Get Involved
Deepen your Penn experience.
Fellowship Information
An interconnected education.
The SNF Paideia Fellowship Program is tailored to help students connect their general education and major requirements to public engagement and community building through meaningful dialogue across difference.
Facilitating Dialogue
Foster the practice of robust and dialogue across a wide range of political, social, and cultural differences within the Penn experience.
Cultivating Citizenship
Integrate the public roles of citizens with one’s academic, personal, and professional lives in healthy, sustainable, and fulfilling ways.
Creating Opportunities
Provide and highlight curricular and co-curricular opportunities for students to acquire the tools to effectively contribute to local, national, and global communities.
From the Fellows Director
I am consistently amazed by our Fellows. Though each student is distinctive in the way they contribute, they are united by a common desire to better understand others through dialogue. Since they are committed to becoming better at the process of dialogue, mistakes become opportunities to learn and grow. Our values—curiosity, humility, intentionality, and community—ground and sustain that growth.
Structure of the Program
Seminars for Fellows
Participate in a sophomore, junior, and senior year proseminar designed to build skills and community among the Fellows.
Courses
Take two SNF Paideia designated courses designed to integrate students’ personal, professional, and civic development through the lens of dialogue across difference.
Capstone Portfolio Project
Complete a senior capstone portfolio project that integrates a Fellow’s major with civic dialogue, service, and/or wellness.
Funding
Apply for fellows-only internship funding or financial support for academic or community engagement that relates to the mission of SNF Paideia.
Read More About Fellows Travel and Research Experiences
When the Camera Comes Out
There is a concept at the heart of the SNF Paideia Program called humility, defined not as self-deprecation but as a genuine recognition of one’s own limitations and a willingness to reflect on how one’s presence affects others. I did not fully understand what that meant until I was standing in a maternity ward in Santo Domingo and realized that our group was being photographed.
Read More