Undergraduate applicants to the University of Pennsylvania are encountering a new question this year. They are being asked to write a thank you note to someone they have not yet thanked and want to acknowledge, and to reflect on the experience. And this effort is catching. This fall, groups of Penn students launched gratitude projects, encouraging their classmates out on Locust Walk to write a thank you note, which they arranged to deliver. Inspired by our students and the start of 2023, it’s an ideal time to take on that assignment as a broader community: expressing gratitude.

There is so much to be grateful for, but let me focus on one group of people I have been lucky enough to get to know in my first six months at Penn. The tens of thousands of people who, every day, make this always humming place go: the dedicated and talented staff at the University of Pennsylvania. Each of us, no doubt, work to acknowledge and thank our staff colleagues regularly, but we cannot do it often enough.

All of us encounter our exceptional staff every day we come to work. Fewer of us recognize that this is a twenty-four-hours-a-day, 365-days-a-year operation. We have over 40,000 staff at the University of Pennsylvania and Penn Medicine. Every day of the year, at each hour of the day, some of our Penn staff colleagues are doing the vital work that permits Penn to do what it exists to do at the very highest level of excellence—enroll students and educate them in their chosen fields, conduct research, provide patient care, and serve the community and the wider world.

The last several years have made that work even harder, which is yet another reason to express our gratitude in words and action. So as we enter 2023, let us all take the time to express thanks to those who—among countless others performing essential work that keeps our University smoothly functioning—keep our buildings running, our grounds maintained, our classrooms and labs geared up, our emergency rooms open, our students coached and directed, our budgets balanced, our technology services functioning, our admissions files read, our dining halls serving, our rarest and most precious books and materials cared for, and our community safe. I look forward to all that we will achieve together in the year ahead.

—M. Elizabeth Magill, President