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July 3, 10:37 a.m.: I am sitting at my summer job when I have the epiphany: I am not meant to be a plebe among the masses (read: an intern). A funky diva like me cannot survive the boredom of corporate life.
April 1 passed just a few weeks ago and most of us didn't notice or didn't care. Ironically, a couple of years ago that day provided a life-changing moment. On April 1, we all eagerly drove home from high school to check our mailboxes to find out where we had been accepted to college. Letters freshly ripped open in our hands; we knew our lives would change irrevocably with the contents of the envelopes. We didn't need the ominous "something-important-is-going-to-happen-very-soon" music commonly heard in TV after-school specials -- it was pretty obvious that our lives were going to be dramatically altered. Yes indeedy, music or not, something important was going to happen very soon. Then, as summer rolled into September, we came to Penn nervous, unsure and excited about what college would bring. President Rodin told us how our lives would change dramatically when we were in college. How we would come into Penn economics majors and maybe end up folklore majors (read: parents' nightmare). How we might stroll into biology classes aspiring doctors, but come out aspiring writers. How our class was the smartest class ever to be accepted to Penn (which therefore makes the senior class consistently the dumbest class at the University. No one likes to talk about that). How within the next four years, our lives would change in ways even our fearless leader Judy Rodin could not begin to explain to us. Admittedly, I left that Convocation pep talk skeptical. Surrounded by 2,000 high school newspaper editors, 2,000 yearbook editors, 2,000 high school music stars -- and one fellow classmate who had told me that day that he was planning on working in Tanzania after graduation to teach a group of villagers how to create a social market economy (no, I'm not kidding) -- I was pretty sure that most of us were grounded and that we knew what we were doing. But as I watched thousands of pre-frosh tour Penn's campus this past week during Penn Previews, I couldn't help but think one thing: Were we really that stupid to think we actually knew what it was all about? Yes. Yes, we were. Last week I decided to latch onto a Penn Previews tour to see what the "new kids" would be like, and whether it would be easy to steal their lunch money. Pushy parents questioned and probed their tour guides as thoroughly as a Fling officer checking bags outside the Quad for a bottle of vodka. Embarrassed pre-frosh shuffled their feet, and stared at the ground, ashamed that their parents would (gasp!) actually ask a question. A couple of pre-frosh looked somewhat concerned when they saw a man in a chicken suit clucking up and down the Walk. Rightly. What President Rodin didn't tell us in her "begin-to-be-brainwashed-by-Penn-ideology" Convocation speech was that the difference between 18 and 22 is huge, and that it's not just academic. That the transformation from being an 18-year-old to a 22-year-old is not so much like that of a centipede to a butterfly, but more like that of a possum to a giraffe. We come in caring about April 1 as the day that we got into college; we'll leave caring about April 15 as the day we have to file our tax returns on our own, without the help of our parents. President Rodin talked about our years in college as an academic transformation -- more importantly, it's a personal transformation. It's not quite as physically awkward as middle school, but like seventh grade, college is a crucial transition period -- this time, not from childhood to puberty, but from puberty to adulthood. As Hey Day comes this Friday, seniors will graduate into the real world as juniors bang their canes on College Hall to become seniors. Sophomores will transform into juniors, and freshmen will finally no longer be considered sub-human within the community as they become sophomores. Everyone moves up a notch, and with the years, every one becomes a little smarter -- not just academically, but socially and personally. Each year at college changes you: freshman year makes you excited, sophomore year makes you interested, junior year makes you passionate and senior year earns you your license to take the wheels of what poet John Ashbery describes as a driverless car. Enjoy the ride.
Ohmygod, it'll be the best weekend of your life. Seriously, it's amazing! Spring Fling is reason enough to go to Penn." But as I carefully stepped over a puddle of fresh vomit smelling of hot dogs and Bacardi to get into the dirty pink-tiled, clogged-toilets first floor bathroom of Butcher in the Quad my freshman year, I couldn't help but feel that Spring Fling had somehow overlooked me -- that I was the one person on Penn's campus not having "the best weekend of my life." Don't get me wrong, I like looking at vomit all the colors of the rainbow and identifying by smell the alcohol that sparked the yakking as much as any other Penn student. But somehow, I felt flung out. The weekend had its great moments, but to say it was the highlight of my life, or even of my college career, would be a gross overstatement. As gross, one might say, as piles of vomit overflowing from poorly managed toilets. I figured that maybe sophomore year's Fling would be better. Maybe living in the Quad (a.k.a. "University Port-a-Potty") my freshman year had somehow made my Fling harder to enjoy. But sophomore year too, I had a good time, but not "the best weekend of my life." At the end of each weekend, I was hit by an intense amount of depression. Spring Fling had come and gone. It was OK. But that's it. Fling is just one of the many times in my life when I feel that there must be something seriously wrong with me. If everyone else is having the time of their lives, and I'm just having, well, a pretty good time, does that make me the biggest loser on Penn's campus? (That was rhetorical, people. Save your letters to the editor for something else.) Well then, color me green, staple synthetic fur to my body and pay me millions of dollars to be in a B-grade movie -- I'm the Grinch that Stole Fling. For a while, I thought it was just me with yet another neurosis to add to my ever-growing list of "personal Ariel Horn deformities." But as I began talking with friends about Fling coming up this weekend, I was met by a series of freakily intense smiles and "I'm so psyched"-style remarks that seemed as artificial as Freshgrocer's claim that they're actually going to open up sometime within the next millennium. As I listened to friends' forced enthusiasm about Fling, it hit me, like a Mack truck ploughing down a young frazzled raccoon on Route 76: I'm not the only Penn student with a problem. There are a lot of people on Penn's campus who are in the closet about their true Fling feelings. Fling's just not "all that and a bag a chips." At best, it's just the bag of chips. This is not to say that the bag of chips isn't good enough. The problem is that Fling has been made into the be-all, end-all of our college experience -- that it is presumed to be the existential answer to our lifelong questioning of our purpose on Earth (Fling philosophy: to drink to the point of blindness). Making Fling into "the best weekend of your college career" then creates a real problem for all the other weekends at Penn. By making Fling the number one weekend of your life, you're obliterating all chances of having any other weekend at Penn outside of Fling be as much fun. The net result is that nothing will live up to Fling. And the problem with that is that Fling doesn't always live up to itself. The fact is that any weekend at Penn can be the best weekend of your life, and that while it might be Fling, it doesn't have to be. Even in terms of "Fling-style fun," let's face it, you can get as drunk any weekend at Penn as you get at Fling, and you could probably find 10 or 20 people willing to be drunk with you for 72 hours all the same. So as Fling approaches this weekend, don't despair if you find yourself creeping over a puddle of vomit, or holding the hair back of a friend as you kneel on dirty pink-tiled bathroom floors. It may not be the Sweetest Fling ever, but it doesn't have to be. "Sweet" is good enough.
At Penn, our day-to-day exists in a generation vacuum. For four years of our lives, we eat, breath, sleep, study and think surrounded strictly by twenty-somethings. Baby-boomers (known as our professors) occasionally break the monotony of our eerily exclusive environment. And even the out-of-place sound of a baby crying on the street outside my window is enough to make me glance outside, surprised. But on the first day of classes this semester, the generation vacuum broke -- hard, fast and abruptly. I walked into History 128: Europe after 1945, to find a lecture hall filled with senior citizens. I looked at my schedule. Yes, this was the right room. "Morrie, save me and Dottie a seat, wouldja?" Right room, wrong planet. It was like some sort of bizarre alien invasion I saw once on an experimental documentary at my brother's art school -- like old people had decided to take over the world and no one had informed me of the coup d'etat. I felt grossly out of place. I looked frantically around the room for someone my own age to sit with -- anyone. I finally settled comfortably next to another random student and we exchanged silent, but confident, "Oh, we'll win" glances. Surely, We would be "safe" from Them sitting over here. When it was time for the class to begin, the room looked evenly split: half of Them, half of Us. They sat in the front. We sat in the back. Oh, make no mistake -- it would be a fair fight indeed. But as the semester wore on and my schedule changed, I was deprived the luxury of arriving to class early enough to secure a seat away from Them. So against my will, I changed my seat. To the front of the room and dangerously close to Them. As I walked to the front of the room, everything began to change -- the closer I crept to the front, the stronger the elderly smell of old leather gloves and newspapers became, and the more mild the mixed smells of undergraduates' cologne and perfume. The sea of undergraduate faces blemished by acne transformed into a sea of senior citizens' faces blemished by time. And then my false perceptions and unwarranted suspicion of the senior citizens began to transform as well. I had crossed into The Other Zone. Weeks passed, and The Other Zone became my new zone. I began to sit regularly with Al, a 74- year-old toy manufacturer, and his wife Penny. I learned about their family, how they fit Penn into their lives and why they chose to take the class. Once the senior citizens surrounding us saw that I was friendly, they grew interested, and wanted to play with the Invader. One woman and I spoke about classes we had taken, professors we had liked and disliked and with whom I should take an art history course next semester (she disapproved of my original choice). I helped another man get onto the Web site for our class, and he suggested a book to me that would help with my paper. And next week, Al and Penny and I are going out to dinner with another undergraduate. But the leap over the generation gap wasn't only individual. The professor of the course, fully aware that the demographic of the class was so unusual, catered the class to fit everyone's needs. Each senior citizen was paired up with a student, with whom they could discuss the history the senior citizens had lived through, which students had only read about. Everyone's educational needs would be met; senior citizens' desire to see a retrospective analysis of the era they had lived through and undergraduates' desire to learn about history in a compelling, personal and serious way. At the beginning of the semester, I had feared sitting next to the senior citizens. As the semester nears its close, it has genuinely become one of the highlights of my undergraduate career. Professors at Penn need to follow this lead. Penn's academic community needs more professors and students who are willing to experiment with their classes, tailor their coursework and play with new ideas rather than support the status quo. If history can be brought to life by an innovative program that encourages dialogue between undergraduates and senior citizens, Penn's academic life too can be refreshed by similar programs tailored to meet the specific academic needs of the specific students in the classroom. Educational or generational, there is a desperate need at Penn to supercede the gap. Now's the time for a creation of a real Other Zone.
You'd better fucking call me back. Are you trying to exhaust me? 'Cause you're doing a real good job of it. I'm done chasing you -- you do this so many times and then it just becomes fucking old." "You've tortured me all day and night. You'd better fucking call me back if you ever want this to work out. I hope you're happy being a lonely guy. You wanna be with me, yeah, right, great, thanks. Thanks a lot. I hate you." "If you're having a good time right now, well, then, fuck you." These are the real voice mail messages from a woman who has just broken up with her boyfriend of eight months. Wavering and unsure of herself, the woman's voice is broken by intermittent sobs as she alternately curses, cries and screams at her boyfriend in over 50 messages just like the ones transcribed above. Who hasn't known the pain of a recent breakup? Who doesn't somehow feel sorry for this woman? All of us have had traumatic emotional moments. All of us have cried and screamed over broken relationships. And if we haven't said the same words to our exes that this woman said to her ex-boyfriend, many of us have certainly thought them. The difference is, we've been able to keep our secrets to ourselves. If I want to trash an ex-boyfriend, I can relish in the fact that unless I have really untrustworthy friends, my calling him a "tremendous, steaming bag of feces" won't be spread around. That's the beauty of privacy. But the fact of the matter is, I don't know this woman. I don't know her ex-boyfriend. I actually know nothing else about her beyond her voice mail messages. Above all, I don't know why I was given the opportunity to listen to her voice mail messages in the first place. But although this woman has nothing to do with my personal life, I've listened to 10 of her desperate, sobbing phone messages to some random guy I've never met, all in the comfort of my own home. Thanks to this woman's ex-boyfriend -- who has cruelly converted her voice mail messages into MP3 files to be shared -- privacy has become as obsolete as pet rocks named Skippy. It's bad enough to think that our worst emotional moments might be broadcasted by our hateful exes at any given moment; but violations of privacy as disturbing as this, if not more so, have extended far beyond the sharing of voice mail messages -- right here at Penn. Most of us go through our days at Penn in a relative routine, unsuspecting that our privacy is susceptible to manipulation at any time. But within the past year, several "privacy scandals" have emerged from the dredge and routine of University life. You're not as safe as you think you are. Only two weeks ago, one University employee was caught using Penn students' social security numbers in order to apply for credit cards. Only after credit card companies called students asking for a verification of address was the fraud exposed. Last semester, hundreds of Penn students received a random e-mail from "Dr. Brian J. Kelley" about scientific research. How did he get our e-mail addresses? And how can we stop people like him from getting them in the future? And just a few weeks ago, an embittered ex-boyfriend at Penn posted his former girlfriend's "for your eyes only" pornographic videos on his Web site for all to see. Whether it's the broadcasting of deeply personal voice mail messages, or the easy access people both inside and outside of the Penn community have to our personal information, it's clear that emotional and factual privacy has lost its value, and has become as useless as the "universal language" -- Esperanto -- to a group of blind and deaf French mimes. Where do we go from here? Can privacy be rescued? An alumna of the Penn Law School concerned with cases on privacy issues recently said, "The World Wide Web had tremendous potential to ensnare us and our individuality in its tangles. Commercial profiling and 'spam' e-mailing proliferate due to cookies and the lack of digital privacy. This can only be fixed by more technical and actual respect for each other's privacy. We need to be smart consumers and smart people, ready and willing to stand up for our rights." So get up. Stop sitting there. And rethink the value of privacy. It's time for a comeback.
On the last day of classes last semester, I faced a moral dilemma. As I sat with my number two pencil in hand, filling out the end-of-the-semester course evaluation, I didn't really know what to do. Everyone applauded the professor at the conclusion of the class, the professor thanked us for being such good students and such a receptive audience, and then he left the room to allow us privacy to fill out our evaluations. A hush fell over the room as students began to furiously bubble in their opinions of the course and the professor onto the scantron. Did he merit a one, two, three, four or five? And then came the "additional comments" section. The professor had been a good professor -- when he showed up to class. He had graded our papers fairly, though it took him nine weeks to do so. And overall he had been responsive to our needs -- when he checked his e-mail three weeks after the fact. But for the most part, I felt our applause was unnecessary and unearned. What should I write for my additional comments? Enter moral dilemma stage right. Essentially, in my hand was the power to make or break a Penn professor. In a bizarre dream sequence-like moment that usually only occurs in cartoons or Saved by the Bell, the good person inside of me (deep, deep, deep inside of me) popped up on my shoulder. Clad completely in Penn gear, she said in an angelic voice: "Ariel, don't ruin this professor's teaching career by writing about your frustration with his teaching patterns! His career lies in your hands! "He's not even tenured yet. Remember, sometimes honesty isn't always the best policy -- lie, lie, lie!" So I happily began to lie on my course evaluation. "Professor X was a good professor and responsive to students' needs." There. I felt satisfied. I had safely avoided irrevocably damaging someone's professional future because of my personal gripes. But then, as I was about to tuck my evaluation into the grey folder, never to be seen again, I stopped dead in my tracks. In an incredibly disturbing moment -- which will no doubt come up in therapy someday -- I realized that I'm the person I hate. Let me explain: As the middle of the semester rolls around each Penn student has to select courses for the next semester. Many of us will consult the University of Pennsylvania Undergraduate Course Review to find out the lowdown and dirty on professors we might take classes with. But for the most part, the evaluations of professors listed under certain courses are pretty tame. The evaluations give an opinion that is usually non-committal or extremely impressive -- but seldom negative ("Professor X was a good professor and responsive to students' needs" -- neither a glowing nor damning report, and utterly useless.) Only in the "notable quotes" section do we get to read the truths we really need to hear when picking classes: "Professor Y is terrible. I'd rather be sitting in a room staring at a wall than be at his lectures," or "Avoid Professor Z like drinking year-old goat's milk left outside the Quad on sunny days." I'm the person I hate because I often don't tell the truth on course evaluations like the "notable quotes" people -- and I'm not alone. After speaking with several other students after my course evaluation of Professor X, I found out that most people "didn't want to hurt his feelings," by writing the truth. The net result of this "nice" behavior is that Penn preserves the careers of professors who aren't that fabulous, thus providing us with more classes with professors who are only average educators. Worse yet, professors who have the ability to improve never learn what they're doing wrong because we're too busy being nice on our course evaluations to tell them about their goat-milk-like qualities. And in the end, everyone is hurt by our relatively sedate comments -- both professors who never learn what they're doing wrong, and students who are searching for truthful evaluations of professors in the Course Guide which they will only find in the "notable quotes" section. Penn prides itself on its extremely intelligent professor pool. But in order to keep the University as one of the best schools in the nation, we need to constructively criticize what's wrong with our classes and professors when there is a problem. We need more opinions that tell it like it is. From now on, we've got to leave our moral consciences at the door, and feel no hesitancy about explaining the curdled goat milk for what it is.
From the second I spotted a gigantic Ziploc bag full of pot underneath the hotel shuttle bus driver's foot, I knew I was living my parents' worst nightmare of what "spring break" means. "Ganja," pork, artificial cheese and leopard skin shirts. For those of you who didn't get to go on traditional spring break to "Random Tropical Place Where People Will Braid Your Hair With Ugly Beads for Outrageous Prices," that pretty much sums up my spring break experience. To my parents' utmost horror, I spent half of spring break in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Despite my mom's desperate pleas and endless begging that I remain in New Jersey for yet another "great break" (read: sitting at home alone in my pajamas every day watching Jerry Springer and infomercials for ButtMaster 2001 while waiting for my parents to return so that I could have use of a car), I somehow manipulated my parents into believing that it would be a "valuable learning experience" to go to Jamaica. Suspiciously well-priced airfare and free lodging at an all-inclusive resort -- thanks to my a capella group, which would be performing in Jamaica -- seemed to sell the deal to my parents. Off to Jamaica I would go. Hopefully, I would return. If not, hey, "no problem, mon." No more tuition to pay. No more freeloading from the financially dependent unemployed student. We all seemed to be winners in this scheme. But for those of you who were unable to manipulate your parents into thinking that Jamaica was a good idea, or who simply didn't want to spend your break in Jamaica or another cliched Hair-Braiding Central location, here's what you missed. Memorable Experience #1: Arriving days after the rest of my a capella group had been in Jamaica, I had the luxury of taking the hotel shuttle from Montego Bay Airport to the resort solo. After 10 uncomfortable minutes spent with Delroy the Driver sitting entirely too close to me ("Ah, you are not married, no ring. Let's go to the beach later, ya mon? I show you a real good time"), a buck-toothed woman in her forties named Marge and her dashing husband Ray, King of the Obscenely Long Mullet, boarded the shuttle. Spotting a huge bag of "the Ganja" underneath Delroy's foot, Marge lunged at Delroy like a lioness at its prey, throwing her half-chewed cigarettes to the ground, salivating as her eyes lit up like the fiery end of a bong. Then, in a Southern accent as thick and juicy as fried chicken, Marge, in all her eloquence, burped out, "Ray, you gotta see this! This here guy's got the Mary Jane! We gonna have a real good trip yeah!" Twenty dollars later, Marge and Ray were snuggling up to a gigantic Ziploc bag of pot, slowly taking out each leaf and stuffing them individually into their socks. (For whatever reason, this seemed to be the logical next step.) I had arrived in Jamaica. Ten minutes later I called my parents: "Yes, everything's fine. The shuttle worked out great." Memorable Experience #2: The Pork Pit and Margaritaville. Growing sick of the confines of our all-inclusive resort (in Jamaica, "all-inclusive" means enough nachos and artificial cheese to feed the entire former British Empire and billions of cats roaming the premises), we ventured out into the city of Montego Bay for some action. What spring break would be truly complete without a trip to the MTV-famed Margaritaville? But first, a bathroom stop. A glowing pink neon sign outside a dilapidated building beckoned us inside as it blinked "Bacon, Ham, Pork! Bacon, Ham, Pork!" The smell of frying pig reeled us in, as it would any Penn student. Thank God for the Pork Pit. (Yes, that's its real name.) But it was at Margaritaville where we discovered Spring Break in its true short-skirted, tight-shirted, sunburned glory. Annoying, drunken college girls danced on speakers like hookers on Pat Pong in Thailand. Sweaty guys in Abercrombie shirts surrounded the dancers. And a personal favorite: a girl wearing a skin-tight leopard print tube top with a beer in one hand and a whistle into which she would repeatedly blow to produce ear-piercing shrieks. Spring Break. Woohoo. When one girl asked various Jamaican men to spank her tight-jeaned bottom, for whatever reason, it felt like it was the right time to go. With the enthusiasm of Tito Puente mid-concert, one chivalrous man began to play her butt cheeks like a Puerto Rican bongo. Yes, it was definitely time to go.
We're at the edge of the Earth. On the way to Cornell University from Penn, the straight line of the highway seems endless as the city melts into country and overbearing skyscrapers seem to soundlessly transform into more overbearing mountains. City lights fade out of view and the Philadelphia skyline silently slips from vision. As the highway continues, the sky sheds its nighttime polluted pink as it melts into an upstate New York deep inky indigo, stars that can't be seen in the city shining like fluorescent cell phone buttons in the sky. Upon arrival at Cornell, just the barely audible sounds of worn students' boots crunching on the freshly fallen snow interrupt the eeriness of the otherwise soundless night. Sprint PCS ("Pretty Crappy Service") doesn't work here. Good God, surely we Penn students had arrived at the edge of the Earth. This past weekend, 14 Penn students and myself traveled to Cornell to perform in an a cappella competition. Arriving in the silent country landscape buried in upstate New York was like walking down Locust Walk at some ridiculous hour when no one else is awake and you're alone. The wind rustles the branches, and you turn around anxiously as you've been trained to do in Philadelphia -- but no one is there. In a lot of ways, that same description describes Cornell. It's beautiful, yes, but no one and nothing is there. People at Penn often whine about the University's location. West Philadelphia has never been Penn's selling point as the parents of prospective (and mortified) students on campus tours perpetually ask about "the safety issue." Penn is nestled deep in the thick of "the bad side of town," and despite the changes that have recently occurred in the community landscape, students aren't ready to forget that we're still in West Philly. We can try to take the "bad parts" of West Philadelphia out of Penn -- but we can't take Penn out of West Philadelphia. On top of that, Penn students often claim there's "nothing to do" in Philadelphia: "The restaurants on campus are bad." "There's nowhere to go on campus except for one or two bars." "We need a better movie theater." And the most recent on Papaya King: "What genius thought that beefy fattening hot dogs and fat-free fruit drinks actually go together?" Overall, despite all the improvements that Penn has given us, we often still clamor that it's not enough. So why not transfer to beautiful Cornell? There, students leave their doors unlocked until the last person returns home at 3 a.m. Safety's not an issue. Barbecues sit carelessly on the huge lawns -- no one's going to steal them. Rent for a six-person house not far from campus is $300 per person per month. And it might take some time, but you'll eventually get over the biting cold that freezes your lungs every time you breathe. But will you get over the fact that the town is isolated from any city by hours? That there is a depressing four-foot high "rides" box in the student center into which people drop off slips that beg for rides to the nearest city? That the only city to speak of is "Collegetown," N.Y., where there is less to do than there is at Penn? Crotchety old people on TV always tritely comment, "You never realize how good a thing is until you don't have it anymore." As much as I hate to believe moral aphorisms that could have easily been hacked out by a Full House writer, the crotchety old people are right. Cornell's beauty can't be denied. The feeling of safety that pervades their campus is incomparably better than Penn. But when push comes to shove, maybe it's not so bad to take West Philadelphia over Ithaca. A not-so-fabulous neighborhood over isolated beauty. Something -- anything -- to do, over nothing at all. West Philadelphia may not have the best entertainment options. It may not be perfect. There may be some things that you detest about Penn's location and Philadelphia in general. But we've got a lot more than the Ithacas of the world. If nothing else, a trip to Cornell should remind us how lucky we are to have Penn and Philadelphia. Even if it's not Los Angeles or New York City, thank God it's not Ithaca. As the weekend drew to a close, I hardly minded waking up at 6:45 in the morning to get in the car for the four-hour drive to come home to Penn. Because there may not be much here -- but at least there's something.
We are all pretentious, self-serving, arrogant trolls. I'm sure this is hardly news to you. We strut around campus in our uncomfortable Charles David high-heeled boots with our multi-colored Herve Chepelier bags, our outrageously priced Gucci watches, reeking of Armani cologne. When winter comes we don our Burberry scarves that look like horse blankets, and snuggle into our North Face jackets until we get home to type up our cover letters for overrated companies that will always accept at least one of us as a summer intern. As winter melts into spring we head to Jamaica and Cancun for spring break where we spend Daddy's trillions effortlessly, eating Chilean sea bass in a tomato couscous sauce at fancy, over-priced restaurants in our fancy, over-priced Diesel jeans. This isn't you, right? You don't have a Herve Chepelier, you don't have billions to spend, you don't even own a North Face catalog, let alone a jacket. Go on. Write a letter to the DP about how shocked and appalled you are that Ms. Horn has falsely characterized Penn's student community: "We're not all like that. My sneakers weren't made in a sweatshop by malnourished five-year-olds. Some of us don't care about labels, or jobs at rich corporations, or beauty on the outside. Beauty is on the inside, Ms. Horn. You are shallow. Shallow, shallow, shallow!" True, this description doesn't describe all Penn students, and you'd be right to write that letter (though admittedly, it's a little ridiculous that you'd actually take that tongue-in-cheek description seriously). The people described above are the stereotypes. In fact, there are thousands of people at Penn who aren't rampant consumers, who aren't hung up on labels, who have to work to pay for college, who have no sense of entitlement and who have dreams that don't involve big titles at big corporations. Sadly, though, to the rest of the world these stereotypes categorize all of us at Penn. Along with being one of the best schools in the country, Penn also totes in its Kate Spade bag the reputation of being one of the snottiest, too. Employers, journalists, even in our own community often think of us as pretentious, arrogant jerks. About three weeks ago, the cover article in The New York Times' Sunday Style section was devoted to addressing the attitude of entitlement that so many educated people our age seem to have. The article was written by an apparently bitter writer in his early thirties who was both amazed and annoyed at how interns and recent college graduates perpetually ask for more responsibilities. He was bothered that the "new kids" didn't get his obscure early 80s music references, how eager they were to take on new projects and how they all felt they were capable of more work and deserved a higher spot on the corporate totem pole. The gist of his article? These kids think they're entitled to real jobs with high paying salaries. They're not. The belief that schools like Penn produce self-serving students isn't even limited to the endless generalizations of articles in the Times. Last week, I attended a Career Services program called "What's Enough Money?" Before we created a hypothetical budget to deduce how much money recent graduates need to earn to live a reasonable lifestyle, one of the counselors told the 15 students present one of her biggest pet peeves -- that Penn students feel that they "deserve" a certain lifestyle and salary simply because they're Penn students. Even as we created our hypothetical budget, we seemed to be acting out her pet peeve. When she suggested that we don't have to live in Manhattan or San Francisco upon graduation -- that we could live in (gasp!) Brooklyn or (Good God!) Oakland -- we all looked at her rather skeptically. It's true. Though we're not all on the extreme side of the Arrogance and Entitlement Spectrum, the world thinks we've got a severe attitude problem. It's time to fix it. Let's keep the energetic, neurotic high-achiever part of who we are -- it makes us work harder. Despite what some apparently bitter contributor at the Times says, aspiring to bigger projects and thinking bigger ideas is what makes us important to the future of the American economy. But it's time for all of us to check our proverbial Herve Chepeliers, our Chilean sea bass and our "I deserve to be the CEO right after my internship" attitudes at the door. It's time to remember -- and to make sure that our "elders" know we remember -- that we have to work for what we want, and we don't simply deserve it.
Maybe you don't have a Valentine today.
In Athens, Ga. there's a lot of hope to go around. But not just the kind of hope that appears in gushy Hallmark cards which wish people good luck in the form of cute little kittens wearing glasses and hats. In Georgia, hope comes in the surprising form of cold hard cash. At the University of Georgia, hope means more than Hallmark gooeyness -- it translates to a hefty financial incentive through the nine-year-old Hope Scholarship fund, a free-tuition program used by the majority of the freshman class at state schools in Georgia. The Hope Scholarship pays for all tuition and fees at any state college or university for Georgia residents with at least a B average. Funded by the proceeds from Georgia's state lottery, the program has forced students to work harder, strive for higher SAT scores and has kept many of Georgia's best and brightest students in the state through its enormous financial incentive program. For all intents and purposes, the Hope Scholarship has achieved what it set out to accomplish -- it has created a merit-based scholarship program which has encouraged students to work harder to maintain their scholarships, "to be better prepared for class" according to their professors, and to invest more thought into their future. It has allowed students to attend college for free as long as they keep their grades at a certain standard. The idea of a scholarship program for students based on merit is not particularly novel or interesting. After all, various and diverse grants and scholarship programs across the United States provide thousands of students with the opportunity to learn at a lower cost. State schools across the nation promised each of us lower tuition rates than we pay at Penn. At a first glance, Georgia hasn't opened any scholarship doors that haven't already been swinging wide open for quite some time. What Georgia has done though (with 13 other states following suit) is create a program which awards students four years paid tuition not for being utterly amazing at everything they do at college, but for simply being pretty darn good by maintaining a B average. The Hope Scholarship separates itself from other scholarship programs because it gives everyone an equal chance at achieving four years of free tuition. All they have to do is work for the B. Allegedly, right now each one of us has a "fair chance" at receiving scholarships such as these. All we have to do is apply, right? But what's the likelihood of your receiving a scholarship comparable to four years of paid tuition if you have only maintained good grades, while your competitors have not only achieved a high GPA, but also have spent their summers in clinics in Ghana researching AIDS? What are the chances that you will receive four years of paid tuition with good grades alone while your competitors have maintained good grades and done field work in Pakistani journalism? The Hope Scholarship gets rid of the superfluous extracurricular activities that make most scholarships more competitive; based on grades alone, it offers each student an equal chance at free tuition, with no minimum amount of recipients. Maybe it's time for hope to hit Penn. Admittedly, a Hope Scholarship equivalent at Penn couldn't be paid for by the state lottery; as a private university, Pennsylvania has no obligation to fund our education. Similarly, to give free tuition to every student who achieves a B average would be excessive as many students at Penn have this kind of GPA or higher. And the very thought of Penn paying for our entire four years of education is so ridiculous it's barely worth writing on paper. (A sidenote: Harvard says they have a large enough endowment to pay for all their students' tuition in perpetuity. Maybe it's not such a ridiculous idea, even considering Penn's recent endowment woes.) But could Penn feasibly make a scholarship program which would award students a sale price on their yearly tuition based on grades alone? If students maintain a B+ orA- average (attainable, but still a standard that forces students to work for it), why not award them a discount in tuition costs? Full discounts are obviously absurd, especially in light of Penn's recent endowment troubles. But would a cut of $3,000 (less than 10 percent) for students with a 3.5 or higher make Penn destitute? Hope doesn't have to be Hallmark cards alone -- hope could come to Penn through following the lead of other innovative universities. Maybe it's time for hope, and lower tuition costs, to hit this University.
Dear Random Potential Employer: I am writing to you because I am extremely interested in obtaining a position at your company's New York location this coming summer. Admittedly, I don't know much about your firm or what exactly it is that you do, but I've heard that everyone else in my class wants to work for your company, so I figured, hey, why the hell not? All it takes is a resume drop and a dream. Actually, I really liked the free coffee mug you gave out at your recruiting presentation, and I'm hoping that by working at your firm, I will be able to complete a dinner set for eight and complete my t-shirt collection. In any case, I'm sure that I'll be an asset to your talented and creative team and whatever it is that you do; I am excellent at sharpening pencils. For the past three summers, I have worked at reputable companies that have promised me exciting and hands-on work experience, though they really just paid me to check my e-mail constantly and occasionally work on the few unimportant projects assigned to me while under the watchful eyes of my superiors. It was a fair trade, considering that most people who look at my resume and see the companies' names are impressed, even though I didn't really do anything particularly impressive myself. Each of these internships challenged me to think critically and creatively about the projects to which I was assigned. For example: Would it be better for me to wait for the broken Xerox to be fixed, or should I use the Xerox across the hallway? Should I put these files in a green folder, or a pink one? More importantly, each of these internships also taught me how to view the commercial world both objectively and subjectively, from the viewpoints of both the marketer and the creator. I'm not sure how this is relevant to your company, but I've used that last line in all my cover letters, and I think it sounds snazzy. I'm looking to put my talents to work for a company that delves into problems, sleeves rolled up, in an attempt to find creative solutions. I also hear you have a really nice cafeteria. From my past professional experience, I have learned the importance of planning, organization and teamwork. For instance, it was much easier for me to leave work at 4:50 on Fridays if the other intern who worked with me kept my boss distracted. Similarly, if the other intern left for lunch early, I knew that it would be a good time for me to point out to my boss how eager I was to work and how lazy my counterpart was. Additionally, sitting in on crucial meetings taught me the hierarchy of an office setting -- only people who are really annoying, really bitter, or really old are allowed to speak. At these meetings, I also mastered the art of the closed-mouth yawn. Additionally, working in a smaller company one summer gave me the opportunity to fully grasp how to correctly label a FedEx airbill, which surprisingly, I did not learn in my three years of education at an Ivy League school. Because of my past work experience, I believe I am aptly prepared for a job at your company. Also, I hear you bribe your summer interns to work for you after they graduate by taking them out to expensive dinners. I particularly like filet mignon under a light Bernaise sauce -- please add that to my file. Working at your company appeals to me because I could implement my skills learned from course work at the University of Pennsylvania -- including suchheavy subjects as "Ideas in Mathematics" and "Victimology." I'm sure that my work as an English major who has read Aphra Behn's Oroonoko at least four separate times will also prove invaluable in an office setting. I am an analytical thinker, enthusiastic, a quick learner and excellent at alphabetizing files. Furthermore, I have no qualms about fetching coffee for those who care little about my academic or professional growth, much less my name. Thank you for your time and consideration, and if you don't send me at least some sort of response to this I'm going to be really pissed.
Where have all the ugly people gone? I know what a lot of you are probably thinking right now: Harvard. Yale. Perhaps. But the one place they certainly haven't been visiting lately is "reality-based" TV. The first episodes of the salacious Temptation Island -- a predicted cash cow for Fox in the reality show genre -- show only beautiful men and women in slinky bathing suits and sexy sarongs, many of whom have, naturally, left their lives as models to pursue medicine, law or, alternatively, massage careers. A couple of the beautiful people are Playboy models. One is "Miss Georgia." The men on the show are funky and sexy, with names like "Dameon" and "Maceo." One is a self-described musician. Another a "struggling artist." They are all painfully hip, with their Abercrombie hemp necklaces, Ken-doll hair and six-pack stomachs. The ugly people are nowhere to be seen. Hey, it's just like real life! Although most of Temptation Island's physical characters aren't exactly "realistic" when compared to the American norm (obesity, baldness, bad makeup), America is tuned in, frothing at the mouth to see people's lives fall apart. After all, where else can you see real couples break up without feeling bad about it? (C'mon, you have to admit you feel kind of bad for them on Springer.) The premise of Temptation Island? Four couples who have been in relationships for varying lengths of time are placed on an island near Belize with fantasy men and women whose sole goal is to break their relationships up. Or, as Fox cleverly puts it, "to test the strength of the couples' relationships," so as to stave off criticism from religious pundits who find its "amoral" content problematic. Party-poopers. The couples are separated at the island, with the men on one side quarantined alone with the fantasy women and the women on another part of the same island alone with the fantasy men. Both the fantasy men and women have been selected based on what each contestant in the couple had described to Fox as their "ideal" mate before the show began. If all works according to plan, disaster will strike, tears will fall, five-year-long relationships will terminate and we'll get to see really good looking people hook up. Some people's romantic lives will be ruined. Forever. As Montgomery Burns would sneer, "Exxxcellent." The fact that Temptation Island barely acknowledges the existence of ugly people is inconsequential and not particularly surprising. After all, "ugly" doesn't sell. (Ironically, bikini Speedos made for men over 70 sell rather well.) While the premise of Temptation Island may be somewhat disturbing and stupid, what's truly shocking about the show is the new genre it has created, even within reality TV shows. Watching someone else's real life fall to pieces has finally become genuine family entertainment. In German, there's a word for this: schadenfreude. It means "joy at someone else's misery." And it turns out misery sells -- as long as its not our own. But why do people really watch Temptation Island? Is it because we genuinely like watching other people be miserable? (Yes.) Is it because watching stupid television about stupid people make us feel smarter? (Yes.) Is it more fun to see good-looking people break up than ugly people? (Yes.) The truth of the matter is we watch it because it plays upon our greatest romantic fear -- losing someone we're in love with to someone better looking, smarter and sexier than we are. Temptation Island allows us to privately question our own relationships, either realizing how lucky we are, or how much we want "out" to play the field (or the Island, as the case may be). It allows us to play a delightfully frightening game of "what if" in our minds without actually having to go through with it. We watch it not because we're sadists seeking schadenfreude -- we watch it because we're looking to avoid our own misery by reassessing our own romantic lives. The only difference is we don't get music to go with it. And it's really cold in Philadelphia. While the show certainly isn't the most intelligent or moral program on TV, it gives us an opportunity to re-evaluate and assess our own lives. Maybe it's not that stupid after all. Besides, if a network really wanted to make a show that would allow us to watch people be miserable, they could do a better job of it. Picture this: take all of your boyfriend or girlfriend's exes. Now lock yourself in a room with them -- just you and the exes. Now that's television.
Last month, The Daily Pennsylvanian ran a story of six Penn sorority girls in a sordid Internet video. Kissing. Wearing bikinis. In a shower together, lathering shampoo. Oh baby. To many men, it was a sexual fantasy realized. Penn sorority girls kissing each other and showering together? And on a free Web site? Who could ask for anything more? Really, There's No Place Like Penn. To the six Penn women, though, it was an abrupt end to their sorority memberships; the stars of the video were asked by the group's national chapter to deactivate their status, or "voluntarily" leave. By choosing to appear in an Internet video, earning $50 each, these women inadvertently endangered their member status, due to behavior considered "unbecoming" of their sorority. The national chapter of the sorority asked the women to deactivate -- not for their appearance in the video, but for singing a made-up sorority song on tape, as singing such songs (although the "shower song" was not even official, much less secret) in public is an explicit breach of the group's rules. After reading about this sordid sorority affair in the DP, I did what any normal Penn student trying to avoid studying for finals would have done. I went to the Web site. I mentally prepared myself for big-time female flesh as I embarked on my "virgin" journey into the World Wide Web of pornography. (Because of severe emotional scarring, I try not to count the few pornographic greeting cards a "clever" friend chose to send me freshman year -- signed with my roommate's e-mail address in the "from" box rather than his own. For those of you looking to create an uncomfortable living situation, there's the way to do it.) Though my vivid imagination had conjured up scenes of inexplicable raunchiness, when the the short film ended, I was unimpressed, and, unbelievably enough, downright bored. The women in the video weren't doing anything lewd or pornographic at all. In fact, I could have probably seen more offensive behavior on TeleTubbies. Fully clothed, they were dared to kiss each other, close-mouthed, for five seconds (the women, not the TeleTubbies; though that might have been more interesting). They showered in bathing suits together. They sang a made-up song involving their sorority's name. They each made 50 bucks. Ta-da. Overall, the women just looked like they were taking up a dare and having fun. But for their personal decisions to participate in the video -- to have a little PG-13 fun -- they were essentially kicked out of their sorority. Despite all the rules and complications surrounding this issue, the real problem with this situation is not the women's behavior. It's not the singing of a song that mentioned their sorority's name. Yes, perhaps their selling out so cheap was somewhat stupid . (Hopefully, these women weren't in Wharton; if they were, Wharton may kick them out too for the "unbecoming" behavior of selling out so cheap. Wharton, please don't; these women need a negotiation class.) The real problem here? These women were kicked out of a national group because they were acting of their own free will. While the womens' action of singing a song that included their sorority's name may have been the "official" reason they were asked to deactivate, anyone can see that the real problem voiced by the national chapter was the women's "unbecoming" behavior, not the song-singing. There are several big questions that come out of this scandal. Why are thees women's choices not OK? Do people have to sacrifice their own free will to a group when they join it? Do people have to mold their own choices to the group they're in? These issues are a lot more disturbing than a couple of women prancing around in their bathing suits. While their participation in the video wasn't the smartest idea in the world, it certainly wasn't the dumbest, either. Perhaps it's my non-Greek status that makes the picture foggy for me. I just don't understand why their personal decisions to participate in a video should alienate them from a national group that prides itself on providing community for women while celebrating individuality. In this case, the national chapter's decision to encourage the women to deactivate doesn't seem to be doing much of either. To me, that's the only sordid part of this whole story. That, I suppose, and the realization that people shower while wearing bathing suits. And to think, all these year's I've been showering naked. Maybe I'm the fool.
Christmas or Hanukkah. Pick one or the other. Christmas is the day of Jesus Christ's birth. His life was conceived through the Immaculate Conception of Mary, he was born in a stable and the three Magi visited him upon his birth. Jesus' birth demarcates an important moment both religiously and historically, as his life would forever alter the world's concept of religion and ideology. Hanukkah, on the other hand, is a historical holiday that celebrates the victory of Judah and the Maccabees over Antiochus and the Greeks. Oil that was expected to burn for only one day in the synagogue burned for eight days instead. This miracle of light is symbolically remembered through the traditional lighting of the hanukkiah, a special nine-branch candelabra, which is only used on the eight nights of Hanukkah. This "miracle" evolved from the Talmud, rather than true historic events, and has since been incorporated into popular celebrations. What do these two holidays have in common? Besides a mad dash to buy the latest Playstation games for thankless 8-year-olds, the holidays' appearance in December and the propensity of mothers to buy "sensible sweaters" for children who would rather wear T-shirts, these holidays don't have much in common. No matter how hard commercial America tries, I simply can't be convinced that parthenogenesis and war are the same thing. But greeting card companies and malls across America feel differently. When December rolls around, so too does "Hanukkristmas," the only holiday to date which urges people to celebrate both holidays with unspecific, politically correct zeal rather than staying true to their own religious beliefs. PCness has ravaged our country to the point that people are no longer able to celebrate one holiday without instantly being reminded of the other. Take an online card I recently saw: Santa and a caricature of a Hasidic rabbi holding a hanukkiah speed across the screen on a motorcycle to the music of "Flight of the Bumblebee." Another one: Santa holding a Christmas tree and a hanukkiah, with the subtitle, "Happy Whichever!" And the last, my personal favorite: Jesus in the stable playing dreidel to the music "Blame It on the Bossa Nova" while sitting next to a plate of Christmas cookies and latkes. Across the religions, I think this last card warrants a hefty interfaith "oy." Understandably, displays and greeting cards that combine Hanukkah dreidels and Christmas trees into a montage are meant to spread the holiday cheer rather than create divisive holiday jeers. While the intention of mall displays and interreligious greeting cards is to spread the holiday spirit in a politically correct and inoffensive way, what they succeed in doing more often is blurring the line between the two holidays, creating a mixture of Hanukkah and Christmas which inevitably belittles the meaning and importance of each holiday. What can cards showing Jesus eating latkes possibly achieve other than screwing up the impressionable young minds of children who missed the Christmas lesson in Sunday school or the Hanukkah class in Hebrew School? And don't even get me started on "Hanukkah Harry" and the "Hanukkah Bush." While these cards and gestures attempt to be cute about how the two holidays really aren't all that different, they miss the point of each holiday completely and end up cheapening historical and religious events in favor of commercial humor and political correctness. Beyond the gift-giving -- a tradition largely adopted by Jews from the Christian Magi -- the only real idea these two holidays have in common is miracles. Jesus' miraculous conception marks a event that can't be explained by science, and the miracle of the oil lasting for "eight days" -- as explained in the Talmud -- is just one of the many miracles of Jewish history. But Christmas remains a primarily spiritual and religious holiday for Christians, and Hanukkah a historical one for Jews, rather than spiritual. In fact, Christmas is one of the most religiously significant focal points of the Christian year, while Hanukkah is a comparatively insignificant note on the calendar. Its value is heightened only because it shares December with Christmas. These two celebrations are very different, and each one is special for its own reasons. These differences should not be eradicated. If America is truly to be a diverse place, we should be able to appreciate, illuminate and celebrate each holiday's uniqueness, each by the glow of its own light.
A couple of weeks ago, it seemed I would experience a run-of-the-mill, regular, no-frills Saturday night at Penn. When I saw a random girl's bare nipples, though, all that changed. My night suddenly wasn't all that average. Like every weekend at Penn, fraternity and house parties ran up and down each block, loud music with a pulsing techno beat echoed off campus, students shivered as they trekked across windy Superblock and girls in black pants watched boys in identical Abercrombie shirts eat mouthfuls of pizza at Allegro's. The boys grunted in appreciation of the pizza, and the girls shrieked at one another (at high decibel levels usually only associated with the screams of dying rabbits) about how cold they were in their tube tops and how they should've worn their leather pants. A guy and a girl screamed through tears as they completed their breakup between Delancey and Pine streets. There was sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. It seemed as if it would be just another weekend night at Penn -- and it probably would've been if I hadn't stepped into one of the fraternity parties on Walnut. As I walked into one room, feeling the pulsing techno beat begin to shatter my rib cage, I looked up, and there they were before my eyes, like overripe melons zealously thrust into a visitor's face in a Moroccan outdoor market: bare naked breasts. Dancing on a table, a girl had lifted up her sweater and bra to reveal to all those present her bare -- and rather cold, I might add -- breasts. For many of us in the room, it was one of our proudest moments as members of the Ivy League. Fair Harvard may have her crimson, Old Yale her colors, too, but for dear old Pennsylvania, we've got gazongas, too. What I and dozens of others experienced that night was a clear case of what one writer once defined as "overshare" -- when people share too much about themselves with people who aren't particularly interested, or when people share information with random people that is inappropriate for the situation. This topless dancer -- someone should tell her she can get paid for that at Wizzard's -- was probably drunk, making her innocent of the crime of conscious overshare. However, her decision to show more than people want to see or know brings to light a problem that plagues Penn: Too Much Information. All over the United States, people are sharing simply too much. My father, a dentist, recently asked a patient how she was doing. She replied with graphic detail describing a medical problem unrelated to her teeth. A friend of mine recently met up with a girl to get some class notes. The girl proceeded to tell my friend how she was in a huge rush because she had to go to her therapist to talk about her feelings about her mother's affair with her family doctor. And I personally realized I had a problem with overshare as I told a group of friends about my toe infection. (Arguably, my sharing this with the entire DP readership is an even greater manifestation of my point.) Granted, this is the Information Age, and if we're embracing information about everything else, why not about each other's personal lives, too? Unfortunately, the Information Age has guided us to a forked road -- great amounts of valuable information on one side, and great amounts of unnecessary information on the other. Not only are we receiving enough information through the Internet to figure out how to assemble a bomb, we are personally willing to give away more information about ourselves than we should -- and to people who don't necessarily want it. It might be time to take the road less traveled by: the road of careful discretion. It just might make all the difference. Can there ever be an end to the dreaded Too Much Information on Penn's campus? Will there be a day when students will not lift up their shirts in front of other students, and man again shall not know overshare? Only time -- and students' discretion -- will tell. But for the meantime, maybe it's time to keep our breasts in our shirts, our infected toes in our shoes and our excessive personal information to ourselves.
You have a paper due tomorrow that you haven't started. You haven't even done any research. And it has to be 10 to 15 pages. Frantic, you search online for information about your subject to see if you can throw something mildly presentable together in the next 12 hours. But in looking for that information, you find something entirely different -- term papers bought and sold online. And there's one about your subject. By simply typing in your e-mail address and credit card number, all your problems could be solved within two hours. What do you do? Perhaps you remember signing something like this: "I have agreed to abide by the provisions of the Code of Academic Integrity and I certify that I have complied with the Code of Academic Integrity in taking this examination or preparing for this assignment." Sound familiar? This is what most professors ask us to sign at the end of our exam blue books. Usually, most of us just sign it and move on with our sweaty palms and chewed pens to take our exams, not giving it a second thought. But clearly, professors at Penn have been taking it quite seriously. One professor even said at the beginning of a course this semester, "If you don't follow these regulations, you'll be under penalty of death. And I will follow through on that." (They never mentioned that on the admissions video.) With the accessibility of papers online, getting closer to that academic guillotine has never been so easy. Having read a classified ad in the DP last week promoting a Web site that offers to buy and sell term papers online -- does that seem stupid to anyone else? -- I decided to investigate. The Web sites I browsed through usually had the same format: Cheesy names like "GeniusPapers" or "FastPapers," costs from $5 to $14.95 a page -- depending on speed and quality -- and sample papers demonstrating how "excellent" their work is. To find out if these papers would actually work, I bought -- excuse me, brought -- a paper on Macbeth to English Professor Peter Stallybrass, who teaches the introductory Shakespeare class; a paper on The Great Gatsby to English Professor Al Filreis; a paper on Kate Chopin's The Awakening to English Professor Joseph Dimuro; and a paper on Roman paintings to Art History Professor Larry Silver. They seemed less than pleased. Professor Stallybrass read the paper on Macbeth and commented: "[This paper] does everything I try to get students to avoid in a paper. It tries to deal with a very big topic (Aristotle's views on tragedy) in a very general way -- and the result is unsurprisingly a string of cliches. The writer has only one point to make and s/he makes it again and again and again." He summed up the paper best when he says: "It's one great achievement to say nothing -- at length.... The paper is a disaster." I think he didn't like it. Professor Filreis didn't seem thrilled by the paper "analyzing" Gatsby. "The essay is superficial," he said. "It is a typical 'B+' paper at the level of high-school English." Worse yet, Filreis says, "no student at Penn who wrote in this way -- making no references to language as language, writing only about 'themes' -- would do very well with such a paper." Similarly, Professor Dimuro said: "All this paper wants to do is talk in a very general way about marriage in the 1990s, which reduces a brilliant literary text to something like a segment of Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus." Having read the Roman paintings paper, Professor Silver concluded: "It is an honest summary and a useful precis -- if one were using it as a Cliff's Notes study aid. Of course, submitted as a student's original work for a class, it is something else again. The only academic sin is plagiarism (or misrepresentation). "Whoever wrote this used his/her sources ably, though certainly did not provide any level of analysis in this rather brief paper. Anyone using that student's summary as his/her own here is as guilty of misrepresentation and unauthorized replication as those Napster downloaders." Touche.
On Monday night, I watched eight nearly naked men in bikini Speedos gyrate, pulsate and flex. They danced, they thrusted, they stripped off all garments -- except for their Speedos -- and flirted with the audience. It was a night of passion. Of sweat. Of hard work. Of sex appeal. Of bodies so carved they seemed to be the living embodiments of the Greek Adonis. It was a night to pulsate and gyrate to your heart's content. Not having seen a whole lot of gyrating in class that day, I decided to go to Zellerbach for the Mr. and Ms. Penn bodybuilding contest. After all, a little bit of healthy spectator gyrating and flexing never hurt anyone. I had always thought of bodybuilding contests as disgusting displays of over-muscled bodies built up on steroids and arrogance. But with the excitement of a pygmy marmoset in heat, I was determined to have the contest prove or disprove my understanding of bodybuilding competitions. It was a duel to the death. After pulling a muscle of my own lugging the exercise bike that no one ever used to the basement, and then eating a dinner composed of the four crucial food groups -- fat, grease, oil and starch -- my housemate and I left for the contest. It somehow seemed appropriate that we would be watching rather than participating. The contest began with eight men with eerily waxed and tanned bodies posing and flexing their muscles for the audience. This was where my nausea began. Friends screamed support, whistling, clapping and using megaphones to cheer for the contestants. Parents politely smiled and crouched in their chairs as they watched their sons, almost as naked as they had been at birth, display their sculpted bodies with reckless abandon. Not having pranced around nearly naked before a crowd since I was three and trying to avoid a bath, I was impressed. The contest looked like a bizarre cross between Star Search and MTV's Spring Break. With bodies as slippery as butter and as smooth as the Guereza hairless monkey of the tropics, the competitors proudly displayed their sculpted bodies. Minutes after the competition began, I started pinching my own fat to project how long it would take for me to get totally toned (10, maybe 20 years, I concluded). Twenty minutes later, I popped two Pepto-Bismols to calm the bile rising in my throat. No matter how much fat I pinched or how much Pepto I took, though, the truth was undeniable: The sleek athletes had won me over. Though I found their irregularly pronounced musculature repulsive, I couldn't help it -- I was impressed. I had never seen such toned people in my life. Trying not to get too depressed about my own hardly fat-free body, I left the competition in awe. Then I ate some cookies in honor of the bodybuilders. As nauseous as the foreign, freakishly muscled bodies had made me feel -- there's hope for all the men out there who don't go to the gym all day; not having an overly toned body can sometimes be more attractive than muscles -- I was won over, just like Alanis Morissette, in spite of me. It wasn't a contest about arrogance or steroids, as I had thought; it was about self-confidence and endurance. The contestants' willpower, dedication and hard work amazed me, because I knew that I would have had none in the same situation. No matter how repulsed or amazed we are by waxed, overly sculpted bodies, the Mr. and Ms. Penn Contest offers much more than a chance to see classmates nearly naked. Beneath its beauty-contest exterior, it represents the dedication, hard work and perseverance valued in all fields on Penn's campus. For this, the participants deserve a lot of credit in my book. After all, as a student sitting behind me said, "You've got to have balls to pose in front of 900 people to the Superman theme music."
For 14 years, my family saved cardboard shoeboxes. After throwing out the crinkled tissue paper, putting our shoes in our closets and fighting over the Archie comics that our local shoe store handed out, my three siblings and I would go to the basement to shove the shoeboxes carelessly into the closet. It was where all good shoeboxes went to die -- the Shoebox Burial Ground. Unlike the trash or the recycling bins at the town dump, the sacred closet offered its inhabitants a second lifetime, a chance to make a difference in this topsy-turvy world. Only when sent to the basement could the useless cardboard goods of our house be resurrected. It was from here that the shoeboxes were finally informed of God's greater purpose for them on Earth. They were to become dioramas. Shoeboxes weren't the only materials used. Toilet paper rolls became binoculars for reports on Christopher Columbus. Leftover coffee grounds were used as dye for realistic-looking Constitution reproductions. And, of course, sugar cubes were crucial to my personal reconstruction of the Parthenon. (It was eaten by a fellow classmate who foolishly failed to realize that epoxy glue was not edible as he had his stomach pumped hours later. The doctors felt he was delusional when he cited ancient Greece as the cause of his illness.) Years of dioramas, mobiles, oral reports and video projects mark our collective childhood. As children of the '80s, we have suffered through a lot of things that third-graders today don't have to endure: slap bracelets, Tony Danza, Milli Vanilli TrapperKeepers and Garbage Pail Kids. As of early October, though, there's just one more thing that can put even more salt in the "everything-always-gets-better-when-we-leave" wound. Homework. As a result of a school board ruling earlier this month in New Jersey, kids aren't allowed to have the one thing that unifies elementary school students across the ages. These kids aren't allowed to get homework the way we did -- so farewell, Shoebox Burial Ground. In Piscataway, N.J., the school board limited nightly homework and prohibited teachers from grading their students' assignments. According to a recent article by Kate Zernike in The New York Times, the amount of homework prescribed for students has varied over the years. In the 1930s, homework was limited or banned (in California by state law) because it was declared "child labor." In the 1950s, educators feared there wasn't enough homework and that America would lose the "space race" as a result. The homework rules in Piscataway have been changed for an entirely different reason: It's not the students who are complaining, but the parents. Point blank, they're just sick and tired of coming home to help make another goddamn diorama. Even for the parents, it's just too much. As educators grapple with the issue of how much homework is too much and how much is not enough, it's hard not to wonder about what will happen to students who don't have to save their cardboard shoeboxes. On the upside, it is the parents who don't want the homework, not the children who are balking at the challenge. On the downside, the parents' desire to get a free pass out of helping their kids with homework because of their own work-related anxiety may set a bad example for students. Worse yet, without the endless projects, the drilling of information and the interactive, experiential learning that happens when parents and children work together on sugar-cube models of the Parthenon, will students be able to absorb and learn as much as they have in the past? If I may quote the sages, in The Simpsons, Homer Simpson says to Maggie, "If something is hard, honey, it's just not worth doing." Is it not worth helping our children with dioramas just because it's hard? Is this the final dumbing down of America? At this point, it's no longer about Styrofoam planets and yarn. It's about America's educational future.
Next week I will be receiving my Ph.D. in nuclear physics. Please muffle your laughter. I had spent much time deliberating about my decision to enroll in a Ph.D. program, as most undergraduates would. After all, earning a doctorate requires intensive study, a commitment to scholarship, five or more years of your life and often a subsequent lifetime spent searching for professorships in places other than Iowa, Kentucky and Guam. Despite the fact that I never even took physics in high school -- opting for a longer lunch period instead (yet another student slips through the cracks of American education) -- or college, I was determined to get my Ph.D. in nuclear physics no matter what. The thought made me tremble with uncontrollable excitement. It was also enough to make my parents laugh hysterically to the point of tears, recalling how in the fourth grade I had been put in a math class of four people in which I was the only native English speaker. (Yes, I'm serious.) Ironically, perhaps, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to recognize that my lack of math and science experience might pose a barrier to the fulfillment of my dream. Just when I began to wallow in the deepest pits of despair, lamenting my inability to add or subtract, the mellifluous ding-dong of my e-mail box receiving a message jolted me out of my unhappiness. Subject: "Dr. (Your Name) Phd." It was the answer to my prayers. God had been listening. It was time for me to get myself an edjimicashun. "Obtain a prosperous future, money earning power, and the admiration of all," it began. "Diplomas from prestigious non-accredited universities based on your present knowledge and life experience. "No required tests, classes, books, or interviews. No one is turned down. Confidentiality assured. Phd in any field you desire." Finally, I had the opportunity to get a degree from a prestigious non-accredited university! Was this program not the academic messiah I had been longing for? No work or application required? No uncertainty? And in any field I desired? As quickly as one could say supercolliding superconductor, I dialed the hotline. But something seemed awry with the prestigious non-accredited university from which I would soon garner "money earning power." The answering machine message insisted several times that I not forget to leave my area code first, rather than after my phone number. Then it reminded me to make sure that I leave my phone number, after it had told me that I needed to leave the area code first. I couldn't help but reflect for a moment. I was confused. This hardly seemed like the place that would give me a "prosperous future" and the "admiration of all." My new university could hardly create a coherent answering machine message. Even my 6-year-old cousin can do that. I felt defeated. But then, the next day, I was called back by a young man speaking broken English. "This is good time call? One registrar here, good English speaker. Hold now?" Holding now, I waited. And waited. And waited. Then I was hung up on. This is the story of my life. Sadly, the sun had seemed to set on my easy, anxiety-free Ph.D. empire. There really is no such thing as a free lunch. Or degrees free from tension, despair, hard work, blood, sweat and tears. Wishing for a Ph.D. had made me not only appreciate the dream of higher education, but also understand the reality. I am destined to actually work for my future degrees. Maybe that's not such a bad thing. In the meantime, though, I'll settle for paying my $25 and getting my doctorate in nuclear physics from another online scam. From then on, it'll be Dr. Horn, to you, bub.