Marcus Mundy is so well–known, it’s absurd. Besides being the face of the Penn Alcohol Module, he’s involved in the Glee Club, Queer People of Color, As 1 Global and Carriage Senior Society and he’s about to create his own country: Techtar.
Street: You’re considered one of the friendliest people on campus. Why? Marcus Mundy: My attitude towards life is to just embrace it with an open arm. Everyone I come into contact with, I try and remember their name, a few things about them, so that I can get a sense of who they are, and how we can relate, and I try and focus on that. I genuinely want to be friends with people. I guess that becomes infectious and people want to be friendly around me too.
Street: Do you ever have people come up to you because of the Alcohol Module? MM: All the time. It’s the worst when I’m out during NSO or Spring Fling. I always have tons of freshmen say, “Oh my god, it’s you, the guy from the video! Like, sorry!” People apologize to me in the elevators when they’re drunk. It’s kind of absurd.
Street: You should just wear dark sunglasses to avoid being noticed. MM: I wore dark sunglasses yesterday and immediately three freshmen came up to me. I think I’m more recognizable when I’m incognito, I guess? I tend to hide in plain sight.
Street: What’s your spirit animal? MM: A panda, or Beyoncé.
Street: What makes you most “glee–ful”? MM: Glee Club for me is a brotherhood. We do everything together, we spend hours of time together, we go on hour–long bus rides...I guess, having a community makes me gleeful. It makes me happy that I can go to a place like Penn—where there are 10,000 undergrads—and be able to navigate it really well.
Street: What does your Penn Card look like? MM: It’s my third one. I keep breaking them because I don’t know my own strength. The first one I crumbled around a doorknob — it was in my hand and I grabbed the doorknob and it crumbled. The second one? [laughs] I was swiping and it pretty much just snapped in half. And the third one, the top came off so I just had the barcode, and that would slide through, and the dining hall ladies would hate me.
Street: Do you still have the same picture as freshman year? MM: Yeah, I’m wearing a white shirt against a white background. I’m a floating head! It’s kinda absurd.
Street: If you could create your own country, what would it be called and what would it be like? MM: I’ve thought about this. This isn’t the first time this has been brought up! It would be called Tehctar. It’s the word “ratchet” backwards. It’s a tropical island where it’s pretty much always a Major Lazer concert, always EDM, music everywhere, and people are always twerking all the time. It’s our national anthem—the twerk. It’s a place of intellectual stimulation and no, like, bias. No privilege complexes, no cycles of oppression. It’s an open, level playing field, but everyone’s ratchet at the same time. Intellectually ratchet.
Street: What’s your secret talent? MM: I acquire languages really rapidly. And I can do a split. There’s a picture of me in Glee Club in the DP, dead center, in a split.
Street: There are two types of people at Penn… MM: The people you know and the people you don’t.
Street: As a tour guide, what’s one thing you wish you could tell incoming freshmen? MM: You don’t have to fit into some mold; you don’t have to be this “business person” or take on 30 internships every summer. You can do that, but you can also just relax and have a good time and not stress yourself out.
