Biography | Stacey Snider — The College Hall Campus That Gave Her a Bachelor of Arts

People treat a studio chair as someone who grew up on a backlot.

Snider grew up in Philadelphia and finished a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Pennsylvania in 1982.

College Hall is the oldest building on Penn's West Philadelphia campus, the green serpentine pile that still holds the president's office and the history department.

The degree itself was conferred on 17 May 1982 at the Civic Center Convention Hall, not inside this building.

The university's own commencement program for that Monday morning names Convention Hall as the room and 10 a.m. as the hour.

College Hall is still the right pin for the campus she left with the degree.

Sources split her birth year.

Current English Wikipedia gives 29 April 1960.

Older printed profiles, including an Encyclopedia.com entry drawn from a 2000s business directory, give 29 April 1961 and place the birth in Philadelphia.

Either way she was in her early twenties when she walked off this campus.

She did not go from College Green to a development office.

Three years later she took a Juris Doctor at UCLA School of Law, then took a mailroom job at the talent agency Triad Artists rather than a law-firm desk.

The Penn alumni office later listed her as C'82 and as a member of the School of Arts and Sciences Board of Overseers.

That is the paper trail that starts here: a Philadelphia undergraduate degree, then a Westwood law degree, then the first agency job that put her inside a studio system she would later run.

What stands on College Green now is the same Victorian Gothic hall that stood in 1982.

The Civic Center that held the ceremony was demolished after 2005.

A visitor who wants the degree day itself has only this campus left to stand on.

Photo: Smallbones, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons