added.
Oxelson helped the students, 12 of whom said that they plan to attend college, decide what was important to consider when choosing a college. Academics, sports programs, a ready supply of campus jobs and proximity to home were all top priorities, but the students also brought up concerns about social experiences and college finances.
For those students who believed that college was not for them, Oxelson disagreed.
"My mom told me that there will be a lot of people in your life that will tell you no," he said. "You have to give them a reason to say yes. So if you get a college degree, then nobody can say no because you don't have a college degree."
Besides the visit to undergraduate admissions, the day included an abbreviated walking tour of campus with stops at Perelman Quadrangle and the Engineering Quadrangle, lunch at Kings Court/English House and a visit to Van Pelt Library.
The students were also initially scheduled to visit a Penn class and talk to a professor, but those plans fell through.
But it was the grandeur of Franklin Field that caught the eye of one hopeful NFL player.
"We got to stand where famous people used to play," 14-year old Jamal Caple said afterwards, mentioning the Eagles, not the last year's Ivy League championship football team. "To be there, that's, like, cool to me."
Throughout the day, many students said that they were not interested in attending Penn. Some said they wanted to stray farther from home. Others were admittedly less sure.
"I really don't know what kind of college I want to go to, just that I want it to be a good college, and that I want to make the most of it," Caple said.
On a jaunt down Locust Walk with multi-colored leaves floating down, the eighth graders seemed to almost blend into the crowd of Penn regulars, and yet some of them said they felt out of place, being all minority students.
"In this college, everybody is white?" asked 15 year-old Fakhur Uddin. "I see everybody is white."
Part of their new experience included dining with members of the Undergraduate Assembly and other Penn students in the Kings Court/English College House dining hall.
In the end, it was a learning experience for all involved.
"It's nice to meet more people from West Philly, other than just Penn students," said College sophomore Tony Peebles, who dined with the Drew students. "It's important that we just don't get trapped in the University."
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