It’s a tale as old as Penn, and one of about a million other opinion pieces: Penn’s competitive club culture. It ruins our mental health, it fosters elitism, and it’s grossly preprofessional. But I’d like to take it a step further: It’s a glaring reflection of educational inequality and steals the college experience from many underprivileged students.
Throughout my time at Penn, I’ve noticed a phenomenon in which organizations assure prospective members that absolutely “no experience is necessary,” but everything about the club points to the opposite conclusion. Take for example, the Penn Debate Society. When I opened its application and attended an info session last year, I felt comfortable applying with absolutely zero experience in debate. I had the passion for public speaking and was ready to put in the work to learn. Yet, when I sat down for my interview, I was met with a mock debate in a format I was completely unfamiliar with. Obviously, I didn’t make the cut.
But this isn’t to air out my grievances with PDS specifically; you can find similar situations with just about every other type of club on campus. Penn Mock Trial boasts members who have never stepped foot in a trial before. Don’t check their LinkedIns though; you’ll see that they won debate championships before coming to Penn. Some clubs don’t even pretend to not require experience. Penn Labs specifically requires “sufficient technical ability” and just about every Wharton club asks for a stock pitch that no average freshman or sophomore would be able to write.
By the end of my sophomore year, I found myself in the only club I had experience for: the FGLI Dean’s Advisory Board. Coming from a Title I public high school in rural Arizona, we didn’t have a debate club, Model UN, business clubs, competitive math teams, a student newspaper, computer science classes, or any real opportunity to develop the skills that Penn clubs require before joining. And that’s exactly my point: Penn’s current club culture gatekeeps opportunities from students who were already lacking opportunities before coming to Penn.
But it doesn’t end there: I would even argue that Penn itself contributes to this culture of prior experience. With placement exams designed to fail students and strict AP credit policies, students who have never seen certain subjects are placed in the same classes as students who have already mastered them. When I sat in PHYS 0151, MATH 1410, and even CIS 1600, I felt surrounded by students who already knew physics, multivariable calculus, and discrete mathematics. It sounds like a good thing, starting all students on the same playing field. In reality, it’s unfair to make students who are seeing content for the first time fight to stay above a curve set by students who are learning the subject for the second or third time.
Here’s the bottom line: I got into the same school as everyone else, so why does it feel like I’m underqualified to be a student here? I can’t help but feel envious seeing my high school peers attending state schools with resumes full of extracurriculars I could only dream of taking part in at Penn. Even if the University of Arizona’s Mock Trial team isn’t winning national championships at Yale, at least anyone can join.
Perhaps I just sound bitter that I got rejected from clubs I applied to or salty that I got a bad grade on a few quizzes in MATH 1410, but why shouldn’t I be? What does it mean for Penn to be an Ivy League institution for me and other FGLI students when we don’t reap any of its benefits? Opportunities like Penn Undergraduate Research Mentors are few and far between, and Penn isn’t doing anything to completely overhaul its club system anytime soon. So for now the most impressive part of my resume remains the “Education” section.
It’s not just about filling a resume, either. I chose to attend Penn because I was sold the idea that I’d have the chance to partake in all the classes, extracurriculars, and activities absent from my high school experience. Yet all I was met with was rejections and intro classes that make you feel like they want you to fail. Isn’t the point of going to university to learn? Why am I expected to already know?
For now, I’ll keep applying. But in the future, I’d like to see a Penn that actually stands to support its inexperienced FGLI students. And not just through frivolous free printing and community circles, but through actual systemic change that challenges the status quo.
VIKTOR WITTNER is an Engineering junior from Casa Grande, Ariz. studying computer science. His email is viktorw@seas.upenn.edu.
