“Hey, nice to meet you. I’m Benny.”

“Melanie. Where do you live?”

“Riepe—Lower Quad. You?”

“Hill.”

“Oh.” I knew what was coming.

“So…” Oh, great. Here it comes:

“Where are you from?”

I have come to hate this question. Why? Because of the inevitable next part of the conversation:

“New York.”

“Oh, where in New York?”

“Long Island.”

“Oh, where on Long Island?”

“Great Neck.”

“Oh…” She kind of titled her head to the side, and the conversation ended there.

Yeah, that’s right, I’m from Great Neck. I am a white, Jewish male legacy from Great Neck, Long Island. My mom went here, my grandfather went here, and my great uncle, uncle, and four of my cousins went here. I am the stereotypical accepted Penn student. I am also the recipient of some of the most irritating comments ever.

But I’m not the only one. After asking students, freshmen and seniors alike, I have found a common theme. “People are just too quick to judge,” one freshman commented, “They think they know you just by where you’re from.” It seems like almost every time this conversation comes up, someone gets annoyed.

I don’t know how many of you know where Great Neck is or what it’s about. It’s not just a town—it’s more of a type. There are many of them out there: most of Long Island is a “Great Neck,” and everyone knows a “Great Neck” near him or her. For those of you who like literature, Great Neck was the “West Egg” in Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. For those of you more like me who like television, Great Neck was mentioned in a few episodes of Entourage, such as “Guys and Doll” (the one with the Shrek doll).

To be honest, for a while I couldn’t even say where I was from. During my first visits to frat parties, meeting all those seniors, I said was from “outside Queens”—I was so embarrassed. I don’t have a mansion, I don’t have millions upon millions of dollars—I just live there, and people are so quick to judge that they group me into the spoiled rich kid category.

People from the “Great Necks” of the world aren’t the only ones being judged too early. Some kids get judged for being from “farm country.” I talked to a girl about living in Indiana. She asked me, “what do you initially think when I say that I'm from Indiana? Is it corn? Soybeans? Nothing?” Truthfully, I thought nothing. I didn’t even know Indiana was a state until I was in middle school (and I got into Penn? Maybe it’s because I’m a legacy…). She continued, “In reality, I live in a suburb of Chicago, only about 30 minutes away from the city.  But no one believes me, ever.  True, less than fifteen miles away is farmland en masse, but "the region,” aka Northwest Indiana, is very suburban; we literally sit on the Indiana/Illinois state line.”

It’s funny how people think they know everything, especially in a school like Penn with so many intelligent people. Students think they know a person, their family, their friends, their lifestyle, and their financial status, all on the basis of where they are from. It is kind of disheartening to see the judgment call made in a school with such a diverse population. “It makes you feel bad,” one freshman said, “like you can’t say where you are from because they are going to make fun of you almost. I can’t change where I’m from, so why does it happen?” It’s a good question to ask since many who come from affluent communities, or “farm land” communities like Indiana, or anywhere else for that matter, are often worried about others’ reactions to where they live.

But there seems to be hope, and it lies in our foreign friends. I have the pleasure of being very good friends with kids from all over the world here at Penn. Both of my friends from Greece and Turkey gave approximately the same answer when I questioned them about the reactions to their origins: “Most people were just pleasantly surprised. They were inquisitive. They wanted to know more about it. It was great. No problems here.” I guess people only criticize what they already know—correction: what stereotypes they already know.

I’m not going to lie. The fact that I was a third generation legacy did cross my mind as I was applying Penn. And, it’s even possible that it had an impact on my acceptance. But the truth of the matter is, my grades and my extracurricular activities is what really got me (as well as all of you) into this school. It’s unfair to think that legacy students have an advantage. Unless their families endowed a building, or they are Amy Gutmann’s favorite nephews, legacy status does not carry that much weight. Most of my Penn legacy friends, in fact, who applied to Penn, were rejected.

This type of behavior isn’t limited to me and to our generation of Penn students; this has been going on for decades. Being a legacy student, as well as the son of a legacy student, gave me a great opportunity to ask my mom how she was treated upon her arrival to Penn. My mom’s response was nothing surprising: “It was basically the same thing as it is now. It didn’t help that I was from Great Neck either. They just automatically assumed you were a JAP.” JAP, an acronym for Jewish American Princess, is synonymous with the familiar WASP terminology—it just so happens most of my town is Jewish. “People didn’t give you a chance to show who you really were. Their assumptions became definite descriptions. If it was that bad back then, I feel bad about what it must be like now.”

So the question is, what can we learn from this? Only we and those we care about know the truth,—that’s all that matters. Now, when someone implies that I only got into Penn because my mom went here, I respond with a comment like, “No, it has nothing to do with that. It probably has more to do with the fact that my grandfather, great uncle, uncle and cousins went here. Yeah, that probably did it.”

Benny Laitman is a freshman in the College. You can write to him at laitman@sas.

Comments

---

Post a Comment

Name:       Title:

Email Address:

Security Code:
Comment: (XHTML is allowed. Innapropriate material will be deleted.)