Collin Beck | Memoirs of a Penn student

The year was 2004. It was a simpler time. Usher's "Yeah!" played on the radio, you never had to worry about your drunken actions becoming a Facebook album, and Britney Spears was hot. But most importantly, I started college.

I was excited when my cab pulled up to Hill House for the first time. I'd seen photos of it on the Web site and it looked nice. But once I entered, I began to suspect the people at Housing Services might have access to Photoshop. The black floors and blue doors made Hill look like an insane asylum.

Despite the limited decor, I soon realized Hill was the best freshman dorm. Sure the Quad is nice, but the halls are always empty, while the lounges in Hill are usually full of people playing cards or studying. The sheer crappiness of Hill forces everyone to hang out together. We had to spend time outside our rooms, because at any moment a nurse might put a straitjacket on us and throw us into a padded room.

Since that first day I moved in, Penn has changed a lot.

There used to be a different food court called the Moravian Cafe where CVS is now. For whatever reason, that place closed down and workers spent the next two years building a food court in a building that was already a food court.

There also used to be a place called Triangle Diner, or Tri-Di as the cool kids called it (I'll continue to say Triangle Diner). Triangle Diner served mediocre food, but it had a huge selection of it. You could eat mediocre pancakes, while your friend chowed down on mediocre chicken wings.

Triangle Diner was eventually replaced by Tony Luke's, which soon closed because no one wanted to wait 30 minutes and pay 11 dining dollars for a cheesesteak. (Wouldn't you love to see an exchange rate between dining and real dollars? At most it'd be like 70 percent, right?)

Next to McDonald's there once was Cinemagic, a movie theater affectionately referred to as "Ghettomagic." It was a great place to go when you were tired of getting raped by The Bridge's exorbitant ticket prices and wanted to get actually raped.

During all these campus changes, I suppose I changed, too (or at least I better have for $170,000). I'm an Economics major, so most of that tuition money pretty much went toward teaching me how to maximize a utility function. I know almost nothing about unemployment, social security or the stock market.

If someone asked me what we should do about the recession, I wouldn't have a clue what to say - unless they gave me the recession's utility function, in which case I would maximize the hell out of it.

But I've learned a lot outside of class. For instance, I do not go to Penn State, it's important to call Asian people Asian instead of Chinese, and it's acceptable for guys to wear orange pants so long as their parents are rich.

I learned that if you have brown hair people will give you free crackers on Passover. I've learned how to kill cockroaches, do laundry and avoid flyers on the walk. I've also learned how to not pick up girls. I am now an expert at that.

In the end, I know I gained much more than a degree.

I look back at all the good times I had, the friends I made, and I realize my tuition money was well spent - because you can't put a price on friendship.

Believe me I tried, and it's depressing. I only have, like, 10 good friends, so the price comes out to about $17,000 per friend I made at Penn. While I may not be the coolest person in the world, I feel like I could pay people as little as $10,000 for friendship.

After all, I am a Penn graduate, and if they ever need a utility function maximized - I'm their man.

Collin Beck is a College senior from Minot, N.D. His e-mail is beck@dailypennsylvanian.com.

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