Hi ho, hi ho, its off to work Brick goes. (Julie Siegel/DP)

I’m sorry, John. Teaching English and networking in Seoul really isn’t that far from the typical Penn summer experience. Try holding a STOP/SLOW sign for 8 hours straight.

After working on my county’s Road Commission for 40 hours every week, I did something most Penn students don’t — basic manual labor. On the best days I was assigned to the tree crew, helping cut down dead trees near the roadway. The days I spent filling potholes with hot, burning asphalt were somewhere in the middle. And the days I cleared medians of trash claimed the spot as the worst.

I don’t tell this tale to invoke sympathy or showcase my boundless humility. I’m just surprised how many people are missing out on the joys of physical work.

First of all, I made good money. I’m sure whatever stipend the New York City i-bankers receive gets used up on alcohol and cover charges. After 8 hours outside, under the sun, drinking and partying was not my concern. Sleeping was.

Second, working with your hands teaches you real life skills. Not only can I properly cut weeds around speed limit signs, but I know what happens when calling-in sick to a real job becomes a habit. You miss work, you lose respect. You lose respect, your job gets harder, fast. Remember, there’s no air conditioning outside.

Third, who said blue collar jobs are without networking and future job opportunities? People who work these jobs full-time don’t normally get to share their life stories with kids who go to Penn. When they get the chance, they open up and make friends. Also, having experience with the STOP/SLOW sign opened up an opportunity to work for 50 percent more per hour at a private construction company this summer. What now?

As much as I love the classic summer job, I must admit that I will probably join the hordes of interns and research assistants in the summer of 2008. But working a terrible job really puts my experience at Penn into perspective. I’m lucky to go here, and I’m lucky to have the opportunities a Penn degree presents. So if you’re still looking for a job, try some good, ol’ fashioned hard work, if for no other reason than to realize your good fortune.

Plus, girls really dig guys in hard hats and reflective vests.

Free at last, free at last

I’m sad to graduate Penn? I’d be lying if I told you otherwise. And I’d be lying if I told you that the thought of life in the “real world” with no paycheck from my parents and no job prospects on the horizon doesn’t make me hyperventilate. But recently, about three hours ago to be exact, as I was leaving yet another trainwreck of a midterm I adopted a zen-like attitude. Like a man who somehow finds peace in front of the firing squad I’ve accepted my fate. More than that, I’m embracing it.

You see, even though there’s a lot I’m going to miss about college — I won’t bore you with the trite list of college rituals here — there’s one thing I won’t miss: the rat race. Our whole lives we were fed this line about taking the right classes so we could take AP or IB courses which would get us into the right colleges which allegedly will get us into the right grad schools or the top positions at think tanks, i-banking firms, etc. And while I know the job force is plenty competitive at least I know from now on my life will no longer be governed by the all-mighty GPA.

As much as I’m sad to be leaving Penn, and there’s plenty of classes I wish I’d taken but didn’t, I’m looking forward to reclaiming a love of learning I haven’t had for a while. I’ve had some amazing professors and teachers over the years, but even in my favorite classes I felt learning being reduced to something rote, something that was only validated by three numbers and a decimal point. Now I’ve got a long list of books I’ve been meaning to read, more than a few of them were assigned to me the past couple of years.

As hard as it is to believe my college years are over, I still feel alright knowing that learning doesn’t end here.

Hoorah! Penn chose Microsoft (Ticker: MSFT) over Google (Ticker:GOOG) for the new email system.

Everyone seems to care…except for me.

This battle of the tech titans has to be one of the most over-hyped non-events this year.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a team player here at the DP; but that stupid ticker counting the days we were overdue for a decision on webmail was a huge waste of real estate on the front page of our beloved paper.

Apparently the announcement was more newsworthy than I first thought. Scouting the DP website (shameless cross-promotion), my jaw literally dropped when I discovered that this story was the most commented article from Thursday’s paper! Apparently having the privilege of managing Penn students’ spam-laded email accounts is an honor only bestow upon the best of the best. Well, more like the lowest bidder, but the former sounds sexier.

After looking at the way Google’s earnings handily blew away Wall Street expectations Thursday night, you don’t have to read this to know that Google can do no evil.

Allow me to share something which was not on the front page of the DP for 77 days. Last October, Arizona State University struck a landmark deal with Google to switch all their students and faculty to Google’s mega-platform with everything from email to online-word processing. As of March 22, it was reported that approximately 40,000 students had made the switch to the service. Best of all, ASU got all the servers, software, and tech support for the amazing price of $Free.99.

Why didn’t Penn get this deal you ask? Great question!
An even better one is why would Google be so altruistic?

The answer is, look at Google for what it can be, and not what it is.

Google wants to diversify its business through finding ways to make money off their array of ridiculously cool but unprofitable programs. By giving away their services to ASU, they can get an entire university to start using Google’s word processor, calendar, instant messaging, and a plethora of other features. In the same move, they are cutting hardware providers such as HP, Dell, and IBM out of the picture. In one sweep they get the hardware AND software business. Brilliant!

Google is a solid buy even without this blogger’s crazy theory. But if I am right — well, let’s just say Google could be the next…dare I say it…

…Microsoft.

S(Taylor Howard/DP)

I found myself glued to my laptop late Tuesday night and well into the wee hours of Wednesday morning, clicking on link after link from the major news sources and from blogs, Facebook, MySpace, etc. Amidst images of candlelight vigils and students huddled in prayer, a single theme continued to resurface. It seemed that everyone had one question in mind: Who’s to blame?

Of course, the most passionate accusations are directed at the killer himself. I came across numerous Facebook groups cursing Cho Seung-Hui. They are justified in their anger. But many of them eerily echo the same violence and hatred that Cho himself exhibited.

Others have pointed fingers at the university, saying what it should have done differently. But the reality is, all the precautions in the world, the most strategic security measures, cannot provide a safeguard against man’s potential for evil. (Consider the breach in the Iraqi parliament building last week.)

Still others suggest that the people around Cho were remiss. Interviewers of Cho’s professors and roommates dance around the question, “Why didn’t anyone intervene?”

It is also interesting to read critiques from the rest of the world, many of which find a more nebulous scapegoat in an American society “that fosters violence at home and abroad,” as one Washington Post article puts it. In Le Monde, French social scientists debate “une culture de la violence aux Etats-Unis,” zoning in on the gun issue. In the UK, The Sun features an interview with the dealer who sold a gun to Cho. The same Washington Post article also reports responses from the Middle East which, in an interesting twist, criticize Americans for a lack of perspective and insensitivity. One particularly sobering quote comes from Ranya Riyad, a 19-year-old college student in Baghdad: “It is a little incident if we compare it with the disasters that have happened in Iraq…We are dying every day.” Husam Kareem al-Iqabi, a Baghdad teacher, says more pointedly, “…I wish we would see this international interest in the killing of 33 students in America for all the martyrs that fell at the gates of universities, on the bridges and in the markets in Iraq.”

Yes, we can analyze and point fingers to no end. But the bottom line is, we live in a corrupt world, where man is capable of unspeakable evil. Last fall, the Amish community was confronted with the same unimaginable pain that the Virginia Tech community is experiencing today. It then shocked the nation with an equally unprecedented reaction that focused not on the evil but on the process of healing. We, too, must acknowledge the reality of evil in our world and then devote our energies to combating this evil with good, dispelling violence and hatred little by little, day by day, through our own words and actions.

Seoul at night. (wikipedia)

The Daily Pennsylvanian’s editorial staff has expressly forbidden any sort of reflective, last-post-of-the-semester in which we would reminisce over everything we learned in our semester-long foray into the thick of armchair journalism. Fortunately for them, I have learned absolutely nothing this semester (a side-effect of already being perfect) and as such have no reflection to share with you other than on how great it is to be me.

I’m not really one to dwell on the past anyway. Ever the visionary, I prefer to look forward, and forward I see finals hell and Adderall summer!

Needless to say, no properly ambitious and overly competitive Quaker spends even their freshman summer at home doing, well, summer things. No, the students of dear old Penn all trade in their swim trunks (and souls) for suits as we embark on our annual mass exodus to New York, DC, LA, or other glowing hubs of finance, commerce, and shameless self-promotion. But while crushing the competing interns from NYU is both fun and easy, it is not the only way to spend a summer.

The summer after my freshman year I threw caution to the wind and accepted an offer from a private school in Seoul, South Korea to teach SAT prep classes to frighteningly ambitious Korean students. Speaking absolutely no Korean, it seems, was not an impediment to being hired in Korea.

There in Seoul, far away from America’s i-banking hives, I had a wild summer that changed my life. I made a great bundle of money, started learning a language that the State Department says is in “critical” need, added an eyebrow-raising line onto my résumé, and discovered a world vastly different from the West that I had left behind. I also met another American who became one of my very best friends.

I didn’t learn much about finance that summer, but I sure did learn a lot about the world.

Oh, and that best friend I met in Korea? Now we’re forming a startup company.

Dare to tread off the beaten path, this and every summer.

Why am I so anxious to see “The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial” coming to Annenberg tonight? Not because it’s one of my last chances to get student rush prices. Not because it stars “Q” from Star Trek and Deep Throat from
The X-Files. Perhaps it’s because the show is based on original court transcripts, unlike its cousin Inherit the Wind running in New York?

Most likely, it’s that I’m intrigued that
intelligent design (loosely related to creationism) is not only a controversy of the modern academy, but had also stirred educators and lawyers in the dark ages of the 1920s. The play is based off of the 1925 Tennessee v. John Scopes trial, contesting the legality of teaching evolution in public schools.

The Scopes case was held before scientists discovered DNA’s function, before the electron microscope was created, and before carbon dating was developed. 82 years later, with precise technology and blitzing scientific advances, are we still fighting the same battle?

College has taught me to pursue facts in the most rigorous way, and to freely interpret them independent of larger pedagogy. I can see why most scientists believe in evolution, the evidence certainly has merit. And even though there are flaws in macroevolution theory, I still think evolution should be taught in school. And I’d take the class, if I thought I could pass. After all, the battle of intelligent designers isn’t for the science classroom, it’s for a comprehensive representation of evolution that includes its limitations.

It’s about following the playground rules we learned in grammar school, in between cursive lessons: No name calling — the Scopes’ defense was infamous for publicly mocking the creationists of his day. Tell the truth — every theory has areas of uncertainty. Play fair — with scientific challenges to evolution, scholars should address it scientifically rather than invoking the role of theology in science. Perhaps Scopes would be proud if by the 100th anniversary of trial, the two sides had made progress. Learning more about the trial’s history may be the way to begin.

Tennessee State grad Oprah Winfrey didn’t go to an ivy league school — Adam’s rubric for success.

In his column yesterday Adam Goodman tries oh so hard to explain how Penn craft us into “good citizens.” A noble thought, but after four years at Penn and almost a year in the real world its clear to me that Adam’s argument is absurd. All three prongs of it.

Adam’s first point is ethics should by mandatory for everyone. I took LGST210 (business ethics). One of the first things covered is the difficulty of changing your entire ethical construct at such a late age. I’m inclined to agree. Adam, if you think that one broad-based introductory ethics class is the key to preparing the leaders of tomorrow, then you’re naïve.

His second point regarding a mandatory study abroad program is a great idea in principle but a horrible one in practice. Some students simply can’t afford to study abroad’especially in Europe, Australia and New Zealand where most students go where it’s extremely expensive. Why impose the financial burden? It’s also tough to get credit for many courses and some people need 8 semesters here at 5.5 credits a pop just to graduate. What about international students or students for whom this is their first time away from home? Are they not already broadening their horizons. Not everyone is as sheltered as the writer.

Adam’s final point is that there should be mandatory community service. You shouldn’t have to force people to help those less fortunate. That’s not community service. That’s pity.

Yet, Goodman rationalizes this by saying how his own experiences opened his eyes. I find it tremendously saddening that it took mandatory community service in high school for this “sheltered upper middle class kid” to realize not everyone was as lucky as him. If that is the case, then I would highly question whether his IQ is over 120. There are people who need help? Who knew?

Goodman closes by saying, “We’re smart, we will be wealthy and we will be influential.” If this is type of thinking is considered “smart” then we’re in a lot of trouble. I hope it never will be influential. But maybe I’m just being practical.

Students grieve last night at a candlelight vigil at Virginia Tech (Taylor Howard/DP)

Monday’s shootings at Virginia Tech have prompted several pressing questions. What was the shooter’s background? What was his motive? Was there an accomplice?

While all of these questions indubitably require answers, what concerns me most is the Virginia Tech administration’s actions yesterday. To that end, I have one simple question: How could the University have responded the way it did?

Let’s review Monday’s chain of events. At 7:15 a.m., a gunman shot two students in West Ambler Johnston dorm. Police were called to the scene. Though the police didn’t apprehend the suspect, they believed he had possibly left the campus and even the state.

This assumption led to blatant idiocy on behalf of the administration — they didn’t send an e-mail warning students until 9:26 a.m.

Then, at 9:45 a.m., the second round of shootings began at Norris Hall, an engineering building. In total, the gunman shot 32 people, and then killed himself.

Tech’s administration defends its actions, saying it thought the shooting was a “self-contained case.” How could University officials have come to such a conclusion when they didn’t even have the suspect in custody? Why was an e-mail not sent at 7:16 a.m., warning students that a gunman was on the loose? At the very least, the administration should have evacuated the dorms or shut down campus.

Indeed, students were still in classes at 8 a.m. — after the initial shooting — and many students say that had no idea what was going on. They went to class, as usual, because no one had alerted them not to go.

Thankfully, Maureen Rush, Penn’s Vice President of Public Safety, has announced that Penn’s course of action would be to shut down if a similar situation occurred on campus. She also called for increased communication efforts to ensure the safety of Penn’s students and faculty in such a crisis.

Virginia Tech’s administration can defend itself all it wants — but the parents whose children died as a result of its inadequate response may not accept its excuses so readily.

I’ve never been called a kike, certainly not at Penn. But my grandparents’ generation certainly encountered this hateful label, as do plenty of my co-religionists around the world today.

The only way to counteract this hatred is to inform myself about anti-Semitism and preserve the history of this bigotry. One of the most notorious instances of anti-Semitism in the last 150 years was the Dreyfus Affair, when the French government erroneously convicted Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus of treason. Conveniently for Penn students, a prime resource on this period is the Lorraine Beitler Collection, an archive of propagandist art and literature from the late 1890s, housed on the 6th floor of Van Pelt. The collection includes original newspaper clippings, shockingly anti-Semitic cartoons and other political artistry.

“Although the events of the Dreyfus Affair took place one hundred years ago, the issues continue to have contemporary imperative,” Lorraine Beitler, curator of the collection and professor emeritus of the City University of New York said. .

Not only can students explore the threats of anti-Semitism, but they can examine how the press can “shape public opinion” and relate to “the idea of blaming other people for what you are unhappy about.”

Take a look at one of the most appalling cartoons of the era, which appears in its original form among Beitler’s collected pieces:

“Dreyfus le traitre,” from the series entitled Musee des Horreurs, by Lenepveu, 1899. The cartoon appears in its original newspaper form in the Lorraine Beitler Collection at Van Pelt Library.

This famous caricature demonizes Dreyfus and highlights his inhuman, voracious appetite–he became the monstrous representation of all Jews during this epoch. However, Dreyfus persevered and lives on in Beitler’s memorializing collection.

“He had the strength to endure the punishment and the strength to keep saying he’s innocent,” Beitler said. “Never did he say anything disparaging about the justice system of the French government or about the army. He said that his life belongs to France, but the lineage of his name belongs to his children–and that’s why he struggled so hard.”

But perhaps the most chilling thing about the collection is the prevalence of similar cartoons today in the western world.

“Text on man: European commissionership,” from Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, November 8, 2003.

Serpents, towering noses and evil stares — seem eerily familiar? Yet this isn’t another artistic mastery from the height of the Dreyfus Affair. No, the cartoon pictured here is from a contemporary Palestinian newspaper, just one emblem of the brutally anti-Semitic creations that continue to blaze Arab media today.

Tomorrow at 5:30 p.m., Yale Professor Paula Hyman will speak at the exhibit and share her expertise on the Dreyfus Affair, on the 6th floor of Van Pelt Library. Lorraine Beitler, the curator of the collection and professor emeritus of the City University of New York, will attend, as will Yael Ruiz, the great-granddaughter of Dreyfus.

In total the content has traveled to five continents and has been translated into six different languages. The exhibit first came to Penn for a brief stint in 2001, but in 2003 Beitler decided to donate the pieces permanently to the University.

Ultimately, Beitler hopes to help mend the bitter division between Jews and Muslims students on campuses nationwide.

“This is my dream to go further,” she said.

However, with such persistent, dehumanizing hatred, the realization of Beitler’s vision may unfortunately be impossible — for quite a longtime yet to come.

When Sam Sarin and Mike Romano decided they wanted to open up a second restaurant, they had a lot had a lot of choices about where to locate it.

Good food and good views at have brought crowds to Victor’s Pub in Camden. (Michael Perez/Philadelphia Inquirer)

They already own the popular Sam’s Bar & Grille in the local Jersey suburb of Blackwood. Downtown Philadelphia seems to always be in need of new restaurants. Northern Liberties is a great place for pubs.

But the restaurateurs chose a different route: They built their restaurant in downtown Camden, N.J. Yep, Camden. The city across the river from Philadelphia where only 5.4 percent of residents have college degrees. Where per capita income is less than $10,000 and more than one-third of residents live below the poverty. And, more important, where the downtown, just blocks from abandoned and burned-out homes, turns into a ghost town after 5 p.m.

Not exactly an ideal location for a new business.

But all this makes the new Victor’s Pub,on the Camden waterfront, the “most important restaurant in the city right now,” according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

“You’ve got to get the fear of the word Camden out of people’s minds,” Sarin told the paper.

And, amazingly, the new restaurant is well on its way to doing that.

Since opening, the restaurant is crowded at lunchtime. But that’s not a huge surprise, as the town still has a number of large office buildings downtowns. It’s the dinner crowd that’s surprising.

“What’s really been a blessing is the people in Camden staying in Camden,” Romano told the Inquirer. “The firemen, the cops, the judges, the lawyers.”

It’s the first step toward revitalization one of the poorest and dangerous cities in the country. With nightlife comes people, and with more eyes on the street comes safety.

“Restaurants and night life is the linchpin,” said Tom Corcoran, who lives above the Pub and is head of the Cooper’s Ferry Development Association. “That would get us to the critical mass where you create your own buzz.”

He’s hoping Victor’s creates a domino effect that spurs development along the waterfront. On the southern side of the Ben Franklin Bridge, the waterfront now has a restaurant, a concert venue, condos and a baseball stadium. The restaurant may just provide enough of an anchor to really kick start development despite the prison Camden Camden built a few hundred feet north, on the water.

Victor’s, as well as the rest of Camden, could use your business too. So instead of heading over for drinks at Mad 4 on a weekday, hop on PATCO and give Victor’s a try.

And once it gets nice, you can even sit outside, overlooking the Philly skyline. Just the other day, Cocoran noticed a number of such people taking advantage, sitting and talking outdoors. It was a new experience for him.

“My wife said, ‘What’s that noise?’” Corcoran told the Inquirer. “And I said, ‘That’s the sound of a city coming back to life.’”