Emily Hoeven

How do you say goodbye to a column that you’ve been writing for two years? How do you wrap it up, sum it up, just like that, when there is still so much more left to say, to reflect on, to think about?

When I took my first campus tour of Penn as a high school student, I fell in love with Locust Walk.

I was struck by something Alec Baldwin said near the end of his talk at Penn on Friday. When asked what advice he would give to college students, Baldwin immediately replied that we ought to travel, to explore the world when we are single, young and free.

In my Africana Studies class, we talk a lot about perspective: how things that seem acceptable or normal to a society at a given point in history can often seem incomprehensible to that same society several generations later.

I was watching one of my brother’s baseball games over spring break when a parent asked me why I wasn’t living it up in Florida or Puerto Vallarta or some other tropical location with my friends.

If you type the word “expectations” into your search bar, the first suggestion that comes up is “expectations versus reality.” The search yields endless memes that attest to the vast discrepancy between what we expect the result of something to be and its actual result.

GROUP THINK is the DP’s round table section, where we throw a question at the columnists and see what answers stick.

GROUP THINK is the DP’s round table section, where we throw a question at the columnists and see what answers stick.

Sometimes I feel like the most tangible thing I’ve gotten from my college education is a broader and more refined understanding of just how many things are wrong with the world, how many terrible atrocities have been committed in the past and continue to be committed, how many people are suffering in many different ways.

Maybe it’s because I’m graduating from Penn soon, but I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on how I came to be here in the first place.