Letter from the Editor: Penn 10, 2019

When I floated the idea to go random with Penn 10 this year, I wasn’t really sure if it was going to work. I knew why it should work—everyone at Penn has a valuable story to share, reinforcing competition can exclude important narratives, and randomness is a great, fun experiment. 

Whenever you do something new, something different, you try to temper your expectations, at least if you’re like me. “Maybe this will work.” “We’ll give it a shot.” “Why not try, right?” There are those flickers of uncertainty and doubt. And there were times when I really thought this wouldn’t work. 

But I was blown away by the people we found, and what they were willing to share with Street and the campus community writ large. Every person in this issue shared their good days and their bad days, their relationship to this campus, their relationship with their families. We learned which seniors use a cat licking their face as an alarm clock. We learned which seniors had a childhood obsession with covered bridges. We learned where these people spend their time, and what their Penn experience means, looking back on four years on this weird, wild campus.

And we learned that everybody’s Penn story matters. 

This issue could have been populated by any permutation of the thousands of seniors at Penn, and it would have still been amazing. That’s not because my staff is amazing—even though they are—but because everyone at Penn has a meaningful story to share. 

I’m really proud of the work we did on this issue, and I hope that, whatever your Penn experience, you can find kernels of it represented here.