Penn students’ parents have varying levels of involvement in the college application process. Some make a long list and drag their offspring to each school; some, like mine, glance over a list of the student’s making, nod, and remark upon a few choices. My parents looked at the schools I was considering and immediately approved of most, but hesitated over Penn and Columbia.

“Philadelphia and New York are big cities — are you sure you’d feel comfortable and safe there?” they asked.

“Of course,” I answered. “I know I’m used to Oklahoma City’s general friendliness and safety, but no one would go to those schools if they were that dangerous, right?”

Apparently, I was covering my ears and humming to not hear what I knew — the crime rate in big cities is high, and the sexual assault rate in American colleges is a statistic often cited but seldom really contemplated.

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During the freshmen elections, I criticized what I thought were impractical and frivolous campaign platforms. I might have been wrong about “Mark Peter Pan”. It looks like he’s really trying to push his thicker toilet paper objective through the UA agenda.

UA Housing is also working with the HCS to bring in-house tutoring services to College Houses as well as thicker brands of toilet paper.

My apologies to Mark Peter Pan for thinking he couldn’t get it done, and apologies to the UA for implying that they don’t matter. Now hopefully he can focus on the other issues in his platform — like moving DRL closer to the Quad …

When I opened up my email yesterday to see the time of my group meeting, one member had sent the group a disturbing message. I managed to obtain a copy of this correspondence and reproduced it below. I can confirm that it is indeed authentic.

I can’t make it guys. I’m going to the Lehman Brothers presentation at 7pm

Ladies and gentlemen … this poor baby is only 19 year old.

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As anyone who’s been recently assaulted by overly ambitious flyering on Locust knows, it’s a cappella season.

This weekend I was conned into going to the PennSix show by friends who I was sure must have been eating Aqua Dots, because they claimed I’d love it. Judging by Penn’s recent embarrassment in the Ivy-League a cappella scene, I was highly doubtful that I would not want to gauge my eardrums out with a blunt object.

Surprisingly, I was entertained, impressed, and a little turned-on.

Well, that’s it. According to the “expert” in (and inventor of the concept of) sex addiction, Patrick Carnes, most Penn Students are sex addicts. (You can take the test here to find out if your own thoughts and habits qualify you.) After all, just looking at boredatpenn.net shows that many Penn students “find themselves preoccupied with sexual thoughts,” “feel controlled by their sexual desires,” and definitely “have used the internet to make romantic or erotic connections with people online.”

And anyone trying to get in good with a rising Whartonite has “traded sex for money or gifts.”

Apparently, even dating around is a bad thing — the survey asks if the taker has ever “maintained multiple romantic or sexual partnerships at the same time”. But according to an MSNCB column this week, it’s pretty easy to score as a sex addict using the test, and it might not mean much.
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I’m a senior with time on my hands, so I read the news so you don’t have to. Here’s what’s news at Penn . . .

Buy

Ivy League entitlement: As we engage in what has come to be an annual debate every November on the meritocracy of Early Admissions, legacy applicants continue to successfully justify how being conceived from the sperm (or egg) of a Penn alum is a perfectly fair and objective measure of their academic ability.

No more diversity training: With the recent failure of diversity training at the University of Delaware, diversity is the new hot topic in today’s issue of the DP. After DuBois college house was deemed the metaphorical “whipping boy” (no pun intended) for culture-based residential programs at Penn last week, the American Indian Cultures residential program, East Asia House residential program, and the Latin American residential programs all breathed a collective sigh of relief as they went unnoticed for doing the exact same thing.

Sell

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Penn just started it’s newest campaign to help engineering students pick up chicks. SEAS launched the Advancing Women in Engineering program in order to get more women involved in engineering.

The question is — why? If women have decided that spending their life in a cubicle with Dilbert cartoons taped to the walls isn’t for them, let it be.

I don’t understand why a lack of women in engineering is perceived as such a problem. It’s not that they aren’t interested in sciences. More than half of all medical school applicants are women. Perhaps women just don’t want a career where they have to worry about outsourcing to the point that they go insane and take a bat to the fax machine.

If SEAS is worried about anyone becoming engineers, it should be its students. The number one employer of SEAS graduates is Goldman Sachs, and tied for number two is McKinsey & Co.

Don’t know who to vote for in upcoming presidential primaries? Feeling lost and confused by the vast array of information? Perhaps a brain-scan could help.

Penn’s (or should I say Annenberg’s?) very own Kathleen Hall Jameson was one of several authors of yesterday’s New York Times editorial enticingly titled, This Is Your Brain on Politics. Basically, the team of researchers took brain scans of several independent voters as they saw images of presidential candidates or watched stump speeches.

Jameson threw voters’ deepest, darkest feelings about each candidate into the limelight.

Funny picture of Hillary after the jump!

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Open up the DP today to find coverage of two murder cases — Irina Malinovskaya’s, which ended in its third mistrial, and Raff Robb’s, which is just getting warmed up.

Both murders are domestic affairs — Irina is accused of killing her ex-boyfriend; Robb, his wife. Both murders were committed with an object of blunt force. Both were so horrific it seems unlikely that anyone but a spurned lover could have done it. Both have only circumstantial evidence linking the suspect to the scene of the crime.

These cases are so similar that it’s possible they’re linked. Maybe Robb and Malinovskaya hired the same killer. Someone vicious enough to over-kill, someone professional enough to leave no trace of his presence, someone insane enough to do it twice.

Someone like this guy:

Bright, shiny junk.

I’m not a Mac user and thus don’t have direct experience of the new Leopard operating system. However, my indirect experience with the OS so far is as follows:

• My housemate went in on a license only to find that his computer didn’t have enough RAM to run Leopard smoothly.
• My professor (Sam Apple, ironically enough) was unable to print for our class on Wednesday because Leopard didn’t work with his printer.
• I read this story in the DP about students having trouble connecting to AirPennNet on Leopard.

Are we talking about Apple here, or Windows 98?

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