Penn's real front door

Penn works hard. Penn plays harder. That was seemingly the message of New Student Orientation 2005, which featured both reading group discussions of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and a school-sponsored toga party in the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Of course, a Penn toga party is no mere Delta House affair. U.S. News and World Report ranked our university fourth, so its toga party must be bigger and better, larger and more lavish than those of lower-ranked institutions.

And so it was.

Two Hollywood-sized klieg lights greeted students at the museum entrance, piercing the dark night with crisscrossing halogen beams. Inside, platters of chips, cookies and brownies and a cart filled with ices and ice cream awaited bedsheet-bedecked freshmen. A DJ invited attendees to grind and dance with abandon-among the ruins of ancient civilizations whose very excesses led to their downfalls.

Ironic?

Maybe, but to focus on irony is to miss the point of the toga party and the countless other huge NSO events: "An Evening at the Philadelphia Museum of Art," the "Library Social," the "Bookstore Social," "PennFest 2005," "Comedy Night at Irvine" and the "Convocation Dessert Reception." These affairs showed the degree to which Penn was willing to expend money, time and effort to ensure that its incoming students immediately fell in love with the University.

Rent out an entire art museum and supplant its docents with DJs? Pay two professional comedians to take the stage at Irvine and poke fun at ethnic stereotypes? Why not, NSO planners must have asked, if it will endear freshmen to dear ol' Penn?

That's a noble question, and one has to give the NSO planners credit for all they did to welcome new students in style. But perhaps their labors were unnecessary.

Heck, I'd already fallen for Penn, and I didn't even attend most NSO events -- or, at least, the official ones. You see, I had a fever and a cold for most of the first week, and while my peers danced the night away in bedsheets, I merely rolled around in them, trying desperately to fall asleep.

Yet while I never made it to any of Penn's NSO events, I did manage to attend a few of my own. Like the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania WaitingFest. This amusing activity involved sitting in the hospital emergency room for three hours (since Student Health is closed on Sunday), hoping to see an actual doctor. You may be wondering what made the Fest so fun. Well, for one, I got a cool HUP bracelet imprinted with my name and vital info.

Better than the bracelet, though, were the fellow Penn students I met in the ER. There was the freshman who needed someone to remove the stitches in his head; the sophomore who looked dazed and confused (and the four girls who had brought him); the other sophomore who might have had a hernia. We all sat there together, each one of us as clueless as the next about when a doctor would show us in.

These peers could not have been nicer, asking me about my NSO and wondering aloud if there was anything they could do to help me. At a time when I just wanted to be outside with the rest of my class, the sophomores and juniors I met in the ER actually made me feel good about feeling lousy. At least I was meeting new people, I thought.

To be sure, my NSO events didn't come with the same fancy desserts that they served at Convocation or the art museum. But a sophomore from down the hall did make me tea after hearing I was sick. And another student who lives three floors below me did microwave and deliver me a bowl of chicken soup.

Which brings me back to the real NSO. In January 2000, the Council of Undergraduate Deans voted to add three days to NSO, making it a full week.

NSO is "the front door through which hundreds of students enter the University," said then-Deputy Provost and CUD chairman Peter Conn. "We have to make it as stimulating and rich as possible."

Conn was clearly right about NSO's importance as the "front door" through which Penn welcomes its freshman. But for me, no toga party could be as rich as that bowl of soup and cup of tea.

Gabriel Oppenheim is a College freshman from Scarsdale, N.Y. His e-mail address is rg@sas.upenn.edu.Opp-Ed appears on Fridays.

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