Starting as a sixteen year old, Jacquelin S. King has carved a niche for herself at the University of Pennsylvania in the service and academic arenas. Along with another undergraduate, she created and directs the Girl Talk program at William L. Sayre High School in West Philadelphia which is currently in its third successful semester. To date, 30 young women have participated in the program and an elaborate memoir commemorating Girl Talk and its participants has been printed. She plans to write a book about the program’s inception and progress next year. Jacquelin spent one summer as an intern for the Penn Program for Public Service, and gained promotion the next summer to the position of house manager. She also teaches nutrition to two classes of eighth graders via the Urban Nutrition Initiative.

Jacquelin integrates this service with academics through independent research. In 2004, she completed an ethnography on Sayre High School. Before that, she wrote an analysis of its social environment. In 2003, she co-authored an assessment of Sayre’s arts education and avenues for growth, and an assessment instrument to evaluate the Sayre Health Promotion Disease Prevention Program in 2009. She also conducted research in African Studies based on an independent five-week trip to Lagos, Nigeria in 2004 funded by University Scholars. The tentative title of the ongoing study is “Becoming White in Lagos: West Africans’ Categories of Otherness.”

Throughout her time at Penn, Jacquelin has maintained a place on the Dean’s List.Entering as a Benjamin Franklin Scholar, she then became a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, a University Scholar, a Goldman Sachs Global Leader, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa.