Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Strategic Plan V2

Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Access

Penn Engineering is passionately committed to attracting, nurturing, and graduating engineers whose diversity reflects our society in all respects, including race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability, creed, and socioeconomic background. Moreover, we seek to ensure all of our community members share an understanding of the importance of fighting bias and maximizing inclusion for the sake of the engineering profession and for the benefit of society at large. Through this, we aim for our graduates to pursue and develop ideas and innovations that will benefit all of humanity. We will accomplish this by focusing vigorous efforts in the following priority areas:

Culture of Penn Engineering

Our goal is to build a culture and climate that allow all students, faculty and staff to thrive. We will accomplish this by:

  • Developing and implementing innovative and inspiring strategies to ensure that faculty, students and staff are trained and educated about the importance and the benefits of diversity, and about how to successfully build inclusive environments;
  • Implementing mechanisms, with accountability and transparency, to monitor and continuously improve the climate of the school including through surveys and advisory meetings with students, faculty and staff.

Faces of Penn Engineering

We aspire to have the Penn Engineering community represent society broadly, as articulated above. We will accomplish this through:

  • Expanded recruitment efforts to enhance the diversity of our student body including from the diverse greater Philadelphia region;
  • Enhanced support for students, including professional advising and coaching, training for faculty advisors on mentoring diverse student populations, and increased financial aid ensuring students graduate debt-free;
  • Recruiting, retaining, and promoting a diverse staff;
  • Endowed professorships to attract top faculty that enhance faculty diversity and who pursue research, education, and service that integrates diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Ideas of Penn Engineering

Our role as an educational institution gives us a unique responsibility to develop, present, and discuss ideas about how our profession impacts and is influenced by our society. We will leverage this opportunity by:

  • Seeking opportunities to present contributions to our field from a diverse set of engineers and scientists;
  • Organizing forums and lectures and supporting research on topics at the intersection of technology, education and society;
  • Integrating diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout our curricula, from improving the diversity of engineers whose past work is cited in classes, to including discussions of how engineering advances affect disadvantaged populations, to offering courses that address the interests of students from underrepresented groups.

Outreach at Penn Engineering

We will build pipelines to enable more students from a far broader population to explore careers in Science, Technology Engineering and Math. We will do this by:

  • Expanding and coordinating our outreach activities across the School;
  • Leveraging our location in the City of Philadelphia to partner with schools, non-profits and employers to promote STEM education beyond the Penn campus.