Benjamin Franklin Scholars

Benjamin Franklin Scholars

The Benjamin Franklin Scholars (BFS) program is one of Penn’s most distinctive undergraduate communities. Each year we welcome a group of extraordinary incoming students, who are committed to the transformative power of ideas.

Benjamin Franklin Scholars are selected based on their interest in, and demonstrated capacity for, a deep engagement in the liberal arts and sciences, both as ends in themselves and as engines of change in the world. By offering unique courses, and the guidance of extraordinary faculty and advisors, we encourage our students to pursue, in the spirit of Franklin himself, our guiding principles of breadth, curiosity, and a tinkering habit of mind.

BFS is a home for students who seek the advantages of wide-ranging knowledge, whatever particular educational path they choose. We look for spirited, independent people who find their own passions and are predisposed to explore their own ideas, wherever they might lead. We welcome restless minds who are not content just to appreciate great ideas as abstractions up on a shelf, but who see them as transformative: changing minds and so changing the world. We are a community of students and faculty who find value in the saying of the great classical writer Plutarch, whom Franklin himself claims to have “read abundantly,” that a truly great education is a kind of playing with fire.

BFS welcomes students in all the undergraduate schools: the College, Engineering, Wharton, and Nursing. Parts of the program, including admissions, work a bit differently in the different schools. For all our scholars, though, the BFS experience includes support for unpaid or underpaid internships, a presentation of research to the BFS community, and our Seminars, which engage a breadth of intellectually challenging topics, without requiring extensive prerequisites, both inside and outside of students' major fields of study.

For more information: https://curf.upenn.edu/scholars-programs/benjamin-franklin-scholars