Potential location of substance free housing in the Quad (Taylor Howard/DP)

As of last year, if you preferred to live in an environment free of, uh, certain “substances,” you were out of luck.

Then, in October, a residential program for recovering substance abusers was announced, to debut in fall of 2007.

But, believe it or not, there are Penn students that choose not to use drugs or alcohol even though they aren’t recovering addicts. And thanks to Undergraduate Assembly member and College freshman Enoch Arthur-Asmah, those students will finally have their own place to live as well. Starting next fall, Fisher-Hassenfeld College House will have a Substance Free residential program as an extension of its Healthy Living program.

I came out against the program for recovering addicts, but I can’t deny that substance free housing is a great idea. I thought the recovery program was a bad idea because it would brand the participating students as outsiders. But students in a substance free program would be there of their own accord.

Recovering addicts shouldn’t be stigmatized at all, but praised for their efforts to get their lives back on track. Still, a negative association does exist in the minds of others. But this won’t apply to students who choose to abstain from drugs and/or alcohol simply because it’s not for them.

Laura Swann, the coordinator for the Center for Students in Recovery at the University of Texas at Austin warned that students in a substance free program have less of an incentive to abstain as they might in a recovery program.

But honestly, that’s okay. Substance-free housing isn’t meant for former addicts. Addicts need professional treatment, where they can be in a structure and supportive environment uniquely designed to help them achieve their goals of sobriety. Substance free housing is to provide a welcoming environment to students who simply feel that drugs and alcohol aren’t for them.

This isn’t a drawback; it’s obvious. These are two different programs with two different goals. Rehab doesn’t necessarily belong in a college residential system, but a program to make sure that students feel comfortable with the life choices they’ve made certainly does.

Some of the more family friendly content on Boredatvanpelt, circa last night at 2 a.m

Monday night, 8p.m.

If you’ve never been to Boredatvanpelt.com, you’re missing out. And believe me, reading yesterday’s article in the Daily Pennsylvanian just doesn’t quite cut it.

After all, I’m bored at Van Pelt right now. So I arrived at the site expecting to find about five minutes of procrastination. Unfortunately, I started to write this a half hour ago. And instead of reading an article for my psychology class on Terror Management Theory, I’m learning lots of things about everyone else that is bored at Van Pelt.

For example, someone clearly wants us to know they have “pepperoni nipples.” And someone even cooler just posted, “any hot women wanna play PS3 with me?” A tip, my friend: the answer is probably no.

New favorite post, as of 7:18 PM: “only at a f**kin ivy league [school] would we continue to type sh*t out here, instead of actually getting some ass.”

My new goal is to find someone sitting near me that is posting. Every time I shamelessly check the window for a new post to make fun of, I’m absolutely petrified that someone will think I’m “horny gal,” who is currently making plans to “do it” at the button with another anonymous poster.

The amount of information people are willing to post under the blanket of anonymity really is unbelievable. After all, would you ever write something like, “I can stroke for you” if your name was attached?

But if Boredatvanpelt.com is too tame for you, according to IvyGate, much of the Ivy League has moved onto using Craigslist’s “Casual Encounters” site to arrange meetups during this (apparently) very stressful time of year. My personal favorite? The posting for a Harvard undergraduate orgy. This poster is very careful to warn us, “This ain’t going to be some 90s dance type affair. We’re trying to keep it good looking, peps [sic].”

This might all post a vaguely pessimistic picture of romance in the Ivy League, but all is not lost. Someone has now posted twice on Boredatvanpelt.com that he wants a girl to take to dinner. Unfortunately, his posts have been sandwiched between conversations that are so inappropriate (and, I’m fairly sure, quite illegal) that I can’t repost them here. Poor guy. I hope he finds a date. I’m just not sure Boredatvanpelt.com is the best place to find it.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to return to the saga of the girl in a green shirt and jeans, who apparently missed her connection from a half hour ago. Although it’s looking like her study group is getting mad at her for leaving too often to hook up in the stacks.

I swear, you can’t make stuff up.

Are you cringing at the idea of graduating with thousands of dollars in student loan debt? Not a problem. 19-year-old Ron Steen, a student at California State University at Fullerton, has a better idea.

According to CNN Money, Steen put his future up for auction on eBay in August. For a minimum bid of $100,000 to cover his education costs, Stenn promised the winner 2 percent of all his future earnings.

Okay. Let’s pretend I had $100,000 to throw around however I wanted, and eBay hadn’t removed the auction after five days for violating the site’s charity policy. Hmm…what to invest in? Stocks, bonds…or the uncertain future of a 19-year-old stranger from Anaheim?

Tough choice, I know. There’s no way I’d send this kid my money even though he swears he is “the real deal” (whatever that means) and “a very intelligent guy.”

Steen told the magazine that he expects to earn “way” more than $125,000 a year before he turns 65, which is when his investor would break even on his or her $100,000 investment.

I’m certainly no expert on investing, but when the guys at Fortune Small Business Magazine tell readers that Breen would actually “have to average $1.5 million a year to match an investment that yielded a 6 percent return, compounded annually over the same period,” I know there are some flaws in Breen’s logic. Even a non-finance student like me knows that the $1,375,000 Breen seems to have forgotten to hypothetically earn every year is a lot of money.

But hey, if you have an extra hundred grand lying around burning a hole in your pocket, go ahead and help out Ron Steen. After all, he’s still optimistic that someone will take up his cause.

And who knows, the kid might even succeed. As long as he doesn’t go into any careers that involve finance. Or numbers. Or writing anything, because even this “very intelligent guy” apparently couldn’t ask complete strangers for $100,000 without making five spelling errors.

(4wordathome.com)

Some e-mails are easier to write than others.

Friends and family rarely get a formal salutation, and usually end with “xoxo, Liz.” E-mail to a classmate usually starts with “Hi” and ends with “-Liz”. If I’m lucky enough to have a vacation or holiday coming up, I’ll finish with a “Have a great Thanksgiving! Liz” and be done with it.

As the recipients get more formal, it gets more complicated. If I’m e-mailing a professor, I need a salutation. But which one? “Hi” seems too informal, but “Hello” sounds like I have no idea who they are. And “Dear” sounds like I’m about to invite them to my 8th birthday party. I also have to figure out what to call them. If they have a PhD, will they be offended if I call them “Professor” instead of “Doctor”? Then I can’t remember if they have a PhD or not, so I have to stalk the department’s Web site to find their CV.

Three hours after clicking “Compose Mail,” I can write the e-mail. But how do I sign it? I know I should use my full name, but deciding what phrase to put is problematic. “Best” seems stuffy, “xoxo” is clearly out of the question and just signing my name sounds too informal. I generally end up using “Thanks!” because by then it’s midnight and I still haven’t cracked a book because I’ve spent all night writing this stupid e-mail.

And this problem doesn’t just plague college students. According to Monday’s New York Times, the problem of how to sign e-mails has become a problem in the business world as well.

While the article doesn’t provide the one final answer, it has a few clues that can help us all devote a little less time to composing e-mail signatures.

Judith Kallos, creator of NetManners.com, told the Times that the best approach is to adhere to the “highest degree of formality until the other person indicates otherwise.”

So there is no right answer. Try to be as formal as you can without sounding like you’re writing to your Congressman (unless you are). And under absolutely no circumstances are you to sign an e-mail to someone with whom you’ve just had a first date with “best.”

Thanks/Sincerely/Best/xoxo/

(The Harvard Crimson)

The most valuable lesson I’ve learned since coming to Penn is that I suck. You’d think I’d feel bad about this, but I really don’t mind. Because all of you suck, too.

Seriously, it’s okay. Obviously, we don’t all suck at everything. But I promise you, everybody sucks at something.

I’ve accepted my suckiness, and you should too. While I could probably fill an entire book listing all the things I suck at, let it suffice to say that items one and two are probably “calculus” and “anything involving a kitchen appliance that isn’t the microwave.”

I know you were perfect in high school. I know that you got straight A’s, got fives on all 37 AP exams you took, and got a 2400 on your SATs (even when they only went up to 1600 back then). So did I.

But then we came to college, where being awesome was a little harder than before. And sometimes, no matter how much work you did, you weren’t awesome anymore. I call that “something” Math 103. I was the kid in high school that couldn’t stand anyone that didn’t understand math. But after killing myself in Math all semester at Penn, I just barely pulled off a C+.

Some of you probably think I’m pretty dumb. After all, when I told people I was taking “stupid calculus,” they would reply, “Oh, Math 104?” And I’d have to reveal that I was being killed by a class even lower in the sequence than Math 104.

But sucking at calculus was good for me. I realized that blaming the professor wasn’t going to help, that other people had gotten A’s and (most importantly) that no one is good at everything. I turned my attention to concentrating on what I was good at and what interested me instead of freaking out about not being perfect.

Most people I know had this epiphany freshman year, whether it was caused by a bad grade or not making the athletic team they had expected to walk onto. Once we got knocked off our high horses, we learned to roll with the punches and accepted our suckiness with pride.

The longer it takes to learn this lesson, the worse off you are.

For example: Yifei Chen, a Harvard sophomore who threw a hissy fit via e-mail after not being re-elected to the 2007 editorial board of the Harvard Crimson. I’m not saying His Highness was a bad board member in 2006, but he obviously hasn’t learned that it’s okay to fail sometimes.

Along with learning that nobody’s perfect comes learning to suck with a little grace. At the very least, you learn that calling next year’s editorial board “incompetent” and “undedicated” and resigning in self-righteous rage might be just a tad juvenile.

Holding yourself to a higher standard is great, but you have to be realistic. Don’t beat yourself up for sucking sometimes. Because if nothing else, I can assure you that people who think They’re perfect have no friends. And that sucks.

On Judgment Day, the righteous are supposed defeat the morally corrupt, and so on. And if that’s true, you’ll see for yourself this Saturday.
At noon, Yale will take-on Harvard in the 123rd playing of The Game. And if (like most of the country), you don’t care about Ivy League football, you only have to wait until 3:30, when Michigan takes on Ohio State for a bid to the National Championship game.

I know that when the Bible talks about Judgment Day, they weren’t talking about football. But we’re in the middle of a drought of religious holidays, so why not spend some time in the church of Saturday afternoon football?

If you don’t have any pre-existing allegiance to any of the teams that are playing, you can have your pick of whichever rivalry you’d like. You can get into the Harvard-Yale rivalry, with its proper Ivy League history, tailgate debauchery, sweater-vested alumni and rap wars.

If you like your sports rivalries on a larger scale, you can watch the number one and number two college football teams in the country battle it out on national television to see which team will finally suffer its first loss of the season.

(mgoblue.com)

I have to confess that I’d choose baseball over football any day. But I can’t abandon ESPN until April. So this weekend, I’ve picked college football to care about.

As a result of a grandfather and freshman year roommate who are obsessed with Michigan, I’ll be rooting for the Wolverines. But regardless of how much you care about sports, college football is a pretty easy one to get into, at least for a day.

Who doesn’t want to watch kids their own age battle it out with the weight of entire campuses and alumni networks on their shoulders? It’s why even the most apathetic Penn fans suddenly find themselves sitting in Franklin Field. If watching is free (at least on television), college sports can be addictive. A good rivalry is the best way to get into it.

As a college football convert, I swear that you don’t have to know every intricacy of the rulebook to have fun with it. And while anyone outside the Ivy League will probably try to convince you that the Harvard-Yale game isn’t a “real” rivalry, not all of us have the strength to deal with the intensity of the Big 10. So pick whichever game you feel more comfortable with. I promise, they’re both (somewhat) equally respectable.

The Spin will be back on Monday morning. Have a nice weekend!

After two and a half years of giving campus tours for the undergraduate admissions office, there are plenty of times I’ve felt like an idiot.

Of course, there are the times when people ask me questions that I can’t answer. How am I supposed to know if the pool at Pottruck is long course or short course? And if someone could please explain what that means, it would be much appreciated.

In addition to unanswerable questions, I also feel pretty stupid when people ask uncomfortable questions. It’s hard to talk about drinking on campus with both honesty and tact. There’s nothing like the disapproving glance of a parent when you confess that Penn doesn’t have any female-only housing.

And then there are those things that we encounter every day and pay little attention to, but don’t really go over well with parents. I’ve had tour groups accosted by fraternity members handing out party flyers. I’ve led prospective students and parents past couples heavily engaged in PDA on Locust Walk. You name it, I’ve seen it.

Despite all that, my most awkward tour guiding moment was this past Saturday. All tour groups are now required to go through a mock dorm room in the Speakman basement of Ware College House. Because the hallway and room are only big enough for one group at a time, a tour guide often ends up standing awkwardly with their tour group after realizing that another group is in the room. Usually, the time is spent answering miscellaneous questions, but my group seemed not to have any this weekend.

Luckily, one of the students living on the third floor of Speakman came to my rescue, blasting music for everyone to hear. I managed to grin my way through Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” and Jefferson Airplane’s “We Built this City” despite a surprising lack of amused looks from classic-rock loving parents. But I figured that as long as our resident DJ stuck to G-rated classic rock, I would be okay.

Unfortunately, I thought too soon. The music suddenly switched to a song whose opening bars I recognized, but couldn’t quite place. Soon after, I heard, “They see me rollin’/they hatin’” Yes, there is certainly nothing like the looks on a bunch of parents’ faces while they stand around listening to Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’.”

So, a special thanks to the mysterious Quad DJ that provided me with the most awkward tour guiding moment ever. And an even bigger (and more sincere) thanks to the tour guide that vacated the mock dorm room before the song got to lyrics like, “There’s a full clip in my pistola/turn a jacker into a coma.”

What I learned in school yesterday: Girls, gear up for a battle upon graduating. Because we’re screwed.

My social psychology class spent part of yesterday’s lecture discussing sexism in the workplace. It’s no secret athat when I graduate, I can expect to have to fight harder than my male peers to move past my entry-level job and to work just as hard for less money.

But what if I managed to prove that I can be just as much of a hard-ass in negotiations as my male counterparts? Nope, still screwed. If I deviate too far from female stereotypes, I will be perceived as being competent, but cold. This will be considered a threat and I could be discriminated against.

Don’t worry, there’s more. In 2005, Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa published a study suggesting that biology is responsible for differences in the workplace, instead of discrimination.

According to Kanazawa, males’ evolutionary role as family breadwinners has left today’s men with a stronger biological desire to accumulate material resources than women. The desire is fairly comparable among young people of both genders. But as people age, women lose that drive because of the biological desire to have children and raise a family. And even if they don’t have kids, older women will still be driven to nurture other children in their lives and will lose some of their desire to pursue material success.

As you can imagine, I was feeling fairly pessimistic by lunchtime. But luckily, the Brown Daily Herald came to my rescue with an article about a new pilot program called “Women’s Launch Pad.” This program matches female seniors with female Brown alums that have found success in their respective careers to serve as mentors, and has met with overwhelming success.

Why doesn’t Penn have a program like this? Women obviously have enough to go through when trying to succeed. Having a mentor to show us that success really is possible could help relieve some of the stress. Wharton has taken an important first step with its affiliation with 85 Broads. We also have many alumni mentoring programs available, but we lack a Penn-specific network for women students and alums.

Yes, we’re supposed to live in an era when we shouldn’t need special mentoring networks for women because we’re all “equal.” But if Kanazawa is right, that might never happen. Knowing that other women who were in positions identical to ours have managed to overcome both biology and discrimination to find success would be a tremendous resource.

(hcima.org.uk)

Woe is me! I’ve got this big trust fund sitting in a bank that I just found out about, and I have no idea what to do with it. What to do, what to do?

Just kidding. There is no trust fund sitting in a bank somewhere with my name on it. But according to yesterday’s Daily Pennsylvanian, it’s possible that a significant number of Penn students could be facing such a dilemma. Chances are, one of your friends or acquaintances on campus is going to inherit a significant amount of wealth one day and will have no idea what to do with it.

Your first inclination might be to give your lost, confused trust fund-inheriting friend a good kick in the you-know-what. And if the dilemma they’re agonizing over is whether to buy a Mercedes or a BMW (and they expect sympathy from you), it’s possible that they deserve it. But even the uber-wealthy can have a sense of social consciousness. Maybe what they’re struggling with is how to put their newfound millions to good use. And that’s where Resource Generation comes in.

Resource Generation is geared toward helping wealthy young people learn how to effect positive social change through philanthropy. They hold annual retreats and other programming to help spread their message.

While the idea of such an organization might seem slightly strange (and even somewhat obnoxious) at first glance, it’s actually a pretty cool idea. It’s my personal belief that our nation’s wealthiest citizens should be devoting a decent portion of their riches to helping those who are less fortunate. If someone is interested in learning more about how to put their wealth to good use, I say we should give them all the help they need.

Now, there aren’t any $700 weekend retreats designed to tell anyone this, but I’ll let you all in on a little secret: even those of us without trust funds can take a cue from Resource Generation’s efforts. Everyone with resources to spare should be devoting a portion of their good luck to those who need it, and the giving spirit should start young. So find a charitable organization that means something to you, and help out when you can.

We might not be setting up charitable foundations or contributing wings to buildings, but it’s important for us to learn the value of doing what we can to make our world better. Even without a trust fund.

It’s a running joke among the entire student body that Penn hates holidays. Even though entire halls become vacant during the Jewish High Holidays and the weekend of Good Friday, classes remain in session. Professors try their best to cope with half-full classrooms, and are careful to be politically correct in their e-mails informing us that “despite the religious holiday,” lecture will still be held that day.

President Gutmann dressed as Willy Wonka in 2005 (Gustavo Centeno)

The academic calendar’s overt political correctness is a little annoying, but we all get used to it. I’ve gotten used to the fact that the only holidays Penn acknowledges are (insert your favorite December gift-giving holiday here), Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Thanksgiving and, as I started to realize in my classes on Monday, Halloween.

The same professors that sent e-mails a month ago about doing all they could for any student that had to miss class for the “religious holiday” (heaven forbid they should just call it “Yom Kippur”) were suddenly showering us with candy and spending a few minutes of class time talking about the holiday. One even showed us a picture of his dog dressed up as Rocky for the occasion.

It’s pretty cool that while professors have to hide from religious holidays to avoid even the slightest appearance of political incorrectness, they don’t mind having a little fun with the secular ones. Even University President Amy Gutmann gets in on the fun every year by holding a party at her house for Halloween.

Every once in a while, it’s good for us to look past our stuffy Ivy League roots and not take ourselves so seriously. It’s nice when professors, students and even our President can share a few moments of non-academic fun. And even if you think it’s a little weird for holidays to be acknowledged on a college campus, you have to at least admit that nothing makes a lecture go by faster than free candy.

Even though Penn could probably stand to have a looser policy regarding religious holidays, we’ve managed to get the fun ones right. Now all that remains to be seen is: How will President Gutmann manage to top last year’s Willy Wonka costume?