Back in high school, I never had much school spirit. I took pride in opting out of pajamas or Hawaiian garb during Spirit Week and made no effort to pretend that I cared about my school’s sports teams while stuffed into the crowded gym bleachers for pep rallies. Toward the end of my senior year, I watched many of my friends—people who had never shown much more spirit than I had—fall in love with their chosen colleges and express that love with a passion.
As I observed this transformation, I wondered what should make college so different from high school. How could I feel so enthusiastic about a school I hadn’t even yet attended? I figured that I didn’t owe anything to my university—certainly not the sort of spirit I had never before felt.
Admittedly, a bit of this attitude followed me to Penn. I suppose it’s easy to hold on to that bitterness when you live in a place that’s as maddeningly hot as Hill. Yes, Hill is where I ended up. Those of you who have ever landed in the Fiery Pit of Death (my affectionate name for the non–air–conditioned building) know where I’m coming from. If you’ve frequented the dining hall at Hill, you’ve had a little taste of how we live. As for the rest of you, well, take my word for it.
Hill in late August and early September is miserable. I tell people that it’s all right as long as you remain calm, but in all honesty, I have been sent running for a cool place to study several times. There is a point at which the heat renders the human brain incapable of functioning—a daily occurrence at Hill.
I have found myself many an evening sitting in the lounge, where some generous soul may have brought his or her fan, going tit–for–tat with the other people in my hall on stories of sweaty, sweltering struggles. Everyone seems to have a tale about sleeping with no covers on with a fan aimed directly at his or her face.
It’s almost unsettling how many times I have heard my suitemates describe fat drops of perspiration falling from their foreheads and splashing on textbook pages or computer keyboards. I shared a knowing laugh with one of my neighbors, when I witnessed her peeling her legs off of the wooden chair where she’d been sitting and pulling down her shorts so that she wouldn’t stick to her seat again.
This sort of gathering of commiserating freshmen quickly became routine in my suite, and initially, I joined in without giving it much thought. It crept up on me, really: Through the sweaty nights in which my new friends and I came together to exchange jokes and stories, play cards or a game of Mafia or watch a movie, I had found a community.
Sure, we Hill folk have suffered together, but in the process, we’ve also become an amazingly close–knit group in hardly any time. I am incredibly thankful for that—for our ability to come together at the end of the day, even though our individual paths lead us on such different curricular and extracurricular trajectories.
At a school where there are not bound to be many more shared experiences for my entire graduating class, it’s nice to know that I’ll always have my suitemates to turn to.
And that’s the key. That’s how I found my reason to show some school spirit. I don’t owe it to the university, but I do owe it to my classmates, and I certainly owe it to myself. I think that every student deserves to feel a sense of unity, a sense of belonging within a larger group—and that’s what living in Hill brought me.
So, I happily wear my Penn gear around the campus. I even find myself whistling our school songs sometimes. I’d like to tell you that I bleed red and blue, too, but I’ll have to get back to you on that one the next time I get a paper cut—inflicted, of course, by a sweat–stained textbook page.
