Students @ Schreyer Honors College, Penn State

“Call me Popek.” Everyone else does already.

Good evening, everyone. My name’s Matt, but I’m better known by my last name of Popek, and I’m your newest humble blogger for the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State.

I’m somewhat torn between writing a proper introduction entry and jumping right in with why I’m at PSU (and why you all should be too). It’s a difficult conundrum; if I start in right away with any sort of recruiting pitch, I risk turning readers off immediately before you get a chance to really know me. On the other hand, if I don’t write this down now, I’ll probably forget it. You know what that’s like. So what do I do? I’ll have to think this over with some music.

::Five minutes pass::

Aaaah, the extended Futurama theme: a brilliant remix of Pierre Henry. Great show, too. Did you know that Comedy Central will be airing the DVDs as “episodes” in 2008? Should be interesting. Yet another TV show that died before its time.

I digress. I hope, though, that you can see that I have plenty to talk about, not just SHC publicity. I promise to do both in due time. And yes, I feel that I owe the readers of this blog a proper introduction. There will be plenty of time for you all to get to know me, but since we are currently approaching my second week of winter break, I felt that I should begin with what I have done since leaving Dear Ol’ State. After all, introducing my entire life story in my first entry is absolutely no fun at all – better to build suspense that way, right?

Anyways, I suppose a little background is in order. As I said, my name is Matt. (Or Popek. Your choice. Or you could make up another nickname, as my previous roommate has done this past semester – but that’s another entry.) I’m a junior, majoring in Urban and Regional Development through the Department of Geography. With this degree, I’d like to enter a career in urban or regional planning, preferrably in my home area of Southeastern Pennsylvania. My sister is a junior in a high school in southeastern Pennsylvania as well, which is where my story begins.

You see, I was a big music kid (read: geek) in grade school. I started on the trombone in fourth grade, which led to concert band, marching band, jazz band, and the occasional orchestra performance, and also led to my recruitment into high school choir. My high school band director started at the high school eight years ago, and has been performing “A Christmas Festival” every year. He invites alumni from our high school to come back and play along as well, which always results in a big turnout. This year’s concert was held last Wednesday night, and I was home and able to play for the seventh year in a row. (Excellent thing about being a geography major number 1: very few finals – I was finished with my fall term Monday at noon.)

Going back to your high school after your graduation is always somewhat strange, and is even different from returning to a middle/junior high or elementary school. You still know the layout of the building (unless they knocked it down and built a new one, which happened with my middle school), and probably still know most of the teachers, but all of the students are utterly foreign. I’m the only one of my friends from high school that still have siblings in the band, so I have met many of my sister’s friends, but it doesn’t feel the same as when I was in high school.

Large amounts of alumni returning to a high school at the same time as current high schoolers are present makes for an even more interesting scene. Some alumni on the verge of graduating from college feel the “I’m way too old!” feeling, even though they are only 22, which makes the feeling laughable to anyone over the age of 25. Students just out of high school and into college are comparing notes with their fellow freshmen while also reconnecting with the high school seniors, while high school freshmen look around at this large gathering of mostly strange people, not believing that they will be in the first group’s shoes within a decade.

As a college junior with a high school junior sibling, I had a lot of people to catch up with when I returned for the first time since…uh, Thanksgiving. (Told you I was a band geek…and I’m proud of it!) I was happy to see my trumpeting college senior friend who attends Wash U in St. Louis, my fellow low brass college junior friends (currently at Lebanon Valley and Messiah), a choir college junior friend (at Susquehanna), low brass college sophomore friends (at Northeastern and Ursinus), and woodwind college freshman friends (at Lebanon Valley and Temple). Everyone happily reported that college was going well for them, and I echoed the sentiments. I also engaged them in discussions about their academic pursuits. Everyone else, it seemed, was following along the tracks they had decided on coming out of high school; both my low brass junior friends were still in music education, my senior friend was finishing off his civil engineering program, and my sophomore friend at Northeastern was well on her way to a degree in her pharmacy program.

This, you see, was not where I fit in. Coming out of high school, you see, I had my eyes set on a physics degree. At this point, dear reader, you are probably asking yourself: “Wait, he said he was a Urban and something major…” You would be correct. (And it’s Urban and Regional Development, now renamed Human Geography. ) Around March of my freshman year, I realized that a physics degree just wasn’t right for me. Maybe it was the nonstop hard math (not hard as in easy/hard, but hard as in serious, calculus-type stuff), maybe it was the inevitable lab work, maybe it just wasn’t meant to be. I know other people are able to both handle it AND enjoy it, but I wasn’t enjoying it. So I changed to geography, mainly thanks to falling in love with the subject during GEOG 20H (now GEOG 20U – the course description does not do it justice), my only elective during my first semester.

Which leads me to my point, and the first thing that most prospective students inquire about Penn State – its size. My fellow blogger and good friend Chris has already written up a great entry about the size of our university, but in order to properly do it justice, I’d like to paraphrase Mr. Douglas Adams:

“Penn State is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to your dorm, but that’s just peanuts to Penn State.”

OK, perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But PSU is big. So big, that when they added Penn State to the Big Ten, the logo spontaneously changed to reflect the new constellation of universities in the Midwestern sky.

Once again, another exaggeration. (They did have to change the logo, though – who doesn’t love secret elevens?)

Big certainly scares some people. However, big comes with benefits, and the one that directly relates to this story now is the massive number of majors offered. As I like to say, Penn State has “everything from physics to geography to agribusiness management.” (Don’t laugh, suburbanites – farms are important to the great commonwealth of Pennsylvania.)

Since this entry is already long enough, I’ll make my second point somewhat briefer for now, as I can expand on it closer to admissions crunch time. I didn’t just talk with college people while I was waiting to play Christmas Festival; I also spoke with some high school seniors. I remember how much of a crunch time winter vacation was three years ago, trying to send off all of my college applications before January 1st. Some of the seniors looked slightly frazzled from staying up late working on college applications and essays. I asked one of my friends how many schools she was applying to, and she answered with a straight face: “Eleven.”

11. That’s one more than ten, and ten more than one. So without getting too preachy, I’ll also present suggestion number one in my ongoing list of “Thoughts On Applying To College”: don’t stress out over applying to as many schools as you can. For some of you high school seniors, it may be too late, but this is important for the high school juniors. I found out the hard way about this – I applied to eight schools and got into five. The story about how I ended up at Penn State deserves an entry to itself, but the point fits in well with my discussion. You can only attend one college (with very few exceptions), and you can always transfer if things don’t work out. Therefore, I’d suggest to applying students: six is probably a good limit, broken into as many categories as you want. My friends here at the SHC applied to between one and fourteen schools (yep, 14), and all ended up at Penn State. (Plus, between you, me, and the monitor – it gets a little expensive after a while, right?)

So…yeah. That’s me. Popek. Look back if you missed #1 in my lists of “Excellent Things About Being a Geography Major” and “Thoughts on Applying to College”. I owe you all a proper introduction (personal item number 1: people consider me tall), so look for that (hopefully) before 2007 ends. It’s about time for bed for me for now. Have a good night, a good weekend, and a good break!