NSO Seminar to Teach Mechanisms for Coping With Father’s Indictment While at Penn

This year’s New Student Orientation will offer a first-of-its-kind program about what to do when your father gets charged with serious white-collar crimes during your time at Penn.

The “Daddy Issues: Legal Trouble in the Penn Bubble” seminar will be mandatory for all students whose family names are attached to campus buildings.

Lorena Landyk is the 2018 NSO coordinator. “We’ve seen a larger number of Penn students’ fathers get charged with serious crimes recently,” Landyk said. “We expect more than 1700 students in the Class of 2022 to have a parent face legal scrutiny for white-collar crimes during their undergraduate years.”

The seminar is designed to reflect the range of crimes Penn dads are brought up on. “The seminar will be applicable to the children of health care fraudsters, insider traders, money launderers, pyramid schemers, and even Presidents facing impeachment,” Landyk said.

The seminar will cover arranging transportation from campus to jail, being written about in the Daily Pennsylvanian, and hearing your father’s case discussed as an example in business ethics courses.

Trey Watson, W ’19, was in his sophomore year when his father was arrested for dumping industrial chemicals in an estuary. “It was just such an ordeal and it really distracted from my studies,” Trey said. “Just because my dad caused the extinction of rare herons and egrets doesn’t mean I deserved all of that stress.”

Trey believes the seminar will help other students who might face that situation. “I know some students in the Class of 2022 from the boarding school water polo circuit who will definitely be dealing with this problem in the near future,” Watson said. “I think it will be helpful.”