Alice Lee | Why I did not drop out of Penn

People always ask me why — after taking the last semester off from school to work as a freelance photographer for a nonprofit in Ethiopia and in New York for companies like Coursekit — I decided to come back to school at all.

I’m surprised that I’m back too. Including the summer, I was away from Penn for eight months. I spent time in a total of six countries — seven if you count the time I accidentally got off a plane on the wrong stop and ended up stranded in Sudan for approximately 30 frantic and retrospectively comedic minutes.

I spent most of my time designing, programming and shooting (photos). And I didn’t really do anything else. By the end, I had even forgotten how to use a pencil and my handwriting transformed into this weird chicken scratch because most of my work had been done in a sketchpad or on a computer.

So when my break from Penn came to an end, I had an important question to answer.

It’s one that likely only a handful of students from each entering class has ever seriously considered, yet it is relevant to the Penn community as a whole:

What is the true value of a structured Penn education in comparison to the education that the rest of the world has to offer? This question is particularly relevant to students who wish to pursue nontraditional careers or have a pure thirst for learning.

More specifically, I asked myself whether I would be happier if I dropped out of Penn to chase my passions, as a few of my classmates have already done this year.

Perhaps I should note that: in specific cases, to be a successful entrepreneur it becomes necessary to drop out of school. There are only so many hours in the day and once your business starts taking off, you’ve got to make the call as to what’s more important. I am not (yet) that entrepreneur and I assume that the vast majority of us aren’t there either.

I found the answer to my initial question, though, in IDEO design agency co-founder Bill Boggridge’s idea of the “T-shaped person.”

Allow me to explain. While the horizontal part of the “T” represents breadth of general interests, the vertical part represents depth in focused skill. A T-shaped person is infinitely more creative than someone who lacks that extra perspective. After all, Steve Jobs was passionate about computers (depth) but interested in typography (breadth), a seemingly unrelated field at the time. He chased both and later melded the two by creating computers with beautiful typefaces that we still use today.

While I was away from Penn, I spent most of my waking time working on a series of really specific projects. I learned a lot but became more of a specialized “I -shaped” person rather than a “T – shaped” individual. I focused my energies into a few particular projects — programming, product design and photography. But my focus was so narrow that I forgot how to do some things that weren’t directly related to my job, such as writing with a pencil!

Now that I’m back at school, I get to take classes such as “Typography.” I get to develop new obsessions without the burden of a workweek. This weekend, for instance, I spent a continuous 72 hours teaching myself how to create elegant typographic illustrations from scratch, which was completely beyond the scope of the course.

After class on Tuesday, I showed my teacher, Professor Hyland, the work I had created. The 10 minutes of feedback that she gave me was more valuable than any advice I could have solicited from others on my own.

Staying in school makes it easier to develop the horizontal bar of that “T” because our sole priority is to learn. Different classes allow us to acquire different “lenses,” or ways to problem solve — whether it’s with the cool logic of computer science, the fiery creativity of fine arts or the articulate communication skills from a business class.

Clearly, I’ve chosen to not drop out. I’m trading in my single pair of well-worn, well-sharpened glasses from my time away in the hope of acquiring a few more of these “lenses” at Penn. And if I’m lucky, I’ll regain the ability to use a pencil too.

Alice Lee is a Wharton junior from Cupertino, Calif. After taking an eight-month leave of absence from Penn to work at Foursquare she is back on campus.Her email address is leealice@wharton.upenn.edu. Through The Looking Glass appears every other Friday.

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