When was the last time you saw your peer advisor or your PHINS leaders? We never really did to begin with. Since arriving at Penn, we’ve pondered how Penn provides students with structure. But the answer we’ve come to terms with is actually that it doesn’t.
“War flashbacks!” is how most of us typically describe New Student Orientation. For the first week after move-in, we found ourselves floundering, unsure of which events to go to, who to approach, and frankly, where we were. Sure, the NSO gala at the Philadelphia Art Museum was good fun, but the beginning of college should be remembered for more than a night that better resembled Senior prom. Beyond that, the rest of NSO felt more like a rite of passage, a suffering to be endured. By the end, we were exhausted from having had so many frivolous conversations, filled with Instagram-sharing and major-reciting, not enthused by an abundance of budding friendships.
That same attitude carries throughout your first year, where you are joining organizations that “haze” you for the sake of promoting bonding between your peers. Most students do not have any sort of reliable connection to Penn as an institution. Rather, your sense of stability is completely dependent on the organizations you are part of. For example, Wharton students have first-year cohorts from the moment they step onto campus until the end of their freshman year where they literally take classes together. But for other students, they’re left to forge their own paths, making connections wherever they can and figuring out where their classes are by themselves.
At other similar schools like Yale University, students have a heavily structured first-year experience set up by the institution. They’re randomly sorted into Residential Colleges, connect with Freshman Counselors throughout the year, and are required to participate in Camp Yale programs. At Penn, we have one week of first-year orientation, an uncomfortable mandatory consent circle, and optional Pre-Orientation Programs that are poorly advertised to students and feature unnecessarily long applications.
In fact, most forms of connection or community at Penn have a high barrier to entry, where groups often evaluate artistic talent, technical skill, and even personality. Students who can play the flute, are experienced public speakers, or possess the outgoingness to small-talk strangers have the upper hand. Those who can’t compete suffer devastating ego death in their first weeks of college. Perhaps this process is good exposure for new students of how Penn truly is. But there is something deeply dysfunctional about this kind of first-year culture — one that requires students to prove their worth through competence instead of acknowledging each student’s inherent value.
It’s not just these first-year events that widely shape your experience at Penn. It goes as far as your entire underclassmen experience when there is a widely different quality in academic advising. We can all acknowledge that the quality of your advisor can shape your future in either highly positive or negative ways. As underclassmen, some students have great experiences with their pre-major advisors where they are given high levels of support, sent encouragement, and made aware of valuable opportunities.
Meanwhile, others witness pre-major advisors struggling with the literal technology that lifts the registration hold after a brief and detached discussion of their first semester course plan. In general, it’s easy to feel like there are no faculty or upperclassmen who genuinely know you or care about your success if it doesn’t benefit them. For many, this comes in stark contrast to high school, where even massive public high schools manage to make it feel like students and teachers are working towards a common goal. But here, most students don’t feel that structured recognition from Penn as an institution and are instead expected to seek out those relationships themselves.
Penn advertises itself as a University that equips its student body with the tools to make their own success. But in reality, that attitude is Penn’s way of absolving itself of any responsibility to foster community. If Penn wants to “enable students to be who they are” and help them “grow by interacting with others” they ought to create actual spaces for everyone to do so, indiscriminately of their talents or backgrounds. Mentoring resources and first-year experiences should be available to all students, not just those in a specific school. This shared community can look like offering a cohort program to all first-years, requiring them to participate in a robust Pre-Orientation Program, or standardizing faculty mentoring.
We acknowledge that Penn tries to create experiences where academic security and personal connections can be formed on campus. However, Penn must start showing its students that it genuinely cares about what happens to us after admission — not just academically or professionally, but personally. Without any sort of University intervention or initiatives, we’re left with our first-week NSO group’s Instagrams, not friendship.
DEW UDAGEDARA is a College first-year studying neuroscience from Long Beach, Calif. His email is dewdunu@sas.upenn.edu.
LINDSAY MUNETON is a College junior studying sociology from Bergenfield, NJ. Her email address is lmuneton@sas.upenn.edu.
