34th Street Magazine's "Toast" is a semi-weekly newsletter with the latest on Penn's campus culture and arts scene. Delivered Monday-Wednesday-Friday.
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I realized that classes are about quality over quantity, and if I wanted to take advantage of my education, I needed to truly focus on prioritized classes and plan out my next few years.
Students who've grown up abroad and have been around alcohol since their teenage years are responsible drinkers, especially compared to students who had their first beer during New Student Orientation.
Considering all freshman pay the same amount for their dorm rooms, those left out in the heat are sure to question why their comfort is seemingly less important.
Highly addictive painkillers are making their way into drugs that Penn students frequently use. Drugs at Penn are far more unsafe than they were before.
So then does it make sense to resort to removing exams or reducing problem sets as a solution to campus stress? Doing this would undermine the very rigor of Penn that has made it what it is.
It can be upsetting to realize that I’m now in charge of looking out for myself, but it’s also refreshing to avoid the constant fights we’d get in when I lived at home.
Fumbling through a summer fling, where I am the first to admit that I had no idea what I was doing, proved to me that relying on someone else to explain my actions led me no closer to self-realization than my (unsuccessful) attempts at Penn.
In some of the places I visited, I felt marginalized as a tourist. People unapologetically walked into my photos, some locals stared when I dined in restaurants, and I was the victim of angry glares when I accidentally bumped into people. And while I considered myself an American tourist, I felt I was lumped into the unspoken “international Asian tourist” group — at one point, I was handed an unsolicited Chinese flyer when neither my family nor I know a word of Mandarin.
We can make the choice to remain politically unaware. At the end of the day, that only serves to emphasize our privilege. People think they can afford to be incognizant of worldly matters if those matters don’t pertain to them directly, but to do that is the ultimate act of selfishness.
I shouldn’t have to come up with creative ways to word “camp counselor” in order to sound more accomplished on my resume — a resume that proudly boasts working with kids at a job that is demanding and satisfying should be enough. This philosophy applies to many situations, and I think we as students need to stop focusing so narrowly on creating resumes hopped up on steroids.
Even though my bout with burnout only lasted around two and a half weeks, it was definitely one of the more unpleasant aspects of my college experience thus far.