As graduation approaches, I've been thinking quite a bit about things I have not done. It was sometime while watching the impossibly talented members of the Excelano Project perform several weeks ago that I realized I hadn't accomplished or seen 90 percent of what I told myself I would as a dewy-eyed freshmen.
Still, it is customary when a chapter such as this one closes to assure anyone who will listen (though, they surely do not care) that you "have no regrets." Regrets are for failures and tortured souls - not smiled-upon Penn students. Any semblance of a regret that an at-risk student senses sprouting within him should be promptly repressed and remain perpetually unconfronted - similar to my high-school years.
So I beg forgiveness for this malapropos and socially unacceptable confession, but I have regrets. A lot of them. A sampling: I regret initially choosing my major based on what I thought sounded impressive and sexy ("International Relations? Cosmopolitan, yet masculine!"), rather than what I was genuinely interested in. I regret being too scared of rejection to apply to write opinion for The Daily Pennsylvanian until halfway through my sophomore year. I regret spending so much time playing Halo this year rather than devoting myself to something like community service.
Rather than consume me though, these regrets inform and guide me. I immerse myself in them, studying them harder than I studied anything this entire senioritis-ridden semester. Sounds depressing, but it's not. Healthy, well-considered regret is the engine of improvement - improvement of ourselves, our relationships, our careers and whatever else we choose to devote ourselves to. If we maintain the pointless pretense that we don't make mistakes or the misguided notion that such mistakes aren't worth dwelling on, then we're doomed to repeat them.
One thing I don't regret is choosing to go to Penn. Though I made a risky habit as a columnist and an editor of taking the administration to task for myriad shortcomings (sorry, Amy!), I was always struck by the passion exhibited by the school's employees at every level. Even as I bickered with administrators over the cost of high-rise furniture and feuded with faculty over the shape of the curriculum, I never once doubted any of my interviewees' commitment to this institution and the best interests of its student body. That commitment does not get recognized enough.
I'm also endlessly grateful to Penn for fostering an environment where I could continually question my identity, challenge assumptions and dogmas, and recreate myself accordingly. Perhaps that's characteristic of college in general, but I suspect that Penn, with its student energy streaking through Locust Walk like a palpable current of electricity, excels in this regard.
Making sense of my time at Penn is analogous to perusing a flip book. Flip through the snapshots as a whole and the outcome is coherent to me. I understand my political transformation and my religious evolution as logical products of series of events and experiences. But looking at the pictures one by one, without context, I find myself nearly unrecognizable.
There's the page where I was tantalized by the prospect of working in finance, and here's the one where I wore a yarmulke and went to daily prayer services at Hillel. Flip through a little more and you could find the page where I started to wonder if that all might be a waste of time. Oh, and 40 hours a week at the DP - did I really do that?
If I've learned one thing in college, then, it's that - to paraphrase Socrates - the only thing I can know for certain is that I can't know anything for certain. Where I once saw the world in black and white, I now perceive a bursting and radiant spectrum of gray, swimming in contradictions and multiple truths and interpretations.
I leave Penn humbled, eager and hopefully a little wiser - mistakes cheerfully in tow. I may be a lot less certain about things, but I'm much happier in that uncertainty. I don't know where I'll be in five, 10, 20 years, but I'm excited to find out.
Adam Goodman is a College senior from San Diego. He is the former editorial page editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian and will attend law school in the fall.
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