Farewell Column by Luke Hassall | My advice to you: Disregard others’ advice

My time at Penn has come to an end. I have no more classes, no more extracurriculars. I’ve written all my papers and only a few finals remain. There’s that show and dance next month, but I’ve never been one for ceremony. If it weren’t for the opportunity to finally ask Denzel Washington about playing me in the movie version of my life, I doubt I’d bother going.

Now relax. Climb down from that balcony. Sure, your life will be eternally and irreparably degraded by my absence, but you’ll be okay. Let’s just focus and get through this somber moment together. Five points if you get all the TV references.

I thought about giving you some advice, giving you some guidance on what to do with your own time at Penn and how to make the most of it. But let’s be honest, you wouldn’t listen, and I’m not sure I believe any of what I was going to tell you. I’ve spent a lot of time mulling over whether I made the right decisions about what classes to take and what groups to join. I wonder whether I made the right friends and have started to feel that some of my friends were a mistake (you know who you are).

If I give you one piece of advice, it is to disregard the advice of others. Every one of these farewell columns is going to tell you to do something or pursue certain opportunities. Read them, enjoy them and then do your best to forget everything you’ve been told (be careful not to forget mine, or you’ll forget to forget the others).

Nobody can tell you how to have a successful time at Penn. There is no single set of directions to a great college experience. Any attempt to provide such a set is tantamount to giving two people, one in California and the other in New York, the same set of east-west directions to Kansas City. One of them will end up in the ocean. So don’t let anyone tell you how to have your Penn experience. You may not know quite where you’re going, and you will probably never get there, but you won’t be stuck blindly following GPS directions into a lake.

Penn is unfortunately a place where a significant status quo is exerted upon students. I’ve written about it in the past, and I’ll rehash it here only in brief. There is something very peculiar about a school full of such atypical students aggressively trying to have a stereotypical college experience. We are told to valorize our sports teams, as if we weren’t aware that Ivy League championships are not quite the same as regular ones. We exude a culture of drinking and partying, even though really — when it comes to drinking — most Penn students aren’t equipped to go three rounds with a fruit fly.

You can be part of that if you wish. It’s your business. I’ve wandered in and out of such things over the years myself. But don’t ever do anything because you feel you have to or because others are doing it. Reach into your mindholes and remember that middle-school peer pressure assembly.

Whether you embrace the typical Penn experience or not, you may feel that you have disappointed yourself. That is, of course, inevitable. College will be a disappointment. I cannot save you from that. No matter what you do, you will look back on Penn and regret the paths not taken and the things undone. All trains lead to that station.

So given that fact, all you can do is make the best of the road you have chosen. College is a disappointment, but it is also awesome. Embrace whatever things grab your attention, and follow whatever makes the most sense to you at the time. Make sure that you only regret the things you didn’t do, not the things you did

Because, to quote one far wiser than I: “If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.”

Luke Hassall, a former columnist, is a College senior from Auckland, New Zealand. After graduation, he will pursue his lifelong dream of being a rogue demon hunter.

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