Lisa Zhu

The conventional formula for a senior goodbye piece (whether it takes the form of a DP column or a commencement speech) goes something like this: 1.) Nostalgically list several fond, quintessentially-Penn memories-"I remember getting wasted at Smokes/being pelted at Hey Day/pissing on Ben Franklin's statue ." 2.

I'm no Fresh Prince, but come May 18, I too will be saying goodbye to the city in whose shadow I've been living for the past 20 years. Since my parents to Philadelphia in the late 1980s, parts of the city have changed a great deal: The Comcast Center tower has nestled itself next to the Mellon Bank building and the Liberty Place skyscrapers.

The most recent turn of events in the never-ending Philadelphia casino saga - a new location for the proposed Foxwoods casino - has the city going all in on the developer's demands. At a Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board meeting last week, Foxwoods revealed that they were now planning to move into the former Strawbridge & Clothier building at 8th & Market streets.

Many Penn students (read: haters) tend to harbor a certain disregard for our peer institutions, as exemplified by basketball fans' over-enthusiastic trash-talking at basketball games and the obligatory groan-plus-rolling-of-the-eyes reaction whenever anyone mentions the word Princeton.

For longtime Philly resident Tamara Ali, William Penn High School changed her life. A 2000 graduate of the North Philadelphia school, Ali participated in its communications and journalism program, which at the time was one of the best in the city. "I transferred to William Penn from Strawberry Mansion, which was in a bad neighborhood," she said.

In late January, Mayor Michael Nutter announced that the City was contemplating raising taxes in order to close the $1.4-billion budget deficit Philadelphia faces over the next five years. A week ago, he and his team officially unveiled a projected budget and five-year plan intended to close the gap and mitigate the effects of the recession.

Last week, as I waited on the corner of N. 8th and Lehigh for the No. 47 SEPTA bus that would take me back to Center City, I was struck by the depressing, sporadic gaps of land every few houses. The entire street was pockmarked with vacant lots on which scrubby brown grass competed for space with broken glass, crushed beer cans and discarded candy wrappers.

A week after Penn's outbreak of meningitis, things seem to have finally calmed down. Social gatherings have resumed as usual, the collective paranoia over sharing drinks and food has diminished and the three patients are well on their road to recovery. With the incident almost behind us, now may be a good time to review some of the major takeaways from this latest health scare.

If you're a junior or senior currently scrambling for a job, you might as well pack up your bags right now and see what the economy looks like on Mars. But if you're an inmate in the Philadelphia Prison System scheduled for release in the next few months, you may actually be in luck.