Student Life

Student life is about more than just study; it’s about community, collegiality, and purpose. Here, what you learn will make a difference in the world beyond the classroom and your growth—intellectual, personal, and professional—will be supported every step along the way. 

“The support of this community has been so genuine and game-changing for me. I feel so welcomed and embraced for my unique approach to my doctorate as a multimedia artist and social entrepreneur!” 

—KYRA WILLIAMS, current student

Representation Through Media Arts & Education

Kyra Williams isn’t just a student in Penn GSE’s Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education, Ed.D. program. She’s also a nonprofit founder. She started SIMBY—Stories In My Backyard—to offer culturally relevant media arts education for Black youth, and its latest project is an exhibit, The Voices of Sisterly Affection, that honors the legacies of nine Black women musical artists from Philadelphia—from Billie Holiday to Tierra Whack—by blending photography and community storytelling. What began as pandemic-era photoshoots evolved into an immersive exhibit with a virtual reality component that was on view for six months at the Free Library of Philadelphia. At the exhibit’s opening reception, Williams was moved to see so many of her Penn GSE professors and classmates in attendance.

“The most significant takeaway for me from this experience was how we translated classroom theory into a real-world, AI-driven application,” 

—Jyoti Poonia, current student

Creating With AI Tools

Two teams of Penn GSE master’s students made it to the finals of the second annual Wharton Hack-AI-thon, which brings together students from across the University to innovate by solving real-world problems with artificial intelligence in just one week. For Jyoti Poonia, whose team full of Learning Sciences and Technologies, M.S.Ed. students developed an AI-powered classroom orchestration tool designed to foster intentional, meaningful dialogue, working on the extracurricular project helped her coursework come to life. “I’ve been working on AI-related projects across classes this semester, and it was incredibly meaningful to apply those learnings in this way. I feel more connected to my program than ever, as this truly embodied what Learning Sciences and Technologies is all about,” she said.

Presenting like a Professional

Youning Zhao, a recent graduate of the Higher Education, M.S.Ed. program, was one of the roughly 14,000 attendees at the 2025 AERA conference in Denver, where she shared two studies—one on how social media impacts college students' emotional well-being, and another on how personality shapes faculty members' experiences in academia—born out of her Penn GSE courses. The conference served as a premier platform for advancing some of the year’s most pressing educational research and practice discussions.