Rebecca Rosner: Fulfilling your pledge on Saturdays

Confession: I lied on my Penn application.

Now before you get all excited and start calling the admissions department, let me explain. It's not that I embellished my list of activities or altered my SAT scores. All I did was innocently write an essay about what I saw myself doing in my four years at Penn. I wrote about meeting new friends (so far, so good), taking interesting and thought-provoking courses (still looking) and participating in all the Penn events.

The example I gave was football games. I told the admissions staff that I planned to be at every home game, cheering on the team with my other equally enthusiastic and spirited classmates. It didn't matter that I didn't really like football all that much -- I saw how much fun college football was on TV and figured that I'd join in on the fun, too.

Four years later, I still haven't sat through an entire football game.

College students across the country are back to school this week and college football is in full swing. At schools like Notre Dame and the University of Texas, every Saturday afternoon is football day. Students, regardless of how wiped out they may be from the previous night's partying, go into full gear for football, with painted faces and team chants.

And it's not just the students. Entire towns come alive for college football. At Penn State, so many alumni and fans come out for the games that every Saturday afternoon, State College becomes one of the biggest cities in Pennsylvania.

At these colleges and universities, you can wake up at 9 a.m. on a Saturday, throw on your school sweatshirt and walk out the door to a school full of students and alums who are just plain happy to be at your school and share in its spirit. Hours before the game even begins, everyone celebrates. Tailgaters offer food to poor college students. Fans start up cheers at random. Alums swap stories about when they were in school and how that was the team's best year ever.

And for the most driven among us, this alumni network can't be undervalued -- wouldn't it be easier to approach them for career suggestions when they are sitting next to you at a game than when they are in suits and ties at stuffy receptions?

While we are clearly "Not Penn State," I can't help but admire their passion. At Penn, we return to school and are almost immediately thrust into classes. Our Saturday afternoons are too often filled with homework or meetings. We're not an all-work school, though. Of course we know how to have a great time. We just don't know how to do that as a school.

Remember last year's Spring Fling? It rained. So we all stayed inside. We saw that no one else was willing to get wet and, after all, Fling isn't Fling if no one is there. At another school, everyone would have seized the opportunity: Fling comes once a year -- let's all go have a crazy, muddy Fling.

No one wants to be the first one to do it, whether "it" is going to a football game or eating funnel cake in the rain. I understand completely, because up until now, I've felt the same way. Clearly it must not be cool to go to football games, since no one else is there.

But now I'm a senior, and I'm starting to think that maybe we're all missing out on Penn by trying so hard to fit in at Penn. Weren't we supposed to stop caring what other people thought about us when we graduated from high school?

By choosing Penn over our safety schools, we don't necessarily have to give up the things that they offered -- namely, the spirited atmosphere and sense of togetherness. It doesn't matter that Penn State's players are being scouted by the NFL and that sometimes the most exciting thing on Franklin Field is the toast zamboni.

I know it's scary to be the first one out there, but isn't it more frightening to think that one day you'll graduate without experiencing what Penn has to offer? We only get to be in college once. So show up, paint your face, sing the Red and Blue and try not to hit anyone when you throw your toast.

Rebecca Rosner is a senior English major from Lawrenceville, N.J.

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