Co-Op Supercharges Drexel University Honors Program
Dean Cohen on Pennoni Honors College at Drexel
Prof. Paula Marantz Cohen is the Dean of Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
I had the pleasure of talking to Dean Cohen about Pennoni Honors College recently as part of my Podcast series on Honors Colleges and the opportunities and the value it offers students.
Here are 5 Takeaways, excerpted and edited, from my Podcast conversation with Dean Cohen:
Custom Design Your Major
Co-Op
Undergraduate Research
Scholarships & Grants
Career Opportunities
1.Custom Design Your Major
While there are a number of popular courses like Sustainability, Design Thinking, etc., students can Create their own Major.
As you can imagine this is a very labor intensive major for the advisors.
So, when students can come and talk to our advisors, they figure out whether this really interests them, or whether maybe they'd be better off having a minor or double Major.
So, there are 10 to 12 students a year who make their own major, combining three or four areas, and they take coursework in those areas across the university.
Finally, to enter the custom design major, you have to come through the Exploratory Studies Program, which is in the Goodwin College of Professional Studies at Drexel, not directly from high school.
2.Co-Op
Drexel is a Co-op school.
So most students do 2 or 3 six-month Co-Ops over the course of a four or five year degree, with five year degree being the norm.
Which means they have 3 job experiences that are substantial that they get paid for.
It turns out that some employers tend to want Honors students
And often those Co-Op jobs turn into full-time jobs after graduation.
And I should note that we have a dorm, a residence hall, and an addition to it, which was built five years ago, thanks to Greg Benz of Bentley Systems.
He was not a Drexel graduate, he a Penn graduate;
But he was so impressed with our Co-Op students, that he was the benefactor for this building, which is our office space, and connects to the first year residents.
3.Undergraduate Research
The STAR undergraduate research is where Honors students can work in labs or find a match with a faculty member at Drexel who's doing work that they might be interested in.
For example, there was one student last summer worked on heart transplants for infants, which needed to be improved.
And she's so enthusiastic about it, she's continuing to do that work.
The work she’s doing at first Co-Op over at the Children's Hospital at Penn (CHOP) will contribute to going back to the lab, and working on this project till she graduates!
We have a lot of students doing different kinds of things, some doing statistical sort of work, work in computer science, or in sustainability.
Others are doing doing work in Sociology or Social Science, looking at poverty issues in the city, or comparing them with other other locales.
So, the research runs the gamut from more qualitative and to quantitative.
4.Scholarships & Grants
We have a budget for STAR undergraduate research;
We accept 135 students for the summer, they get housing and a stipend.
They stay in the residence hall here, which is the first summer is the one summer when Drexel students do not have a Co-Op or classes.
Quite often faculty members can pay them out of their grants.
But we also give small mini-grants to faculty and student pairs, if they apply together to help them work together.
5.Career Opportunities
Our students do a wide variety of things.
I will say that we have students in the business school that go on to the highest consultancies. I've had quite a number of students go to Goldman Sachs, for example.
Quite a few go to Google. A student of mine, who is now at Google in Singapore. She's actually Vietnamese and she’s been rising through the ranks there.
And we also have students going into nonprofit areas.
I will say that our Nursing students in the Honors Program are extremely. well trained.
And because of the Co Op, they get the experience.
They are more often hired by the hospitals in Pennsylvania, than their own nursing students.
And then you know that there are many engineering schools in the area that hire our students. Chuck Pennoni Greg Bentley, Bentley software company hire our students as well.
There's a whole network that's been created over the past 100 years of Co-Op involvement in the area that really makes it so that our students who tend to be more industrious and higher achieving, then perhaps the rest of the university, get those get the best jobs.
On with the Podcast
In this Episode, Dean Cohen introduces the Pennoni Honors College, Honors Programs, Experiential Programs including the Co-Op, Scholarships & Grants, How to Apply, and Career Opportunities.
Listen to the Podcast with Dean Paula Marantz Cohen of Drexel University Pennoni Honors College.(48-Minute Listen).
Also check out:
Hope you find the stories and articles in the Newsletter inspiring and helpful. Please give me feedback or leave a comment to let me how I am doing.
Thanks.
Finally, my heartfelt Thanks to all my Podcast guests who have been generous with their time and counsel on my Podcast.
Have a wonderful week!
Venkat