Touching the Elephant: How Small Moments Revealed the Bigger Picture
By: Franz-Josef Knops
Semester Abroad: Exchange at Penn
Franz-Josef, one of the Exchange at Penn Correspondents, shares his experience here at Penn during the Fall 2025 semester. Follow along with the group of correspondents on our blog and look out for their images on the @pennabroad Instagram feed.
There is a parable I return to when I think about my first weeks in the United States. A group of blind men are asked to describe an elephant. Each touches a different part and confidently reports something entirely different: a rope, a wall, a tree trunk, a fan. None of them intend to lie. None of them are mistaken. They are simply bound by their perceptual truths.
That is the position we find ourselves in as exchange students. Through America’s cultural dominance in different parts of the globe, we can take an educated guess about American culture or Penn but still be miles off the target.
As a future exchange student, you are in a uniquely fortunate position to test the waters for yourself. You can see the content that shapes students’ minds, face similar day to day challenges, and experience the small moments that reveal the bigger picture.
Let me take you through extracurricular examples from my own journey.
New York
Penn has countless student associations. One week in September, you will see Locust Walk plastered with posters and lined with tables stretching from the compass all the way down to Amy Gutmann Hall.
One of the associations I took a particular liking to that day was the Wharton Undergraduate Real Estate Club. Their ability to organize more than sixty events in an academic year truly surprised me. How could they possibly be so active?
This curiosity led me to attend several of their campus events. One was hosted by Henk, who presented a vision for converting a parking lot at the South Philadelphia Sports Complex, where you will find the stadiums of the Eagles, Phillies, and the Philadelphia 76ers, into a mixed use development featuring housing, retail amenities, and community space. It is hard to hear about such ambitious projects and not be fascinated.
After a few weeks of joining WUREC events, their New York Trek sign up appeared in my inbox. If you have the opportunity to go, either with friends or alone, you absolutely should. Standing between skyscrapers while listening to former Penn students at Blackstone, KKR, and BDT and MSD is an experience that stays with you.
It is one facet of America that you may not love, but you will almost certainly respect. The amount of coordination and the centralization of talent required to create a sphere of influence like New York is tremendous. Exploring the world outside the classroom through these experiences helps your professors’ ideas fall into place in a much clearer way.
Move in Day
One of my earliest examples of a micro discovery that shaped my understanding came when I arrived at Stouffer Mayer on the twentieth of August. It is at this moment that you discover personal biases, such as expecting a furnished room to contain a few helpful items left behind by the previous tenant. In my mind, a drying rack or dish soap were the obvious candidates.
Instead, the room was completely empty.
To my surprise, if an object was not an integral part of the apartment, such as a stove, bed, or shelves, it was removed. On the one hand, this approach allowed us to decorate our rooms in ways that felt fully personal. On the other hand, for Europeans it may feel strange that items essential for living could be thrown away every six months.
So off we went to Target, buying the essentials that would carry us through the next six months. It was only the first tiny piece of the elephant. A simple beginning that now pales in comparison to the memories we built over time on the fifth floor of Mayer.
You understand the elephant only after you have touched enough parts.
Thank you very much for the opportunity.
-FJ Knops