Well, today the four of us woke up around 6:20 A.M. at my house in Red Lion, Pennsylvania. We were all pretty exhausted after having gone to bed around 1:00 A.M. the night before, but we had three exciting interviews to complete in Philadelphia! After packing up all of our random belongings, grabbing breakfast, and saying goodbye to my parents, we Hit the Road for Philly!
After the unfortunate happenings of the previous day in Maryland and missing our first two scheduled interviews, we were praying that PA would prove less stressful. The drive into Philly was pretty hassle-free (which I was extremely thankful for considering I was pretty tired of getting turned around on almost every ‘95 road in Maryland the previous day). We reached South Broad and realized first hand that parking in center city Philly is not fun! After about 20 minutes of trying to find cheap meter parking, we just decided to drop off Kelly and Steph to head to our interview with Rachel Oring from Expert Events (we were NOT going to miss this one!) Kristal and I finally just gave in and parked in this semi-sketchy parking garage and then ran about 3 blocks to the interview. I really wish we had footage of us every time we ran all over pretty much every city we visited!
We got to the interview on time, and Rachel was actually a few minutes late because she brought her new baby (which was beautiful) to work; she is still on maternity leave. Rachel did not want to be filmed for this reason, but that was alright because Kristal speedily typed up her responses to the questions. The interview with her was really interesting and it was so obvious that she loved her career. Rachel placed so much emphasis on the importance of finding a job that you love, and it really inspiring to learn about her pathway to in finding her ideal career. Kelly has more to add on this point, which will be in her blog on this 
After this interview, we drove to the apartment in which we were going to be staying during our time in Philly. My boyfriend Dustin and his two friends, Ben and Liam, go to Drexel University in Philadelphia, so they were gracious enough to offer us their apartment for the night. So, we drove to get the keys for the apartment from Dustin and then headed to The University of Pennsylvania for our following two interviews.
Our second interview was with Leslie Kruhly, the Secretary of the University of Pennsylvania. I am personally interested in the field of Higher Education Management, so I was pretty excited to talk to Secretary Kruhly because of her Administrative position in an Ivy League School. I feel as though I really got so much out of our interview with Leslie. Out of all of her very inspirational advice, she really prompted me to realize that skill sets are so much more important than specific majors when it comes to going into graduate school and even future careers. Her undergraduate degree was in History, but because of her ability to write significantly well, she was able to score a job writing for Reader’s Digest and ended up covering a story the Kent State Massacre, which led her to future openings and eventually she found her way to UPenn. She also explained the importance of getting involved early on so as to prepare oneself for graduate school. The University of Penn. offers a Grad. program in Higher Education Management, and she offered to help me get in contact with some people from the program. She was so nice and very personable! I am very grateful for getting to meet her.
After this, we met with John LaVoy, the Director of PENNCAP. This organization receives funding from the PA as well as from UPenn, and assists students from underprivileged backgrounds in getting into UPenn. He also provided some very useful information about how to network with people, as well as how to find one’s own place in fields which can be very broad, such as Higher Education Management. John gave us some suggestions on how to not pay for Graduate school, and he also shared some information about getting involved in programs and with professors that can help students in getting into graduate school. John was very willing to talk to us and was so down to earth. It was obvious that he was so excited about being able to help students that might be first generation college students to graduate with a degree from UPenn, knowing that their degree would change the course of their decedents’ lives.
After these interviews, we walked back to the boys’ apartment to relax after our three interviews. The boys were so hospitable and absolutely hilarious in entertaining the four of us during our stay. We made a nice spaghetti dinner and had a fun, relaxing evening with the boys and some of their other friends from Drexel. Then, we all settled into bed for our following day of interviews in Stroudsburg, PA!
