GUEST COLUMNIST: Polarities of undergrad education

Ben Dietz Ben DietzDespite all its ups and downs and ins and outs, dear old Penn has treated me well over the past four years. I've had opportunities here that would have been available nowhere else, met people who might never have crossed my path and gained insights so profound and moving that they could have been had in no other place on Earth. Now, dear reader, my intent is not to alarm you -- the schizophrenia of which I speak is not the Sybil/Ted Kaczynski/Bag Lady variety. It is of a much more sublime sort, a social schizophrenia which nonetheless plagues Penn to the very marrow. The illness of which I speak is our reliance on a pair of bipolar social expressions as our primary means of relating to one another. Let me explain. My clandestine cultural anthropology skills have unearthed a pair of polar euphemisms we undergraduates are fond of. They are, in no particular order: "I'm sooo drunk," and "I've got sooo much work." They are seemingly harmless phrases at first glance -- the sort of hyperbolic generalizations everyone uses in some form or another to quicken the pace of conversations and spare the pain of detail. In polite society, such euphemisms don't mean much. At Penn, however, they mean everything. These two phrases have become the sum total of our social expression. One or the other is applicable to virtually any conversation. They represent those opposite poles of college life: inebriation and scholarship. But because our innate desire to be both smart and hedonistic is tempered by our general lack of social skills, we undergrads find ourselves grasping desperately at both the beer and the books. What happens to us, as a result, is that we are never able to reach either one. Instead, we slide from one pole to the other, all the while insecure about our abilities to get either one right. And sooo we exaggerate our prowess, or worse still, our flaws, in an attempt to reconcile our pathetic lives with those of our peers. We shotgun beers and highlight books with equal abandon, all the while attempting to out-do the Joneses of Harvard and Princeton universities by trying to live up to our oxymoronic reputation as the party school of the Ivies. And, as we all know, the only thing we ever manage to get is sick. I've always wondered why this is -- why a group of people so bright and so talented would so readily turn themselves into blithering idiots or burnt-out zombies all for the sake of one-upmanship. After all, here we are at the number seven school in the country, surrounded by a vibrant academic and cultural environment. Why in the world would we subject ourselves to such abject misery? Just to say we'd done it? The answer, of course, is that it's fun. Drinking is fun. Hooking up is fun. All nighters, while not really fun, are fun to talk about later. Wearing the same clothes for four days during finals is gross, but it's also kinda fun. And having fun, my friends, is what college is all about. Those of you who are honestly here to get an education and an education only, feel free to stop reading. You may now proceed directly to graduate school, where nobody has any fun. But for the rest of you, stop for a second and realize that you're here not only to be groomed for Wall Street, but also to have a good time and to learn a little bit about people and about how laughter makes the world go 'round (especially if you're an English major, 'cause you folks have got very little else to live for). And remember also that age-old axiom: you can't have your cake and eat it too. Remember it, because it means that ultimately, you're going to have to choose between getting sooo drunk and doing sooo much work. Personally, drinking sounds a lot better to me. Especially while we're still young. Because as soon as you hit grad school (are you listening, English majors?) it's all downhill. As soon as you get there, there's no more choice -- you've got sooo much work. And that's to say nothing of your latent schizophrenia.