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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Littering hurts Penn students' image
To the Editor:
As a UPenn employee, I get to travel across campus and around University City every day. I'm unfortunately one of those parking spot sharks, though it's tolerable.
What isn't is the almost laughable amount of garbage filling the sidewalks outside of off-campus student housing all year long.
With just a year until I make the dreaded leap from undergrad to alumna, I can't help but wonder what my graduation day will entail.
It's supposed to be one of the most important days of my life, one that I'll remember as I wander my way through life's ups and downs (and sideways).
"Imagine a world where you could manage your entire life from Facebook - it's not that far off!"
While you were home recuperating from the intellectual hazing that was Finals Week, an academic juggernaut other than Penn was "Making History".
Blackboard, a premier course management website, announced the release of the Blackboard Sync - its first ever Facebook application.
In 2004, a federal ban on assault weapons expired.
Now, four years later, Mayor Michael Nutter and Governor Ed Rendell want to reduce violent crime nationally by convincing Congress to re-enact the ban.
The ten-year federal ban forbids the possession, manufacture, use and import of assault weapons.
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.
Over the course of the last four years, the Class of 2008 has learned a lot about life - and taught us just as much.
As mentors and friends of the other undergraduate classes, the graduating seniors will be sorely missed.
With their days as Penn students numbered, this year's senior class can review their time at Penn with pride, and the future looks nothing but bright.
Hello. Some of you may know me as the zany former editor 'n chief of 34th Street magazine who woefully will soon be pushed, rather shoved, into that nebulous place commonly referred to as the real world, but some of you may not.
I would like to share some brief ruminations with you and I hope that you will be entertained.
Shortly before I graduated from high school, I opened a fortune cookie that would change my life forever.
"The work of the world cannot wait for perfect people," it read.
I was a girl who was plagued by self-doubt throughout high school - a girl in love with the idea of going off to college (proudly sporting a Penn sweatshirt during her senior spring) but who was terrified of messing up an experience that she knew could impact her entire future.
On the last day of classes, I ran into my freshman advisor on Locust Walk. She and I had a quick catch-up as we walked together before the mayhem of Hey Day began.
The last time we had really talked was my sophomore year, when I had just declared my American History major and thought I wanted to be a political journalist.
Enforcing our rights To the Editor: An editorial by The Daily Pennsylvanian's Opinion Board titled "Stand up to the RIAA" (4/21/08) deserves a response. There's nothing novel or unique about the copyright infringement legal actions (lawsuits or pre-litigation letters) that we bring on behalf of the major record companies.
It was some time at the beginning of last December when I was officially done with my duties as executive editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. We had just elected a new board, and although there were some loose ends to tie up, the finish line was all but here.
Whoever said the ending is always anticlimactic couldn't have been more right.
With only two weeks until graduation, I look at myself and realize how little has changed over the past four years. In many ways, I'm leaving Penn the same way I entered: broke, single and with a mild case of insomnia.