Zachary Noyce | A more personal Penn

It's a rough time of the semester - the calm before the storm for procrastinators like me. I still have about 70 pages of papers left before I can burn my Campus Copy bulk packs on Hill Field and perform a celebratory end-of-semester dance.

But between now and the day Penn Police pistol-whip a confession out of me for disturbing the peace, I'll face daily existential crises.

All the while, I'll wonder why on earth I decided to come to Penn.

So in order to remind myself, I went undercover on Friday. (To those of you disturbed by my lax ethics, I didn't really - I disclosed my identity to everyone I talked to).

I went on a campus tour.

There were about 10 prospective Penn students - mostly juniors in high school - on the tour I accompanied. At last year's acceptance rate, one and three-fifths of them (apologies to Dean DeTurck for the fraction) will make the cut.

If you've been following the news, though, you know that their chances are getting better.

With this year's odds, 1.64 of them would make it. All said, our leg-less, torso-less student could now have two kidneys instead of one.

Unsure of what to study and where to study it, they were all extremely impressionable. On the tour, I remembered why I came to Penn - why all of us came to Penn.

Lies.

One hundred languages? Give me a break. Raise your hand if you can name more than 30 languages taught here.

Campus safety? Don't you read this paper?

Every single person on campus will be the victim of at least a dozen crimes per semester (not including pop quizzes, last minute reading assignment changes or 3 a.m. fire alarms). Heck, my laptop has been stolen twice since I started typing this column.

Diversity? Prospective freshmen probably don't know that at Penn, that means we have some students who aren't from the Northeast (about 200, I believe).

In all seriousness though, the rose-tinted glasses that universities strap on prospective students may help attract some. But we truly fall in love with Penn when we take off the glasses.

It wasn't long after I stepped on campus that I realized that the real Penn was very different from the one the tour guides showed me.

My tour guide downplayed the drinking on campus, but it was immediately obvious that there weren't many places at Penn for a dry Mormon from Utah.

And while the University brochures promised that my professors and I would be BFF's, I rarely saw any of them outside of class.

But I still found my place. We all found our places.

And that's what all of these prospective students need to hear more of. They don't need to know how many a cappella groups Penn has or how many majors the University offers.

They need to hear the personal stories - they need to picture themselves at Penn.

Case in point: the toast tradition.

Now I've heard so many versions that I can't keep them straight, but most official Penn folks will tell you that it started when Franklin Field banned alcohol.

But the real story is even more interesting than the apocryphal one.

Greer Cheeseman, the current director of the Penn Band and a 1977 Penn graduate, was the first to throw toast at Franklin Field. Recalling a scene from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, he decided to throw some crisped bread Penn's way during his senior year and the idea caught on.

That story is a lot more meaningful. Instead of just giving the impression that Penn sounds like a quirky and fun place, there's a real message to this story: "Come to Penn. You don't need to know where you'll end up in life, but 30 years from now, something you do here might still matter."

Zachary Noyce is a College junior from Salt Lake City, Utah. His e-mail is noyce@dailypennsylvanian.com. The Stormin' Mormon appears Mondays.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.