I understand where my friend is coming from. Part of my selfish, pre-frosh fantasies about Penn was making something more of myself, of standing out somehow in the massive crowd. I didn’t know how that would manifest or what I would do to achieve that, but I wanted to be different. I think we all did.

A feeling of too many problems to be able to affect change has begun to permeate the activism community. Too many problems and too little time. How is a student supposed to spend time contending for a cause, while also keeping up with school work?

I should be able to identify as a Zionist without being called a fascist. I should also be able to criticize particular policies by the Israeli government without being anti-Zionism. As the debate stands, it’s all or nothing. It’s inaccurate and unfair to those of us who are looking for a middle ground. To put it simply, it’s unreasonable.

This pervasive notion that black people have to change their bodies is ingrained in our society and makes it difficult to recognize how external forces have been internalized. Whether this self-loathing comes in the form of using makeup or chemicals to brighten skin tones or using heat or treatments to straighten hair, the goal has been to meet a standard of beauty that elevates one group of people and simultaneously demeans another.

People who say they are colorblind miss the point of cultural acceptance. Yes, you should not make assumptions about me or treat me unkindly because of the color of my skin. But you should also not strip me of the rich backgrounds that have shaped my life and made me who I am today.

For me, that’s the most troubling part of flipped classrooms — the idea that, with all the great faculty Penn has, they don’t spend time teaching. A freshman in an active learning Math 103 course told me that she is required to watch online lectures. Once she is actually in class, her professor puts her into groups and gives them worksheets.

I hope that I will love my child the instant I know they are mine — as my parents felt with me. I will love an adopted child with the same deep, irrational and unconditional love my parents have given me. Just like my parents, I will then begin the lifelong process of getting to know who they really are, and loving them not just as my child, but as their own person.

When it comes to student government, Penn does not have a participation problem. Participation with Penn Student Government has undoubtedly improved over the past few years, from higher voter turnout to increased student participation in various appointed committees. Penn does, however, have an ownership problem.

Normandy, Iwo Jima, Pusan, Khe Sanh, Fallujah, Kamdesh. For some, these names might not mean much. Maybe they have seen them in history books or have heard the names before. Yet for those who fought, those names and many others are forever branded in their memories. They recall the desperation and the sounds of battle, and most of all, those they fought beside. It is a brotherhood that runs deeper than any fraternity, one that traverses time and location. It is a bond forged in blood and fire.

We’ve lost 22 soldiers today, but not on a conventional battlefield. Instead, that is the number of US military veterans that the Veterans Administration estimates die by suicide every day.

Luckily enough, after three years of immersion in “Penn culture,” I have good news to share with any worried underclassmen or compassionate, concerned outsiders who’d like to hear it. I am, in fact, capable of occupying myself with activities that will never make it onto my resume, I have never justified the time I’ve spent eating a meal with a friend by calling it networking and Fear Of Missing Sleep consistently trumps Fear Of Missing Out on my list of concerns.

Conservative behavior might have yielded an advantage in more primitive times, but today, it lends itself too easily to xenophobia, negotiation through brute force and the persecution of religious minorities.

Of course, then she would have also seen that students here spend their time on all sorts of projects and groups that have very little to do with employment prospects and that lots of people don’t think of their fraternities and sororities solely as “a gateway to the gilded Goldman life,” and that for every hard-partying social climber is some schlub in a library — and that sometimes those are even the same person. In other words, she would have found out that Penn is filled with human beings.

On behalf of the dedicated general body members and executive board of PSFA, we would like to clarify our club’s overall mission to the community at Penn and in greater Philadelphia.

We have a responsibility to take control of our futures, and that means voting for what we believe in. To vote, or not to vote, that is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to vote with ignorance or not to vote at all. This isn’t quite the dilemma that Hamlet had in mind, but as of this past Tuesday, it seems slightly more relevant.

Last week I had an appointment with a new psychiatrist, which I had made the first week of the semester back in August.

Queer and gendered narratives are stripped from the black narrative, resulting in a solely heteronormative, male, black narrative, which effectively serves as an act of erasure. We are expected to drop our identities — identities that interact in ways that open us up to violence that is largely ignored. We are expected to silence our criticisms about our treatment in order to focus our attentions on the struggles of black men.