While most students were saying goodbye to their dorms last Tuesday, College junior Joshua Bennett was being welcomed into a new room - one further to the East. Bennett was one of a handful of performers invited to celebrate poetry, music and spoken word in the East Room of the White House with the first family and about 200 guests.

And here I thought the last piece I'd write for this newspaper would be about meningitis - it's sort of scary how quickly I can spell "meningococcal" at this point. But when I was asked to write a goodbye column, my mind immediately went to the first time I stepped foot inside the office that would basically become my home for the next four years.

The Black Students League is trying to help some students avoid skyrocketing textbook prices next semester. The group organized a textbook drive May 6-13 to help give books to Penn students struggling with financial aid. "Our goal is to help out classmates who have to go through hardships to get textbooks," said College sophomore and BSL community outreach chairwoman Jolecia Flournory.

The days of Penn being a national basketball powerhouse may be gone, but give the Quakers a frisbee and a field, and they can compete with the best in the country. For the first time since 1996, the women's Club Ultimate Frisbee team is headed to Nationals.

As graduation approaches, I've been thinking quite a bit about things I have not done. It was sometime while watching the impossibly talented members of the Excelano Project perform several weeks ago that I realized I hadn't accomplished or seen 90 percent of what I told myself I would as a dewy-eyed freshmen.

Sophomore Darryll Oliver sat out much of this winter's indoor track season with an ankle injury, and struggled with the flu last week. Yet if you watched the 800-meter race at Saturday and Sunday's Outdoor Heptagonal Championships, you certainly couldn't tell.

Eric Schmidt, Google chairman and chief executive officer, will deliver the commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania's University-wide ceremonies that begin at 10 a.m., Monday, May 18, on Franklin Field, 233 S. 33rd St. Yunus will deliver the address at the Wharton School's Graduate Division ceremony at 1 p.

"You. I'm glad to see you here," Cindy Shmerler said as she pointed directly at me. I was confused. It took a moment for me to realize why Cindy had singled out me. It was The Daily Pennsylvanian's annual Marquez Conference in the fall of 2007 and Cindy, serving as a panelist, and I were the only two females sitting in the room for the sports writing session.

Approximately 2,000 seniors graduate this weekend. Hopefully, we at the DP have had a relationship with most of you - to all of our readers and sources, we admire and salute your accomplishments. You're truly extraordinary. But we've gotten to know a handful of you especially well because you worked at the DP.

The rippling effects of the current economic recession have surfaced at Penn again, this time to the benefit of summer session enrollment.

PhillyCarShare recently announced that it has added a monthly fee for its services. According to an e-mail sent to customers, the company began to "streamline" their services into a monthly plan on May 1. Members who pay the $15-dollar monthly fee will get "the lowest PhillyCarShare hourly rates" - from $3.

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Student Activities Council will fund some political and religious groups for the first time in the upcoming year. Budgets for the Penn Democrats and PRISM, an interfaith religious group, were both approved at SAC's annual meeting on April 22. Though political and religious groups have historically been denied University funding, the issue became particularly salient when political groups spent a large amount of money funding events during the election last year.

Updated May 8, 6:41 p.m. The CDC has confirmed two cases of swine influenza in Philadelphia. Neither of the two patients became sick enough to be hospitalized, however, and both are recovering, according to the Philadelphia Department of Health. Nine probable cases of swine influenza have now been reported in Philadelphia, though the infection has not affected the Penn community.

Picture this: The University of Pennsylvania, fall 1951. Harry Truman is the president of the United States, we are in the midst of war with Korea and women are not allowed to sit on chairs in Houston Hall. Also that fall, my grandfather entered Penn as a freshman, just shortly after the University stopped using informal quotas to limit the number of Jews who were accepted.

Former Wharton undergraduate Irina Malinovskaya was released from prison Friday after serving a sentence for manslaughter, according to John Painter, a spokesman for the Delaware Department of Corrections. Malinovskaya, 27, pleaded no contest to manslaughter in June 2008 for allegedly bludgeoning her ex-boyfriend Robert Bondar's then-girlfriend, Irina Zlotnikov, to death.

This weekend, a concerned group of Penn faculty brought experts on climate change together to inform the Penn community about the challenges and opportunities that climate science presents. The event, "Symposium: Responses, Risks and Adaptation to Climate Change," was held Friday morning and afternoon in the Chemistry building.