Emily Hoeven | Our invisible legacy

Growing Pains | On the change we may not realize we're making

By Emily Hoeven 01/16/17 10:29pm

This semester will be my last one at Penn.

I recently discovered that I have accumulated enough credits to graduate a year in advance. And while I am incredibly excited about saving a year’s worth of tuition and cannot wait to see what the next phase of my life will bring, I’ve also found myself grappling with a lot of strange feelings about the idea of leaving Penn early.

It hit me the other day that I have less than five months left at Penn to finish everything that I want to finish. Less than five months to begin and complete all the different projects I’ve been itching to work on, less than five months to take advantage of as many of Penn’s resources as I possibly can. Less than five months before my preoccupations will inevitably shift from issues at Penn that I want to tackle to the issues of whatever job I’ll hold in whatever city I’ll be living in.

We all come to Penn wanting to leave our mark on this university in some way or another. We enter as wide-eyed freshmen, a little giddy at the idea of attending Penn, a little nervous about living in the dorms and meeting so many new people and trying to navigate our way around a new campus and a new city. We picture ourselves having intellectual conversations with our hallmates until the wee hours of the morning, we imagine ourselves attending parties and finding significant others and learning to drink coffee.

Yet many of us will discover, or feel, as we settle into the rhythms of Penn life, that the pre-college visions we had of collegiate life were not completely accurate. Even one of the best universities in the world has its problems — problems that we often spend significant portions of our college careers trying to expose, come to terms with and solve.

And so here I am, five months from graduation, overwhelmed with all the different things about Penn that I want to change, all the different aspects of college and adulthood that I want to address and discuss in this column. There is simply so much. And I can’t help but feel like I’m running out of space, running out of time.

But at the end of the day, this is the truth at the core of all of our college careers. Most of us only have four years at Penn in the first place. Talk to any administrator on campus about creating a brand-new initiative or altering a certain policy and you’ll discover that they conceptualize everything using a totally different time scale. They think long-term; they often use phrases like, “In the next 10 years...”

But we don’t have 10 years. We have four. We thus feel this pressing need to speed things up, accelerate processes, push, make change now. We don’t have much time to make Penn the campus we want it to be, or institute the clubs we want to institute, all while being full-time students. And this gap, between the Penn we experience and the Penn we want to create for ourselves and for the future, can be extremely frustrating and demoralizing.

At the same time, it is indisputable that the Penn we know and experience now is different from the Penn of 10, five, even two years ago, just as the Penn that others will experience two, five and 10 years in the future will be different from the one that we know now. Penn as an institution is constantly changing, and, although it’s kind of strange to think about it in this way, it will outlive us all. This transgenerational aspect of Penn can seem formidable and intimidating. How can we ever leave our mark on such an institution in four years?

Yet the fact is that we do. Even when it seems like not enough people are coming to the events we hold, or not enough people are reading the words we write, or not enough people are listening to what we say, we are nonetheless holding events, we are writing, we are speaking. We are leaving our mark.

I firmly believe that every conversation on this campus matters. Every meeting with administration. Every article that is written. We may be unable to fully conceptualize the change we are making, cannot measure its effects, but it is there. What others did before us helps us to do what we do now. And what we do now will help others to do what they will do in the future.

EMILY HOEVEN is a College senior from Fremont, Calif., studying English. Her email address is ehoeven@sas.upenn.edu. “Growing Pains” usually appears every other Tuesday.