During last semester's Reading Days, my sister came to see me, and we decided to take a weekend trip to New York.
Imagine the following scenario: You’re a club leader organizing a protest. You have an issue you care passionately about, and you’re gathering like minded students to make a public display complete with rehearsed chants and picket signs.
As the class of 2020 begins to settle into their new lives at Penn, if its members are anything like me, I’m sure that they’re feeling a complex mix of emotions at entering the first step into adulthood.
The Latest
Welcome to Penn, freshmen and transfer students. Over the next few weeks, you will have a lot of opportunities to start choosing the courses, campus spaces, and student groups that will come to define your experience here.
It’s official — the College Houses have out-TV’d my dad. As reported in a DP news article by Ray Pomponio, starting this year College House residents will get Comcast’s Xfinity On Demand streaming service included in the ever-increasing price of rent. Even my tech-happy father, who has enthusiastically upgraded our “home theater” infrastructure every few years since my birth, hasn’t quite sprung for that yet. While I am sure that College House residents will appreciate the service, I have to confess that it seems to me an extravagance.
Before coming back to Penn, I got my first professional massage. I had been saying “I need a massage” for years before actually getting one.
Before coming back to Penn, I got my first professional massage. I had been saying “I need a massage” for years before actually getting one.
Imagine the following scenario: You’re a club leader organizing a protest. You have an issue you care passionately about, and you’re gathering like minded students to make a public display complete with rehearsed chants and picket signs.
As the class of 2020 begins to settle into their new lives at Penn, if its members are anything like me, I’m sure that they’re feeling a complex mix of emotions at entering the first step into adulthood.
SHUN SAKAI is a College senior from Chestnut Hill, Mass.
Insecurity, I have found, is a dangerous force that can subtly permeate various aspects of one’s life.
She was a cosmopolitan-looking, middle-aged doctor with the kind of precisely preserved physiognomy that I imagine develops 15 years out from an Ivy League sorority.
BRAD HONG is a College freshman from Morristown, NJ.
I first saw the letter which University of Chicago Dean of Students John Ellison sent to his incoming freshman class on Twitter, a day or so before it hit the mainstream press. Scanning the first grainy photocopy, I could sense a kerfuffle in the making.
BEN CLAAR is a College sophomore from Scarsdale, N.Y.
In May, Harvard announced a historic move to enact penalties on its Final Clubs and Greek life organizations.
SHUN SAKAI is a College senior from Chestnut Hill, Mass.
The daily news updates of unlawful police shootings against black men and women has led to much hashtagged outrage: solidarity nowadays means expressing communal dissatisfaction.
Voting is a simple act of civic duty, but it is also a transformative one. Each of us joins with millions of individuals across the country to enact something--the democratic choice of our representatives--that none of us can or should do alone. Voting in a constitutional democracy not only expresses our citizenship; it also enables us together to continually re-establish something much mightier than any of us could otherwise be: a democratic republic that aspires to recognize the liberty and equality of all persons.
It’s a scene right out of a classic college film or a rose-tinted admissions propaganda leaflet — a group of college students lazing around a dorm room or lounge, late at night, arguing about politics, philosophy and the meaning of life. It probably figured, to some extent, in your high school visions of what Ivy League life would be like. I know it did in mine.
BRAD HONG is a College freshman from Morristown, NJ.
At the end of this past school year, my mom and I were talking about the ups and downs of my college experience when she asked, “Are you proud of the person you’ve become?” Although taken by surprise, my first instinct was to say yes. After all, I had finished two years of college, lived across the country from my family, survived several East Coast winters, taken stimulating courses with incredible professors and learned from and was challenged by the students around me.
Calling someone “pretty white” isn’t a measure of race, but of how much of your ethnic culture and pop culture you do not identify with, and it’s a ridiculous conflation.
