University of Pennsylvania

Penn’s first 1vyG drew 390 students, 102 administrators, and 67 first-generation alumni from 22 institutions. Its theme connected three horizons that students often have to navigate without inherited guidance: leadership, institutional change, and life after graduation.

Hosting closed a loop that began at Brown, where Penn First’s 13 founders had met one another. By the time the summit reached Philadelphia, they were welcoming the national network to a campus with a stronger student organization and a new FGLI Center of its own.

More than 100 students and administrators from 32 schools returned for the first in-person 1vyG since Cornell. Organizers used the weekend to examine how definitions of FGLI vary across institutions and intersect with international, racial, queer, and other identities.

Students and administrators were deliberately placed in the same conversations about definitions, resources, and change. Organizers saw that exchange as an answer to the four-year turnover cycle: knowledge becomes durable when students and institutional leaders carry it together.