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(09/06/16 3:30am)
Before coming back to Penn, I got my first professional massage. I had been saying “I need a massage” for years before actually getting one. This was partially because, despite my desperation to loosen the tension in my neck and shoulders, the concept of a massage — a complete stranger intimately rubbing your body — made me somewhat nervous. Yet the second the massage started I no longer felt awkward, instead beginning to think about the instinctive habits of the body, how they are intertwined with our minds and actions and what they might reveal about how we conduct our lives.
(08/24/16 1:17am)
At the end of this past school year, my mom and I were talking about the ups and downs of my college experience when she asked, “Are you proud of the person you’ve become?” Although taken by surprise, my first instinct was to say yes. After all, I had finished two years of college, lived across the country from my family, survived several East Coast winters, taken stimulating courses with incredible professors and learned from and been challenged by the students around me.
(04/26/16 3:26am)
When I applied to be an opinion columnist a year ago, I wasn’t quite sure if I fit the mold. Most opinion columns I’d read, whether in The Daily Pennsylvanian or in national newspapers, were about politics, economics or controversial things. But even though I like discussing politics and economics and controversy, whenever I sat down to write a column, I never found myself actually wanting to write about those subjects.
(04/12/16 2:25am)
The more years I spend as a student, the more I find myself wondering, “What is the point of an education?” In general, there are two answers to this question. One answer emphasizes the journey — education is an end in itself, something that ought to be celebrated and pursued because of its inherent, internal qualities. The other points out that education is necessary: Getting a good job and moving up in the world are often dependent on one, if not more, degrees from an institute of higher learning.
(03/15/16 3:51am)
Spring break filled your newsfeed with not only your friends’ pictures in Puerto Rico, Cabo, Miami Beach or various Alternate Spring Break locations, but also with the breaking news that Kim Kardashian had broken the Internet once again with her post of a nude selfie. I was asked to share my opinion on this topic multiple times over break, and each time I would roll my eyes and change the subject because in general, I try to minimize the amount of airtime I grant to Kim Kardashian. (Alas, the irony of this article.)
(02/23/16 5:51am)
Every week in my creative writing class, the most common critique of people’s writing has been that it is too cliche. When I wrote my first short story assignment, I was careful to not include any cliches in any aspect of the story, whether in regard to the phrasing, the plot or the characters. I turned it in with bated breath, hoping that the other students in the class would find my writing fresh and novel.
(02/09/16 2:33am)
My roommate and I were walking to a restaurant downtown for Restaurant Week when a man suddenly popped out from the row of cars parked alongside the street. He was breathing heavily and appeared to be incredibly distraught. My roommate and I jumped backwards, taken aback by his unexpected appearance. “Do you have $23.50?” he demanded vehemently. “My family just got in a car accident and I need to get to the hospital. Hurry! Please! Give me the money! I need to go now!”
(01/26/16 3:49am)
I remember my first night in the Quadrangle, lying on a hard and slightly stained mattress, surrounded by four intimidatingly blank walls and listening to the heartbeat of an unfamiliar city outside my window. I felt very small. It was as if I had literally been transported into another world, and in a way I had: One day I had been at home in the suburban town where I’d lived for 18 years and knew everyone, and the next day I had moved into a tiny room in a huge city across the country where I didn’t know anyone. I had always thought there would be a neat transition between my previous self and my college self, but it turns out identity is more complex than that.
(01/13/16 3:36am)
I’m not someone who regularly writes down New Year’s resolutions, mainly because they often remain consistent across the years: do well in school, go for a decent amount of runs every week, keep in touch with friends and family, journal more.
(12/01/15 5:23am)
I’ve been telling people that I want to be a writer since I was in elementary school. I always thought of college as the place where I would be able to actualize that dream, and I didn’t waste any time upon arriving at Penn: I jumped into English classes, determined to improve my critical writing and become more well-read. I decided to join several literary magazines, in love with the idea that I could be a writer for a publication that was designated as “literary.” Weren’t these, after all, the steps one took on the conventional path to authorhood? The fast track to the future I wanted so badly? I was ahead of the game.
(11/17/15 7:21am)
It’s one of the most-heard phrases on any college campus, rotely recited to hopeful applicants when they ask what the college environment is really like. The double major you didn’t know you were choosing when you chose Penn. A phrase that over time becomes so familiar you stop questioning it: Work hard, play hard.
(11/03/15 4:59am)
As someone who grew up in California, I thought I would be something of a novelty at an East Coast university. But as I introduced myself to different people during my first weeks at Penn, I was overwhelmed by the variety of responses I got when I asked where they were from: “I grew up in Dubai.” “I went to high school in Egypt.” “Boarding school in London.” “South Korea.” “Panama.” Suddenly, California didn’t seem exotic — and it sure didn’t feel cool to tell people that I’d lived in the same suburb for 18 years. I felt this pressing need to globalize myself, to make up in college all the time I’d lost in suburbia.
(10/20/15 4:21am)
There is a poem by Philip Larkin called “Home is so Sad.” The first several lines read: “Home is so sad. It stays as it was left/ Shaped to the comfort of the last to go/ As if to win them back.” These lines themselves are so sad. They evoke the idea of something patiently waiting for you to return, not knowing if or when you’ll come back or why you left in the first place.
(10/06/15 5:21am)
I was leaving my constitutional law class the other day when I noticed that my shoulders were so tightly scrunched up against my neck as to almost inhibit me from putting my backpack on. I slowly lowered them and remnants of stress leaked out from between my shoulder blades as they relaxed. I felt like a turtle sticking its head out from its shell, and really, the analogy was not too far off.
(09/22/15 3:58am)
Sometimes I feel like I’m living in an artificially created world, as if I’m part of some big social experiment I don’t quite understand. The more time I spend in college, the more I’m convinced that it is its own microcosm with its own set of unique societal structures and conditions. Where else in the world can you live almost exclusively with 10,000 other people around your same age? When else in your life do you inhabit that strange gray area, somewhere on the spectrum from child to adult, where you are beginning to assert your independence but are still provided for and protected from real risk in so many ways?
(09/08/15 9:50pm)
This past week, I went to the One Direction concert at Lincoln Financial Field by myself. I had bought the tickets in September of last year (an embarrassing 12 months ahead of the actual performance), and at that time, I hadn’t known anyone at Penn well enough to ask if they’d want to go to a concert together. That was the response I kept giving when people found out I was going to the concert and inevitably asked, “Who are you going with?” Then I started thinking about it. Why was I trying to justify my situation? Why was I going out of my way to explain to others why I was going to an event by myself?
(08/26/15 2:56am)
It seems to me that these days, high school is viewed less as an experience to be valued in itself and more as a mere stepping stone to college. Now that there are handbooks, websites and corporations that claim to know all the variables in the complicated formula of college acceptances, high school seems like nothing but a series of boxes that you need to check off in order to arrive at the desired endpoint.
