“Penn is becoming more nerdy by the second” is an idea I find myself thinking often. I’ll walk downstairs to find all 20 of my roommates with their heads practically poking out the other side of their devices. They can’t hang out; they have an endless amount of work. After their three midterms, maybe.
This amount of work seems on par for a university with a single-digit acceptance rate. It might be normal for an Ivy, sure, I’ll give you that. At last, academia lives! All hail the Ivy League for defying declining literacy rates. Some students might revel in the rigor, but I’d venture to say it’s far too much. There’s no reason I should leave the house on a Saturday and return hours later to everyone exactly where I found them. In a book. On a screen. Working, working, working.
Perhaps you’re thinking that none of what I’m saying can be true. Maybe you’re mentally compiling hundreds of sources that swear Penn is the most social environment compared to its counterparts. We’re the Party Ivy, haven’t you heard? “Work hard, play hard” is consistently listed as a main facet of Penn’s culture. How could we possibly be studying this often if we’re also going out this much? There simply aren’t enough hours in the day.
To this claim, I say the media is lying. Calling us the Party Ivy is similar to being the valedictorian of summer school. Sure, we’re the best, but how good is the best of a very low bar? Seems to me like we’re clinging onto any shred of an individual identity, even if it’s not quite accurate. If we care about the integrity of the title, give the award to someone more deserving. Play hard? We wouldn’t know the meaning of play if it hit us in the face.
Because those heads buried in computer screens aren’t a rarity. They’re everywhere, at every hour: late into the night, before the party, sometimes during the party, and immediately after. Penn students seem incapable of ever feeling completely finished. No matter what “fun” we’re having, there is something waiting for us on the other side of it, whether it’s a reading, a problem set, or an application. You can feel the tension of an impending commitment in the room. Everyone has one foot in the party and the other poised to sprint back to their obligations.
Homework doesn’t only take up our physical time. It changes the way free time feels. Even when the laptop closes, the assignment doesn’t disappear. It sits somewhere in the back of your mind, turning three free hours into three hours you could be working. So we schedule our fun around it instead of the other way around. We squeeze dinner between meetings, leave the party early for tomorrow’s problem set, and calculate exactly how late we can stay out without ruining Sunday. We certainly have fun, but how much can we have when our fun is optimized?
It’s obvious we didn’t accept Penn’s offer with the expectation that our experience would be easy. The smartest minds don’t get to have a good job on top of an easy college experience. Penn is — and I can’t believe I’m saying it — a sacrifice of sorts.
We’re told we have these extra responsibilities precisely because we can handle them. Those kids at the University of Miami or Penn State who truly party just aren’t on our level of academic excellence. Okay, potentially. But when did academic excellence become synonymous with perpetual busywork?
I don’t doubt that Penn should be difficult. I doubt that difficulty has to mean an endless supply of work waiting beyond the classroom. There is a difference between being challenged and simply being busy. The homework I’ve experienced has a lot less to think about and a lot more to copy and summarize.
By my junior year, I can estimate that I’ve spent nearly a thousand hours sitting in Penn classrooms, but was only actively learning for a third of them. I won’t claim to be the most attentive student. I don’t rewrite every sentence on the slides or ask the professor an incessant number of questions. But even then, it’s an incredibly disappointing reality to learn so little during the time exclusively dedicated to doing so.
This isn’t an infrequent condition for Penn students either; those I’ve asked agree that most of our learning happens outside the classroom. And I think we’ve accepted that arrangement far too easily. If the bulk of our education is happening after class ends, what exactly are all those hours inside the classroom accomplishing?
For a lot of students, it’s the action of sitting itself — scanning the attendance code — that becomes the purpose of the classroom. They sit through a lecture, staring blankly at slides, and walk away with no more knowledge than they entered with. At least their participation grades won’t suffer!
When I think about the concepts I’ve actually learned and absorbed, they’re the ones my professors have forced me to wrestle with in the room. Unfortunately, these aspects of the classroom are typically accompanied by annoying participation requirements, pop quizzes, rules about technology, and cold calls — supposedly the college student’s archenemy. And despite all the grueling hardship, they’re also the classes I rarely feel the urge to skip.
Our education should not depend so heavily on additional hours of work after the hours specifically designated for learning. Our professors are experts in their fields who can explain the content far better than any slides. I don’t want Penn to demand less of us intellectually. In fact, I want our classes to demand more. If I’m going to spend 15 hours a week in classrooms, make me leave class exhausted from thinking. But then let me leave.
With these reclaimed hours, we can become truly deserving of our title as the Party Ivy. To party, if you’re doing it for the right reasons, is to soak in the beauty of what it means to be free, lucky, and young. A total release. Life in its purest form — in whichever form feels most authentic to you. To truly party is to let go; and that’s quite difficult when there is always something waiting for you at home.
I’m not advocating for the death of homework. Some learning necessarily happens alone: papers need to be written, books need to be read, and skills need to be practiced. But homework should supplement an education happening in the classroom, not be the place where that education finally begins.
“Work hard, play hard” only works if, eventually, the work ends.
PIPER SLINKA-PETKA is a College junior studying health and societies from West Virginia. Her email address is pipersp@sas.upenn.edu.
Piper Slinka-Petka is a College junior studying health and societies from West Virginia. Her column focuses on student culture and identity. She can be reached at pipersp@sas.upenn.edu.
