The Class of 2019: Anna Darling (MLA’19)
“School demands a lot but it’s also the kind of thing that it’s hard to turn your mind off when you’re excited about projects.”
Student spotlight: Anna Darling, MLA ‘19
By Lauren Hertzler
When Anna Darling is working on a new assignment, more often than not, she’ll become so engrossed in it that she finds it hard to stop. She recalls some days staying up until 6 a.m. “by accident,” she says, laughing.
“School demands a lot but it’s also the kind of thing that it’s hard to turn your mind off when you’re excited about projects,” she says. “It’s easy to get sucked into what you’re designing and learning.”
Darling, in her third and final year of the Master of Landscape Architecture program at the School of Design, where she’s earned the Edna and Monroe C. Gutman Scholarship, chose Penn because of the “atmosphere,” she explains, that’s cultivated at the school. Always inspired by her fellow students, professors, as well as the evolving discipline, Darling says each semester has truly felt “just as exciting as the first.”
This past year, Darling, from Tucson, Arizona, earned a spot as an OLIN summer intern, of which only the most outstanding students are nominated and accepted from the world’s best colleges and universities. She worked on real, world-class projects at the firm, alongside some of the most creative landscape architects in the industry.
After graduate school, Darling hopes to continue learning about ecological design, and how issues of community engagement and environmental justice can be aided through landscape design. She also knows that, at some point, she wants to teach.
Anna Darling is a 2018-19 recipeint of the the Edna and Monroe C. Gutman Scholarship, which supports fellowship at PennDesign.