College Days

I attended the Pennsylvania State University, where I earned a bachelors degree in journalism in 1975. The main campus of Penn State is located on a 6,388 acre campus called University Park that sits adjacent to the town of State College. State College, really a borough, is located in Centre County, Pennsylvania. It lies in the Nittany Valley between Bald Eagle Mountain and Tussey Mountain, near the state's geographic center. The town was settled in 1859, it was named for Pennsylvania State College (now Pennsylvania State University), which was established there in 1855. The population of State College is about 35,000.

Penn State maintains a number of regional branch campuses around the state, one of which, the Abington Campus, I attended for the first two years of college. The entrance requirements for the main campus are quite rigorous. The University accepts only about half the students who apply. The branch campuses have lower entrance standards. In all likelihood, I would not have been admitted to the main campus at University Park had I applied there for my first year of college.

Penn State Abington was established in 1950 when Abby A. Sutherland, principal and owner of the elite Ogontz School for Girls, gave the campus and facilities to the Pennsylvania State University. The campus is located on a picturesque 45 acres in a northern suburb of Philadelphia. For the first two years of college, while I attended Abington, I lived at home. Abington features a small-college atmosphere in a suburban setting, 15 miles north of Center City Philadelphia.

I can still remember the heady excitement of my first semester at University Park, at the beginning of my third year of college. I could sense the material of my mind thinning, spreading, growing transparent; sometimes I was feverish with the excitement of what I was learning and my eyes felt dry and hot and overlarge, the skin around them felt abraded. After hours studying in the library, I would walk outside and the color of the sky at six o'clock on an October evening -- slate blue, shot through with black -- seemed as inviting and dangerous as if I were a child playing too late, too hard, and at any minute I might be called in. But I was not called in. I was told to stay out later, to travel further: the world of ideas was mine. I belonged there; I could inhabit any region of it. My body, both overexcited and repressed from all that reading, would insist on movement. I would run down the hill toward the town, toward State College, and let the wind bite into me, hear the buzz of the cars and watch the lights come on in the town at the bottom of the hill.