“I deserve to be at Penn,” is always a funny statement to hear someone say. Not to burst anyone’s bubble, but you don’t. None of us do.
New York University Stern School of Business professor Scott Galloway once proclaimed, “The whole point [of higher education] is to give unremarkable people a chance at being remarkable.” I should preface this by saying Galloway believes elite institutions like Penn currently do not serve that purpose and instead favor those who are born “remarkable” and wealthy. While that perspective certainly has merit, it gets at least one thing wrong. It’s not that Penn students are born wealthy or are freakishly talented compared to everyone else; we’re just unremarkable in a different way.
I know some of you are going to cite that one friend who got a perfect grade-point average in high school and started a nonprofit when they were a fetus. Again, though, we shouldn’t just see “remarkable” as a measure of how many classes you ace or dollars you make. Those things, in the end, are often determined by a lot more than a person controls, be it wealth, race, country, or even health. On top of that, compared to other students at Penn, being valedictorian or building a startup are not out of the ordinary either.
Instead, we need to think of “remarkable” as what challenges the accepted, what disrupts the undisputed. Being “remarkable” should come with making someone or something uncomfortable, and challenging what is often left untouched. Right now, though, we don’t see that kind of remarkable, but the “remarkable” obsessed with the Ivy bubble we inhabit and becoming the most “Penn” we can be compared to our peers.
That has created a mold we’ve convinced ourselves we need to follow: dressing posh, applying to a ridiculous number of clubs, and pulling As without attending classes. In our quest of satisfying that mold, we survey a class and count how many athletes are taking it. We record Instagram reels at Fisher Fine Arts Library or Huntsman Hall to show the world how “busy” we are. We dress in suits to our club interviews and put on a rehearsed smile for our coffee chats.
But what is “remarkable” about this if we all do it? Not to mention, as College sophomore Piper Slinka-Petka rightly said, it affirms the idea that “there’s only one mold to fit [at Penn] — which is not only a waste of time, but wholly untrue.” We call it our Ivy preprofessional “culture,” and it is: a “culture” of the unremarkable.
In pursuit of our definition of “remarkable,” we have ironically sought to make ourselves indistinguishable from each other. In doing so, we have forgotten why we were given the chance to be at Penn in the first place. We were given this opportunity because even though we were indistinguishable when we applied, we promised to take the chance to become truly remarkable in our own quirky, Quaker (too cheesy?) way if accepted. And I implore each of you, even if you didn’t before, to see that promise through now.
That is the real disconnect. Being remarkable isn’t about name-dropping an Ivy League degree or wearing a tux to a group presentation. It’s about defying norms, constantly redefining what we expect of others and ourselves, and unsettling how we each see the world. It’s about meaningfully pursuing ideas our society fears and constructively questioning the notions, traditions, and beliefs our society values. It’s about embracing the new and especially the unusual.
How many of us have done any of this since we got here? I haven’t done much myself. What do you say we start, or continue, together (in a heartfelt, fuzzy sense)? Ask yourself, “Why am I doing, learning, or thinking what I currently am?” Am I acting in pursuit of a desire to “belong” or to unconditionally embrace who I’d like to be?
Who do I frustrate, empower, or stimulate as a result of my thoughts and actions, and who do I become relative to the society I inhabit? Am I a “freak” on the fringe? A kid in a phase? Am I merely society’s “oddity,” or a catalyst for change towards not just the new, but the unusual?
Grappling with these questions won’t make us remarkable overnight. But, it’ll provide clarity on why we chose Penn in the first place and remind us of the promise we made to this institution and to each other as we strive for the truly remarkable and unusual.
ZAID ALSUBAIEI is a College junior studying mathematical economics from Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia. His email address is zaidsub@sas.upenn.edu.
