Wil Hershner | Attitude is everything

A month ago, you'd be hard-pressed to hear me give my experience at Penn a positive review.

But like most things in life, you only really appreciate something once it's truly gone. And now, situated at that cusp between "the best four years of your life" and the rest of it, I've started to realize that my own natural tendency to be miserable and deprecating aside, Penn wasn't all bad.

In fact, it might have even been better than okay.

My four years at Penn were difficult ones. When I arrived at Penn, I immediately felt like I didn't fit in.

Granted, I tend to be antisocial by nature, but I was immersed in a crowd of students constantly worrying about the future: medical school, law school, investment banking, consulting (whatever that is), et cetera. They had it all planned out: courses, internships, interviews, job, house, three kids, the works. It wasn't just ambition. It was obsession.

I lost count of the number of times I thought that Penn Admissions made a mistake in admitting me. (Of course, former Dean of Admissions Lee Stetson mysteriously resigned last year, so I guess now I'll never know the truth.) I felt like everyone else was the real Penn kid, and that I was some kind of imposter. I was the dumb kid.

So when I was faced with what seemed to be the culture at Penn, I drank the Kool-Aid. I started fretting about anything and everything - the grades, the careers, the future. I missed the forest for the trees, as the old cliche goes. And it made me miserable. By freshman year's end, I was depressed. By the end of sophomore year, I was contemplating not returning to school. And by the time junior year rolled around, the only thing enticing me to return for my fourth and final year was the thought that 365 days later I would be done.

But here I am, 365 days later, and I realize that this attitude has gotten me very little. I'm four years older than I was when I first unloaded my stuff into my dorm room.

After taking my last final, enjoying my last walk down Locust, eating my last burrito at MexiCali, I find that, in hindsight, it's not that Penn is an inherently bad place. It all comes down to attitude.

It may sound hokey, but attitude is everything. There's nothing wrong with ambition. But you can't spend your whole life thinking about the future and forget to enjoy what you're doing now. College is an experience, one that I've come to realize I'll never be able to duplicate.

You always hear people who claim to be "wiser" tell you to live your life without regrets. It's a nice sentiment but not a very realistic one. It's because we regret the choices we make - or the ones we didn't - that we learn.

Contrary to what I thought a year ago, I don't regret coming to Penn. I also don't regret joining the DP - even though it destroyed my grades, cost me some friends, earns me a glare whenever I mention it and likely took a toll on my physical and mental health.

But I do regret the anxiety and the worry I had, and if I had the four years to do again, I would do a lot of things differently.

Even now, I still don't know what I'm doing with the rest of my life. I never pursued a summer internship. I'm not going to medical school, law school or some sweet I-banking gig. And I definitely don't see a house and three kids in my future.

But what may sound strange to everyone who's heading out of here bound for that "dream job" is that I'm fine with this. Maybe that still makes me the "dumb kid" or the misfit, but four years after starting at Penn, I think I understand what college was supposed to be about.

Wil Hershner is a College senior and former Managing Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian, from Ocean City, N.J. You can reach him at wws@seas.upenn.edu.

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