Liman Miah spent a year at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, not entirely sure of what awaited him. Turned out, it was everything he could have imagined and more.

I swapped Mile End for West Philadelphia for a year, on exchange at Penn from Queen Mary, not entirely sure what I was walking into. I ended up with two worlds running at once, Wharton lecture halls and a climate-data lab, plus an intramural pitch, a fashion shoot, and a camera roll I can’t scroll through without stopping. 

I was usually the one holding the camera, which is why half these photos are mine and I only appear in the other half when someone wrestled it off me. If you’re another Queen Mary student weighing up a year abroad, this is the long version of the answer. 

The Place

Penn doesn’t announce itself with one famous skyline shot; it’s a stitched-together neighborhood of green stone, brick walks, and Locust Walk running through the middle of all of it, with a statue of Ben who has watched every freshman walk past.

You pass Ben on the way to everywhere. I clocked him on my first day getting lost on Locust Walk, and roughly a hundred times after that. He was the most reliable landmark on a campus I was still learning to read. 

The Work

Underneath all of it was the reason the tuition existed. For me that meant living between two buildings: Wharton lecture halls on one side, a climate-data lab on the other. 

Huntsman Hall was the best study spot on campus and where most of this actually happened, grinding problem sets and club applications until one of them landed me a spot in the Wharton Undergraduate Investment Group.

The project I’m proudest of: research with Atiya and our advisor Lilian on the thermal and biological controls of surface CO₂ across the frontal zones of the Southern Ocean. Months of CESM2 climate data, compressed onto a single printed board for EESC 3376. 

Game Day

It started, as everything at Penn does, with a slide telling us to “get involved.” We took it literally, and it turned into a team that’s somehow outlasting our time here. 

That promise became Last Dance FC, our intramural side in the Philly league. We won, got promoted, and picked up a genuine rivalry with the Philadelphia Police Department’s team along the way. The squad’s now continuing in London. The dance isn’t over. 

Nights

Penn is work hard, play hard, and this was the second half of that sentence. Day parties bled into basements bled into a festival field, and somewhere in there were the friendships the daylight stuff was really about. 

The City

Penn sits inside a real city, not a snow-globe campus, and the best afternoons spilled across the river, with murals turning whole walls into paintings, a skyline that kept quietly showing up in the background. 

The FMC Tower turning blue at night was the backdrop to most of my evenings: pickup games, the walk back from the library, the city quietly showing off when it thought no one was watching. 

The Crew

In the end none of it was about the buildings. It was about the group that turned up in every photo, chief among them David Thom, an Australian exchange who came for a semester and left as one of my best mates. 

Penn Hillel, on Israel Independence Day. Coming from London, finding my way into the Jewish community here was something I’d never done before, and it turned into some of the warmest welcomes I got all year. 

Afterthoughts

That’s the year. If I could tell the version of me sat in a Mile End lecture hall, deciding whether to apply, just one thing, it would be this: don’t be afraid. This place is going to teach you so much about yourself. Thinking about a year abroad at Penn? Do it. It was the best decision I made at university, and this whole blog is my evidence.