Dani Blum | Accepting Meh

The Danalyst | The extravagance of NSO may be gone, but there’s still plenty to be excited about

By Dani Blum 09/09/14 12:00am

I t’s N S Over.

Classes started two weeks ago, but the fact that NSO came and went hasn’t caught up with me. My friends and I still swap stories from our first nights at Penn, most of us are still sick from too little sleep (I’ve learned that “NSO cough” is an adequate explanation when my poli-sci lecture hall sounds like an ad for Mucinex) and we still wave to people we half-recognize from endless rounds of icebreakers. Even though classes have started and we’ve replaced Quad hangouts with Van Pelt study sessions, the effects of NSO linger.

For me and many other freshmen, NSO was one of the best weeks of our lives. Yes, it was exhausting, and yes, we got really tired of small talk, but NSO didn’t give us enough time to feel anything other than amazement that we were here. We loved the constant bustle of orientation, the running from meeting to assembly to floor bonding to fratting. We learned to parse through small talk or found some way to suffer through it, and learned that after asking, “So where are you from?” a hundred times, we could actually find friends. I spent my first night at Penn on the patio outside my friend’s room in Hill, eating microwave popcorn and blasting EDM just for the fun of it. Cliche as it sounds, I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

“Real college,” though, seems entirely different. NSO packed our schedules with “mandatory” events during the day and sleepless nights, but now that we’re settling into our classes, we realize we can’t fill every minute with friends. We feel that we’re constantly supposed to be doing something, but we’re never sure what that something is. We remind ourselves about opportunity cost — or have our Wharton friends do the reminding for us — but we don’t really know time management skills other than typing furiously into a Google Calendar . What’s more, it’s difficult to navigate the relationships we formed during orientation. Apart from watching their names pop up in a 40-person GroupMe, I barely see some of the people I claimed as my NSO best friends.

The fact is, we’re in the rocky transition stage. We pencil events into our schedule, we mull over whether or not to get a jump on that Spanish assignment due in three weeks, but we’re still trying to fit ourselves into the mold of college kids. For me, at least, the hardest part about Penn hasn’t been the work — although the first full week of classes will probably change that — but wading through details I never gave much thought to back home. Attempting to eat a balanced diet is more difficult than I anticipated, and budgeting my money and time is a skill I can’t seem to pick up fast enough.

More than anything, though, I’m learning to accept the “meh” moments. Real college isn’t as easily romanticized as NSO was, like those times when I lock myself out of my room or forget my Spanish binder on my desk or discover all the dining halls are closed. Convocation seems like it was six months ago. I don’t want to accept that Penn’s losing its sparkle. I want to re-believe in the glossy admissions brochure images I taped to my wall back home, and to not feel gypped when every day isn’t an adventure.

Recreating NSO is impossible, but there’s still wonder to be found in every Hill brunch and a-ha! moment I have in class. Penn just started — let’s not act like we’re tired of it.

Dani Blum is a College freshman from Ridgefield, Conn. Her email address is kblum@sas.upenn.edu. “The Danalyst” appears every Tuesday.

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