Campus & Community

It’s almost as far away from Philadelphia urban life as one can imagine. Or, to be precise, it’s a 14-hour plane ride followed by a 16-hour bus ride capped by a 40-minute ride in a truck away from the University of Pennsylvania campus.

ELECTION TIME IS COMING: Russell Abdo, 20, is the events chair and treasurer of Penn Leads the Vote, a non-partisan, student-led campus voter mobilization group sponsored by the Robert A.

Penn played a significant role in the founding of the Big 5 Basketball series, created in 1955 to showcase men’s college basketball talent in the Philadelphia region. Teams from Penn, Temple, Saint Joseph’s, La Salle, and Villanova competed in the round-robin series, taking turns to play one another a set number of times during each basketball season.

Mark Bendas says it takes a certain type of person to do event planning and management. You must be unflappable, flexible, and detail-oriented. It helps if you thrive on short timelines and under pressure. And you have to be OK with being behind-the-scenes.

It may come as a surprise that the man behind Dance Celebration—one of the nation’s longest-running and highly-respected series of contemporary dance performances—has no background in professional dance. [flickr]72157631739942982[/flickr]

Close your eyes. Tighter, so you see only black. Now, picture Ancient Egypt. None of us was there, but most of us can visualize the ancient civilization of northeastern Africa because we’ve seen photographs and drawings of its great pyramids, pharaohs, temples, monuments, earthenware, tombs, and hieroglyphics.

To be sure, Penn’s more than 32,000 faculty and staff and nearly 25,000 students have more than a few stories to tell.

The whole family can have a day of fun at the 20th Annual Penn Family Day, Saturday, Oct. 13. As with previous Family Days, the festivities will be held on the north side of Franklin Field, where visitors this year can also enjoy the new Shoemaker Green.

Two new restaurants on and near campus are now open for business. The first, Doc Magrogan’s Oyster House at 3432 Sansom St., takes the place of the restaurant La Terrasse, and features a menu of mostly fresh seafood, from shrimp and scallops to swordfish and—as the name suggests—oysters.