During the first few weeks here at Penn, students settle into their routines of all-night partying, all-day sleeping and class somewhere in between. And it is during this busy time that some of their most formative, university-age decision making takes place.
Yup, that’s right. Among other things, like deciding how often (if ever) they’ll exercise, what they’ll eat, how they’ll dress and where they’ll most often get their drink on, students have to decide how they’re going to represent themselves to their friends and classmates. And what better way to do that than by personalizing one’s dorm room with all sorts of intimate knickknacks?
So why, pray tell, do Penn students line up by the dozen to purchase their personalities?
Why don’t the people who are holding life-sized prints of Audrey Hepburn feel phony when they look up and realize that the person ahead of them in line is paying for the same picture? Don’t you feel hollow inside as you carry home your prepackaged punk-rock poster combo? Doesn’t it strike you as completely illogical for us to be deferring to commercialism for guidance at a time in our lives when we’re supposed to be finding our true selves from within?
But maybe that’s just it. Maybe, especially for the newcomers, it’s too difficult and too early on in the game to confront the emptiness of a collegiate identity crisis. Maybe we’re not ready to make order from chaos and figure out the mess inside. Maybe some of us don’t yet realize that there is a mess inside.
So go ahead. Buy your Dave posters and your Animal House memorabilia and make yours and your roommate’s rooms identical. Come Senior year, your naked self-portraits will be splattered across the ceiling in place of that collection of Absolut ads, and I’ll say I told you so. And in the meantime, the bookstore certainly isn’t complaining.
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