Rewriting My Undergraduate Experience
I’m about to turn twenty-one, and here I am in my parent’s house, just sitting on my bed staring at another Penn pennant that my mom managed to mount on my wall. While I’m away from home, she has a habit of sneaking an assortment of Penn décor onto every facet of my room. Like most of the Penn–themed content in our house, the pennant isn’t even mine. My sister got it during her New Student Orientation at one of those “spirit” events, where Penn tries to compensate for its rising tuition rates by distributing unlimited Penn Engineering bottle openers and Penn Med–themed condoms. I wander over to my sister’s room, where I see her Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research (VIPER) stole and “Class of 2018” graduation photographs. That was the last “normal” class, I guess. She got the undergraduate experience that I should have had, that is, until March 2020 happened.