Originally published March 15, 2008

Staring at a monitor in sleepy and familiar Habersham county, it’s difficult to imagine a place like Penn. It’s near impossible to believe it’s a place in which I’ve spent the last six months of my life. I know a lot of college kids have weird homecomings, but I’d contend that mine are weirder than most. It stems from the disconnect between the worlds of Habersham county, GA and the UPenn campus.

I board an afternoon train in bustling 30th Street Station. 13 hours later, I’m deposited into the dead quiet of Toccoa, GA at 5:45 am. The streets are deserted, the traffic lights are set to blink red, and the air smells amazing. My room looks like I never left it, and after a nap I’m catching up with folks who wear Dixie Outfitter shirts and call people “Jew” if they’re being dumb.

It’s like landing on another planet. Not necessarily a worse planet–a lot of times I appreciate Habersham more than Penn–but a very, very different one. Watching the sun set over Highway 365 or walking with my dad in the hundreds of acres of national forest that surround our house, half a square mile of urban Philadelphia seems like a strange six months’ home.

Trying to describe Penn is strange too. Things I take for granted when I’m on Penn campus suddenly seem pretty unbelievable when I step so far off it. My dorm is one of the fanciest looking buildings I’ve seen in my life. Kal Penn hangs out pretty regularly, and Bill Clinton stopped by last week and Karl Rove two weeks before him. I met my scholarship donors in an expensive heated tent, and their family was worth a couple of hundred million. My PennPals engage in fierce (and daily) political debate, and it’s a constant exercise to keep up.

This strangeness can be bad as well. Penn hires hundreds of security guards, and a street you don’t see a guard on is a street you don’t feel safe walking on. There are shootings blocks from campus. A bicyclist was struck by a car right outside my dorm, and the asphalt was stained red with blood when we went out to eat later that night. Thousands of pedestrians pass each other on the sidewalk every day, but I’ve never been to a place where the people were more unfriendly.

What most separates the worlds of Penn and Habersham is the lack of any link between them. I don’t have any high school friends attending college with me, and I’ve never seen a Penn person outside of Philadelphia. The disconnect is strong enough that it still feels odd when wall posts from Penn and Habersham friends crop up right next to each other.

I think the best way to describe the Penn-Habersham relationship is like a reverse Harry Potter. Penn is an unbelievable, kind of magical place that I leave for occasional trips to the Dursleys’, only this time the Dursleys are really cool and include a huge network of some of the nicest people I’ve met in my life. Both worlds are good, but they remain very different.

It makes for an interesting commute, but it also makes me begin to doubt, as I did over Christmas and have now over Spring Break, that one of these two worlds exists at all.

Thanks for reading,

Thomas/Emerson