COLUMN: Learning your elders

From Melissa Wong's, "Days Like This," Fall '99 From Melissa Wong's, "Days Like This," Fall '99There was a guy in my History lecture who I adored. He was always punctual and sat near the front, attention constantly focused on the professor and the topic of discussion. When class was over, he would always smile at me and bid me a good weekend before he gathered his notebook and overcoat to join the mass exodus out of the building at 4 p.m. Ever polite and charming, I looked forward to seeing him every week. The Penn student body is composed almost entirely of young men and women just beginning their lives and careers, anxiously awaiting the completion of their four years here at Penn before they go on and gain even more experience. At Bear Stearns. We are generation gaps away from the senior citizens who sit among us in large lecture halls or more intimate recitation sections. For Penn's senior students, the goals have changed. Their main purpose does not center on sheepskins and rZsumZ fodder. Senior citizens are long past their years of pop quizzes and exams. Instead, they are content to spend afternoons in one lecture after another, deeply engrossed in fascinating speeches of history and literature and the arts. In the meantime, we scribble down the words of our professors at a maddening pace, anxious that missing a mere word or two will be the death of us on the next test. And in many cases on many days, we spend class napping. So what makes these senior students return to the classroom after 40 years of life, family and career? Perhaps the seniors' return to the Penn classroom allows them to reprise their time at college. This time around, they may do things differently, perhaps better. Forty years ago, they were most likely not too different from us. College. Career. Family. And like us, they may not have appreciated the sheer opportunities for enrichment a university environment provides. We sometimes think of learning as a means to an end -- our education as a stepping stone along our career path. Seniors are at the end of their career paths. But they are back for more learning. Now, with decades of life experience and gained knowledge behind them, they can truly appreciate what college has to offer. We study to keep up with the rest of the class. We study to ace the BBB midterm. But when was the last time that we truly studied to learn? Can we even afford that luxury? Senior citizens can. And when they do come back, they find college an entirely different place than they left 40 years before. When Penn's senior citizens went to school for the first time, they sat in classes with people of the same sex and from the same backgrounds. Times, thankfully, have since changed. Drastically. And yet these are people who remain unintimidated by change, an attribute that even some of Penn's younger students fail to share. The seniors are now experiencing an entirely different perspective on education, one that is undoubtedly enriched by the viewpoints of people from diverse backgrounds. While Penn's senior citizen students have benefited from exposure to our world, we also have much to gain from them. Their life stories are unmatched among those of us who can only barely remember the Reagan administration. As we celebrate our classroom diversity, we should not forget that seniors add another much-needed perspective to our class discussions and campus conversations. We are teenagers and twentysomethings who will come to college with the future in mind. For some, the future is often dominated by plans for high-powered careers and the ensuing comforts that come with making $100,000 a year. Between rZsumZ drops and grad school applications, it is not hard to forget that a university is above all an institution of learning. And so, we should take our example from these seniors who sit in on our lectures and classes solely for the sake of broadening their horizons. Undergrads usually have around a four-year occupancy here at Penn. But getting an education is never over. My classmate reminded me of that.