School of Design to Stop Offering Credits for Standing Outside the Design Building Smoking Cigarettes

This past Wednesday, the School of Design announced a sweeping change to the current curriculum. The new curriculum will take effect for Architecture and Design students beginning enrollment in Fall of 2018.

A mandatory introductory course for these majors, which required students to spend 60 minutes a week standing outside the Design Building smoking cigarettes, has been completely eliminated from the curriculum. The course, previously titled “Pondering Design,” provided students with the opportunity to think design-related thoughts while pacing, sitting, and smoking with other design students.

One junior, Adrian Min, said that the class greatly enriched his college education. “The class may be gone, but what I learned while sitting outside the Design School, smoking, will forever stay with me,” Min claims.

Incoming freshmen to the Class of 2022 are reportedly upset with the change. However, for some ambitious students, the curriculum change will not be putting a damper on their Penn education. Early Decision admit Lisa Cho says that the she has every intention to follow in the footsteps of the Design Students who came before her, even though she won’t be getting credits. “I’ll never forget when I visited Penn and saw trendy Design students sitting outside the Design Building smoking cigarettes. I told myself that that would be me someday.”