COLUMN: "A Dual Degree: The Man of Steal Meets the Crazed Creator"

From Sumeet Goel's "I'm From Joisey! You From Joisey?", Spring '92 It's money, it's prestige, it's Wharton Man! · This article is a plea for all of you College and Wharton students to come to the realization that I did, and enter the dual degree program here at Penn. The Engineering students have got enough to deal with between their computer science and chemistry courses, and the really masochistic ones have always got Management and Technology to fall back on. The nurses have to spend enough time walking from their homes to the ridiculously placed Nursing Ed building in East Botswana. I came to Penn as a student in the College of Arts and Sciences, but realized after a year there that if I ever wanted to satisfy my basic primal instincts for competition, I was going to have to be in Wharton as well. Well, now I have the best of both worlds. In the College I can concentrate on the human(e) aspects of life, while in Wharton, I get the more inhuman(e) parts of homo sapien existence. In Wharton, I am taught how to be incredibly anal retentive about all aspects of life, from not reminding friends about resume drops to making sure my report has the best graphic cover sheet design in the class. Meanwhile, in the College, I try and figure out "Why is anal retentivity such a pressing social issue, and how does it relate to mankind's inner Oedipal complexes?" No matter what group I join, meeting I go to, activity, project or paper I do in Wharton, I try and figure out a way to make it sound majestic and force it onto my resume. In the College, I try and figure out how I can join one of the many groups on campus -- not to do something constructive, but so I can meet more people and get tanked with different acquaintances at least three times a week. In Wharton, I can let all of my basic grammar and English skills erode because I need only the ability to press numbers on a calculator or plug numbers into a financial formula. In the College, I can let all of my basic grammar and English skills erode because I only need to know how to summarize a book and throw in a reference to God or a Christ figure for my English paper every three weeks. In Wharton, I think of get-rich-quick business schemes which capitalize on my fellow students' stupidity and easy access to parental monies. In the College, I fall for those same get-rich-quick business schemes. The dual degree program also helps me physically, as I am now able to maintain a median body temperature between my cold blooded Wharton corpuscles and warm blooded College corpuscles. Majors are one of the unique things that made me go the dual degree route. The College offers a wide variety of majors, but none of them had that one thing I was looking for that I found in Wharton. In Wharton, I could do Management (suppression of lower ranking employees for sadistic fun and profit), Finance (monetary manipulation of some poor sucker's money for sadistic fun and profit), Marketing (tricking my fellow human being into a purchase for sadistic fun and profit), Accounting (lying and cheating to all outside parties by rearrangement of cash disbursements for sadistic fun and profit) . . . well, you get the idea. · These stereotypes are supposedly just that, stereotypes: broad generalizations that may or may not be true about a specific group of people. Even though we are told time and time again not to perpetuate these stereotypes, how many times have you heard this conversation: Joe: "You know what, I should have done X." (X representing something profitable, competitive or just plain underhanded) And then these stock responses . . . Jane: "Are you in Wharton?" Jack: "You must be in Wharton." Jill: "I knew someone just like you in Wharton once." John: "You look like the Wharton type." Jahmae: "Just like a Wharton student." Jay: "So you're in Wharton." Jorge: "Could you drop this off in my Wharton friend's mailfolder?" · The sad thing about this is, in two short years I've seen or experienced to a certain degree just about every stereotype involving College and Wharton students. And although you are reading this and vehemently denying that any of those tongue-in-cheek scenarios apply to you, I know that certain people will be very angry; those people with which this hits a little too close to home. I'm not saying that everyone is like this, or that everyone mindlessly watches the boob tube or conforms to an all encompassing fashion standard. Rather, such "broad generalizations" -- about television, or clothing, or academics -- hold merit to the extent that a good percentage of people actually fit into them. People denounce generalizations and the use of stereotypes, but unfortunately here at Penn -- and I'm sure at other schools as well -- these stereotypes aren't generalizations, they're reality. · JUST WONDERING: I guess CCR is too tough for you guys. Try this one from R.E.M.'s "Radio Free Europe:" The _____ radio is gonna sing, The reason it could _____, Put that, Put that, Put that _____, That this is a country at all. Sumeet Goel is a sophomore Communications and Finance major from Parsippany, New Jersey. "I'm From Joisey! You From Joisey?" appears alternate Thursdays.

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