A Likely Story | Shrinking Penn

Short but important disclaimer: this will get pretty schmaltzy pretty quick. Get out if you’re made uncomfortable by sentimentality and take this advice from someone who usually is.

I woke up last Wednesday to heaps of snow and the joy of knowing that it was my birthday. At approximately 7:45 a.m., I walked into Einstein Bros. Bagels where Ms. Lois greeted me with her usual “How are you, baby?” and her persistently wide smile. She then proceeded to sing me “Happy Birthday” as she encouraged her co-workers to sing and dance along with her. I giggled at the unanticipated occurrence much in the same way that you might giggle at a magic trick when you’re six. A little bewildered but legitimately pleased, I thanked her and she hugged me.

The simple, unmistakable delight that this short but significant interaction brought forth underlined for me how immensely important it is to harvest familiarity in a place as enormous as Penn. With approximately 10,000 undergraduates and hundreds of student groups, finding a version of Penn that is somehow your own can be challenging. Yet, I’m convinced that this is also the only way in which anyone can have a meaningful Penn experience.

What exactly do I mean by this?

Kelly Lawler, a College sophomore highly involved in the theater community, describes it as finding “a subset of Penn where I know almost everybody and [a community that] fosters really meaningful friendships.”

This is certainly a huge chunk of it. It would be unnecessary for me to give a spiel about friendship but I will say that in an environment like Penn, where we tend to make so many new acquaintances that rarely stick, having a space that remains somewhat constant puts you ahead in the friendship game.

For others, finding such a space goes far beyond the friendship aspect. It can, in fact, become one of the most defining features of what Penn means to them.

Tanya Bogin, a College senior who has been a part of WQHS — Penn’s student radio station — since her freshman year, remembers the beginning of her relationship with this student organization as the time that she “found an outlet for one of [her] biggest hobbies and loves.” She went on to be a part of the board and “became so immersed in radio and everything to do with radio [that] it became [her] Penn identity.”

It is clear then that this way of absorbing Penn through some of its smaller components is often done through the exercising of passions that can’t be graded on a scale from A to F. This is certainly one of the most effective methods of making Penn, by definition a family-sized meal, into a chewable, single-person serving.

Now, this whole thing might seem like the sort of unnecessary remark that should be second nature. After all, like-minded people are bound to find each other. Yet it is also true that there are a lot of drifters out there ­— people that go from one group to another without really finding their place, the one organization in which they feel as though they undoubtedly belong.

I know this because, for a couple of semesters, I was one of them. Introductory meeting after introductory meeting, I failed to become sufficiently interested in anything, which — in turn — quickly became reason for more than slight despondency. Today, when I get e-mails from my current work-study job saying things like, “One of our reasons to be here is to make you all feel loved and welcome,” I knew I had been missing out big time.

Find the corners of Penn that you can own. Pee all over them. Be territorial and love them. They will prove to be the difference not only between a crappy birthday and a wonderful one but also between an O.K. version of Penn and an extraordinary one.

Sara Brenes-Akerman is a College junior from San José, Costa Rica. Her e-mail address is brenesakerman@theDP.com. A Likely Story appears every Wednesday.

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