I showed up to college early. Usually a punctual guy, I showed up to college 3 days early. I was tricked, conned really. The admissions office is a whimsical little wench that invited me to ISO. An international student orientation that precluded the New Student Orientation that is famous at the University of Pennsylvania.
NSO is a staple in Penn-ite? Culture. A weeklong revelry that Bachus would celebrate by ringing the bar bell announcing a last call.
ISO was a lonely affair.
The freshman dorms have a capacity for something like 2400 students. Only a couple hundred come to ISO. Some internationals, apparently, were smarter than me. It felt like the scene in those tragic movies where most of the human population has been exterminated by a plague, a horde of zombies, or a combination of the two. The fact that the few humans remaining always seem to find themselves in the whole word is the only thing that felt out of place. I didn’t see anyone for the first 24 hours – except a bathrobe clad individual who checked me in.
I had a schedule, a campus map and a still sparse looking room in desperate need of artwork, or at the very least posters telling people what I liked, or what I thought they would like and identify with. Or simply one that told a story about how much I liked to pound shots.
At the first event I was told to never try to bribe a cop. I was also told that in AMERICA (all caps, yes) it wasn’t polite to ask people how much money they made. You were also not supposed to cough up loogies on the street.
I was obviously flabbergasted.
(Note the sarcasm)
It dawned upon me, and not the administrators, that while this ISO was supremely helpful for those who had never been in the United States, ever, it would not be useful for anybody else.
Here’s a fun fact – one that might suggest at the fact that I am rich beyond your wildest dreams, which I assure you, I’m not. People applying to school in the United States have paid for some form of international education – American or British usually.
This form of education is expensive. It requires not only tuition but sufficient savvy and culture on the part of the parents to acknowledge that such an investment might be worthwhile. So you must factor the tuition costs in their life as well.
Further, for schools to have any appeal at all required thorough research, of the first contact kind as well as reading material. An understanding, however light, of culture was required to convince them to apply for something that would set them back at least 52,000 dollars a year.
But let us pretend that those who we have accepted for their overachieving qualities and high standards would not bother to look into the country they are moving to.
Or that the Mexican who wrote about his travels – including the U.S. – might be wildly unfamiliar with the concept of personal space…
I still like to kiss people for greetings for the record.
Eventually NSO rolled around and I got my first experience of COLLEGE friendship when I held peoples hair back while they lost it. That first week I didn’t touch a drink. I was after all from Mexico and drinking had never been a big deal. You could do it because your society approved. And I wanted to make a statement that many doubted – you can have fun without alcohol.
That and I think that getting drunk with strangers is not only dangerous but stupid. It leads to stories of freshman girls waking up, face down, in a frathouse with the sweet aftertaste of Jaeger bubbling up. It also leads to guys walking home with crusty eyebrows and a fist caked in blood from punching a wall. Of course these are !hypothetical scenarios.
I started probing. Exploring not only my high school “passions” like model U.N. but also diving into a culture of business that I had never thought about before. The former I would discover was no longer called Model United Nations but we covered it under the guise of the International Affair Association. A place for those interested in the higher art of diplomacy, world development and coercion to gather. The latter was a pleasant surprise.
Coming out of High School I knew very little but was convinced that I was wise beyond my years. I had to be an engineer, my “passion” for physics and math said that. Forget about the fact that I loved creative writing and enjoyed Social Studies during what I now consider the beginning stages of Mexico’s civil war.
These business types had passions about finance pronounced feenance. They had dreamt about running Goldman or using their engineering savvy to develop the next big Google or Facebook. They were ripe with possibilities and I wanted it.
I learned that a “single” was a great thing. It allowed me to invited friends whenever I wanted as well as entertain… My neighbor and I developed close friendship and had a knocking system. I would scream at my wall asking for milk and the wall would scream back saying YES! And voila milk.
The girls across the hall would constantly come up with new dorm adventures. The type that involve learning the lines in mean girls, jamming to Oasis or playing midnight football. And I loved them. One of them would become one of my junior year roommates and I would see the other compete my senior year during a gymnastics meet.
Down the hall was British man with more style than I could ever wish for and a Jewish man from Massachussets with more style than I could ever wish for. Together we were a trio – eventually we would become a package deal. The Brit taught me of thirsty Thursdays and the Sox fan of the all-American game called Beer Pong.
I told him in a faux-shocked tone that Mexicans did not play with their food. And then I found something I was better at – quincy (chandelier).
Going into November my winter wardrobe consisted of a single green hoodie. It was my favorite sweatshirt and it only recently went into retirement in my girlfriends closet. It didn’t dawn on me that I was wildly unprepared and that madras shorts, boat shoes and hoodies were not going to cut it. That a single cover was not the way to go if you heating broke.
A couple of sniffle sessions later I had a thick, fluffy jacket. I wouldn’t receive my standard Northeastern government issued black North Face fleece until much later in my college career. I also obtained a pea-coat. What a concept! A formal wear attire that can also be casual, warm but not sufficiently so on its own requiring the wearer to layer up. And layers had only been the metaphorical kind to me before that. The kind that you talk about when comparing a person to an onion you unpeel. Now I had to get shirts and sweaters and sweatshirts and jackets and peacoats.
I got a trenchcoat too and would wear it only occasionally lest I be confused for a flasher. Being 6ft6 and Mexican didn’t help I thought.
When the first snow I was ready. The thought: “Bring it cold” ran through my mind a couple of times as I tried to act casual about the fact that the heaven were raining beautifully shaped snoflakes and I attempted to catch only one out of every 30. What I wasn’t ready for was the utter darkness.
I’d get out of class at 5pm on most days and the day would be gone. I’d get home and feel like it was 10 and I should be cuddling up to a movie or dressing up to party (I was not quite at the “rage” stage yet).
The winter blue colored themselves indigo for me.
The way around that I would find is to keep your room hyperilluminated, keep your head down and do your work but allow yourself the dorm room life break cleverly provided by those around you.
That’s who I found my friend around the corner who told me all about her life in California and I told her about my life in Mexico. Shower battles ensued where cold water was periodically dropped in the midst of a cold shower to sharp shrills – often from me.
Co-ed shower. Ha! I came from Catholic country that would have outdoor protests and sit-ins to denounce the perverted admins who would allow that to happen. I had also only met one Jewish person in my life.
The University of Pennsylvania campus has an urban legend which might very well be true – 7 out of 10 white males on campus are jewish. Something close to that applies to girls. This I say from my empirical evidence. The first 6 girls I talked to at Penn were Jewish and once it became apparent that I was not a part of the tribe they began looking past me, not for someone more interesting, but someone more appropriate.
Enter the Jewish American Princess. This concept along with the idea that if you are not from Jersey you must hate on it and that if you are from Jersey you must defend it like a rabid dog on its last leg in a pit fight – were brand new to me. The first principle I understood, we had an equivalent principle at home called “fresas”. Literally put they were strawberries but pragmatically they were daddy’s girls who got what they want if it meant they drove a Benz or a BMW while mommy had to settle for the RAV4. Mommy rarely did for she had been one of them at one point too. I went to a high school full of them. But my high school had princes too.
The latter concept was confusing. In my short adventures into the Jersey countryside I’d found nothing but fun and pretty forests and bocce ball (the Spanish version of petanque that wouldn’t you know it, the Northeast had adopted as a fun backyard game). Sure the Jersey shore would eventually come on and my refusal to watch would be focused on the fact that it was on MTV and I was done with trashy reality TV. But what was so bad about Jersey other than the uber competitive public school system? And the fact that Governor school left kids with a tight sense of community because it was a summit of the nerds. (Let’s just look past the fact that I was expected to know what Governor school was).
Then I was going to a formal at the Castle. Truly the southern name – fratcastle – hadn’t migrated up here yet and I was none the wiser. But the idea of a classier affair, one with champagne, suits and potentially a chocolate fountain appealed to me. They had spotlights! And an ice sculpture! And it was perfectly pretentious because the champagne was little more than Andre. Standing in line to get checked in by the bouncer that night a Penn security guard approached me and the two friends I was with.
“What’s going on here tonight?”
The two girls turned around leaving me to field the question.
“Not quite sure, I’m trying to figure that out myself!” – I felt like a tool. I was dressed in a suit, the blush of a pre-game still warming my cheeks and I was playing dumb.
“All right, you guys take care then”
I got a pat in the back for my cool and cavalier attitude. That was my second con.
And then before I knew it it was final and I started fretting about not being a straight A student anymore. How was this possible? How could I have fallen so deep into my sword? How many rethorical questions could I fit into a chapter?
The thing about writing something like this is that you get to voice all the questions you have to keep to yourself all those years not because you don’t have anyone that can bounce ideas around with you, but because being able to do so requires an understanding from the other party. They have to understand that you weren’t just the typical big fish in a small pond but that you were frustrated, to the core, at the apparent level of mediocrity that passed as excellence in your country. You were frustrated not only with classmates and teachers but with the larger governments’ inability to finance the country and incredible skill at stealing from it. They needed to understand that nobody back home knew what it was like to live and breathe a campus and become a loyal follower of your mascot (a man I would later befriend). They did not know or could not begin to know the idea of dorms and frat parties and an education system that, as a norm, required student input and wasn’t simply reliant on heavy handed professors imparting their lessons to a mute audience. Most of my family members wouldn’t, and still don’t understand the idea of a liberal arts education, or that studying two majors in 4 years is feasible.
On my graduation night a friend’s mom came up to me and congratulated me on going to the U.S. for college.
“What school are you going to?”
“Penn”
“Awesome! What’s that?”
This was one of the positive interactions.
So finals season came and went and as I tried running a MonteCarlo simulation to try to determine what my GPA would be and how I would explain to my parents my fall from the heavens.
They didn’t care. They understood what I would not understand until senior year – that I was to learn more from my peers and my classroom experience than I could learn from a single letter grade. That the strength of the American education system relies heavily on the fact that the learning is done experientially and puts the student face to face with a challenge that they might not be successful at. That it lets you fail and feel like you failed but also leaves a door open that will let you climb back to your feet. And all the while I worried about the “curve” – a pretty little notion that we should, as humans, behave, given a large enough n, as statistics prescribes we should. And I worried about what my friends would think, what my parents would think and I forgot to think about myself.
I learned from that mistake pretty quickly.
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