Ryan Benjamin | What really mattered

Picture this: The University of Pennsylvania, fall 1951. Harry Truman is the president of the United States, we are in the midst of war with Korea and women are not allowed to sit on chairs in Houston Hall. Also that fall, my grandfather entered Penn as a freshman, just shortly after the University stopped using informal quotas to limit the number of Jews who were accepted.

Who knew that 58 years would bring such monumental change? Barack Obama is now the nation's first black president, Locust Walk no longer has cars and not only women can sit on the same chairs as men, they can live on the same hall! Nearly 40 percent of our class is black, Asian, Hispanic or Native American. We've gone from being a significant commuter school to over 12 percent international. And Jews comprise nearly 30 percent of our class.

All things considered, it was pretty fitting that at convocation University President Amy Gutmann called us the most impressive class ever to grace Penn. That is, until the class of 2010 arrived. But we must agree that it's not Penn that's lucky to have us but we who should be thankful to have Penn.

I came here with a bunch of strange interests like an obsession with the computer game Sim City (read: naive high-school senior who thought urban studies was a computer game). I added linguistics, education, astronomy and some other areas later - some I stuck with, others not. Who knew that four years later I'd travel to a local high school to research how students seem to motivate themselves, interviewing one whose worldview completely changed after witnessing his best friend getting stabbed in the heart - my own version of original research.

Before I could do any of that, though, my comfortable suburban lifestyle forced me to challenge preconceived notions of what a city was - its people and its institutions. Urban studies did that. Penn did that.

From our experiences in urban studies, Management 100, student government or Civic House, we apply what we've learned in the classroom - the theory - with hands-on activity - the practical.

School of Arts and Sciences Dean Rebecca Bushnell called this Penn pre-professionalism a "productive tension." We have PPE, BBB, PIK and 12 graduate schools that promote interdisciplinary study, undoubtedly the wave of the future. And though not always positive, I believe this is Penn's strongest attribute - the one which will help us navigate the tough waters of the real world.

In that vein, I've been amazed that it doesn't matter what classes you take here. Many of us will forget those. It's really about everything else. I've learned how to ask intelligent questions, network with the right people, engage my curiosity. I've been to perhaps hundreds of delicious (and free) lunches and dinners with Penn folks like professor Alan Kors and bioethicist Arthur Caplan to one-on-one conversations with terrorism expert Richard Clarke and actor Danny Glover.

Or the time I had a "cordial" debate with Karl Rove about the Electoral College in front of a thousand people. Or when we were all serenaded by Maya Angelou's rendition of When the Saints Go Marching In. Or the free trip to New Orleans to help rebuild a city. Or the day we traveled 600 feet below Manhattan to see construction of New York's third water tunnel. Or more recently, when I participated in a simulation called "Shoot or Don't Shoot" to simulate the life-or-death decisions that police officers make every day.

As we graduate, we have to carefully consider what our Penn education has meant to us - both individually and collectively - because walking into a new job with a chip on our shoulder because of an Ivy League diploma won't get us very far in this climate (sounds more like Princeton).

So we'll trudge forward, we'll succeed, and when many of our grandchildren arrive here, say, in 2081, they'll be overwhelmed with an even better Penn, one with developed postal lands and hopefully a new David Rittenhouse Labs. But I hope they will come to a place where the students are more practical, in touch with reality and engaged more than ever.

Fitting that a Connecticut Yankee should refer to his state's former tourism slogan, "We're Full of Surprises." That's a neat way to describe Penn, too. I had no idea what I'd find inside the gates of that Ivory Tower.

Ryan Benjamin is a College senior from New Haven, Conn. A Connecticut Yankee appeared on Fridays. His email address is benjamin@dailypennsylvanian.com. Ryan will be a D.C. Teaching Fellows next year.

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