<p>It’s sort of disheartening to see people get so snippy and worked up about this silly nickname argument. I’m attending the university soon enough, and it’s disappointing that people get into gripes so easily and debate how much somebody “loves” or “knows” a body of people. It’s cool to stand strong for things you believe in and everything, but I think there’s a lot more worthy causes than calling names or debating intelligence over something as trivial as this.</p>
<p>Chill, guys. You’re scaring prospective students (and also me!). Of course they aren’t going to know how fiercely people apparently advocate the usage of “Penn”. It doesn’t make them any less intelligent than the other student who does. They’re simply uninformed upon the matter. Maybe only a real visit to the university or an interview, as people have said earlier, (or some hardcore Googling) might enlighten them upon this fact. And many students only visit after they’ve actually been accepted, so they might not even be aware of any of this until after they’ve submitted their essay. I don’t think that this whole ordeal is something that’s punishable by disqualification from admittance, as phillySASer08 suggests. And if some futures applicants DO decide to find out more about the University of Pennsylvania in their research and somehow stumble upon this thread, sure, they’ll discover that the appropriate name is “Penn” and might use it in their essay. But they’ll also think us to be spiteful and rigid people with all this name calling here. Nobody wants that, right?</p>
<p>Now, calling it Penn State… 
(I have actually seen this done in a fellow student’s essay.)</p>