As a sophomore who has now acclimated to the culture of Penn, I have made a distinct observation over the past few semesters. I have noticed the way ambition seems to quietly fade once people arrive here. The original goal for many of us was to stand out in our accomplishments and distinguish ourselves. But now, after getting into a top school, more and more students seem content to meet the bar instead of clear it.
In conversations with my friends at other Ivy League schools, I hear the same observation: collectively, the comfort achieved by making it to a top school has slowly eroded the burning fire that has gotten us here in the first place.
I will add a caveat by saying that not every single person has slowed down; some people are far more “locked in” than others. But overall, our objectives have changed. Before, we were rewarded for standing out, pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones, competing, and excelling in our passions. Now, the primary goal has become to land a high paying job at a brand name firm. There is absolutely nothing wrong with chasing a high paying job that will give you a good foundation to build an even greater career; in fact, that is the most rational choice. Rather, what worries me are the long-term consequences of this shift in ambitions.
Once recruiting is over, many people slowly fade their commitments and hobbies and stop chasing ambitious goals because the main target has been secured. There are definitely a couple of factors that make this true at Penn more than other schools. For one, we have a huge finance pipeline that starts recruiting as early as sophomore year, so many of us use recruiting as our marker of success, trading taking notes in class for scrolling through Handshake.
What starts as a reasonable means to reach our goals slowly hardens into a culture. At Penn, that culture is increasingly transactional, and it seeps into how we treat our time, our clubs, and even our relationships. We drop clubs as soon as we get a full time offer. We drop people as soon as they don’t fit the perceived status tier we want to be associated with. We start to treat value as interchangeable with status instead of recognizing that the real, intrinsic value of life comes from a true alignment with the person you actually want to be.
The transactional culture at Penn should be called out more. Calling things “performative” is not just some overused generational insult; it is a reflection of how aware we have become that social media, LinkedIn personas, and Penn Face are real and that most of us can see straight through them. At Penn, many cliques form less around genuine connection and more around convenience, proximity, or perceived status. When that becomes the norm, comfort at a top school is no longer just about having made it in; it subtly reshapes our sense of which people, communities, and commitments are worth our time.
What we should really be valuing is figuring out who we are as individuals, and then everything else becomes more natural: what career path is best suited for our skill sets, who the people we want to surround ourselves with are, and what impact we want to have on the world. These are the questions that are worth spending the most identity-shaping years of our lives to think about. Penn should be a means by which we find who we are and what we are meant to do in our lives, not a time where we become a flock of sheep.
The fact that most College, Wharton, and Engineering graduates all get funneled into the same two industries is a reflection of Penn’s culture. It is what happens when we never stop to figure out who we are in the first place. When we don’t know that, it becomes far too easy to trade our individuality and the fire that once set us apart for the safety of the flock.
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MAHEE PATEL is a College sophomore studying Economics from Iselin, N.J. Her email is mtpatel@sas.upenn.edu.
