Here's a picture that someone (probably Jessica Hartshorn) took of me at a Penn State University
computer lab in either 1992 or 1993. Wearing my lucky, lumpy
USFL hat, I am surely working on a class paper or project for which I had been procrastinating. I was a bad student in college who didn't put much effort into most classes. Let's just say that my grade-point average would have made me a strong contender for the Cy Young Award if it were my ERA. I was a bad student because I spent most of my time at
The Daily Collegian, writing, editing and/or paginating stories for the five-day-a-week student newspaper. I wanted to work in newspapers after college, so I figured that was my hands-on education. And here I am in 2026 still working for one of the dwindling number of newspapers in the United States. It didn't hurt, either, that the folks at The Daily Collegian were awesome and well worth spending endless hours newspapering with.
I have felt bad for years, though, about how little effort I put into my classes. Penn State's liberal arts curriculum offered classes on many fascinating topics that Older Chris would love to spend time on, especially in the realms of history, literature, social sciences, health and the arts. If only some of us could have had our later-in-life passion for continuing education when we were 19, 20 and 21...
I also regret that I haven't yet written much about my college days on Papergreat. When I began this blog in 2010, I was only 17 years removed from graduating from Penn State and it felt far too recent to qualify as "history." But now I wake up and it's
nearly 33 years since I left Happy Valley with my diploma. I'm older than the majority of my professors were at the time they graded my low-effort papers, probably while shaking their heads (unless their
graduate TAs did the grading).
And now I fear I've waited too long. My memories of Penn State are no longer crisp and detailed. They feel more like dreams I can recall if I close my eyes. I don't have a ton of ephemera from Penn State anymore to spur recollections. And I have very, very few pictures from my four years on campus, which seems bizarre but that was life before these times in which I take two dozen cat photos per day with my phone. There's
this photo from my junior and senior year dormitory room (where you can also see the USFL hat in the background), and some photos from
THON, but very little beyond that, until Graduation Day. I should have packed a camera for college in 1989! I can think of a hundred things I should have documented with snapshots. Sigh.
I'm going to try to do a better job in the coming months (and years?) of using ephemera as the jumping off point for telling stories about my days at Penn State. They're as worthy of preserving for posterity as postcards from 1915 or vernacular photography from 1935 or travel brochures from 1955. And those stories involve dear friends who represented the very best part of the college experience.
Other snapshots and memories
