Locust Walk: the ultimate danger zone. (American Radio Works)

While Penn students are forced to make peace with Penn State mix-ups and “safety school” stigmas, one area we all take pride in is our reputation as the “social Ivy.” It’s the one title not even Harvard or Princeton can take from us. Still, I wonder if our reputation as the Ivy League’s answer to the party school might be a touch inflated. And I wonder if our title as the “social Ivy” might need some qualification. More and more I’ve come to think of Penn as the socially awkward Ivy.

This week we’ll examine the Locust Walk Hit and Run.

“When I think about Penn being awkward,” College senior Jen Jablow explains, “is the situation where you’re walking down the street and you see someone and you both clearly know you know each other from a class freshmen year or something, but you both just avoid eye contact.”

It’s a situation we’ve all been in, but can’t exactly explain why. Maybe Penn students just have better things to do with their time than make small talk. In the case that we do pursue these conversations, more often than not they devolve and discomfit quickly. At that point it’s a game of conversational chicken to see who’s first to bring up an excuse (”Well this Netflix DVD ain’t gonna mail itself”) and make their escape.

Then again, sometimes it wouldn’t hurt to follow Jablow’s lead and embrace the awkwardness. When she’s walking down the street and sees that former classmate Jablow doesn’t always instinctively avoid contact. “I sometimes think it’s funny to be overly friendly in these situations just to make things more awkward.”

Leave it to a Penn student to make awkwardness a fine art.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 15th, 2007 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.