Buried in my mom’s camera roll is a video of me from last April, doe-eyed, donning my newly-purchased apparel and officially committing to Penn. “Are you sure you want to go there?” my mom asks half-jokingly. “Yes,” I respond. “The opportunities are endless.”
“Opportunity,” in all of its vague, grandiose glory, was my reason for trading tropical California for frigid Philadelphia. After a year here, what does that opportunity look like? Pure carnage. In fact, it almost resembles the Roman Colosseum where gladiators (first-year students) clad in armor (trench coats) duel one another relentlessly for their lives (a spot in Wharton Undergraduate Consulting Club).
The rumors about Penn’s competition are unequivocally true. Upon arriving here, you’d be wise to heed urban legends of club acceptance rates lower than that of Penn itself. As an addendum to the first-year-of-college aphorism “say yes to everything,” at Penn you must also “apply to everything.” In the cacophony of this competition, you’ll find that religious career obsession is just downstream. At the beginning of the year, don’t be surprised if your friend invites you to a BlackRock information session before dinner. And don’t be alarmed if by spring you overhear two best friends politely fighting over who landed the better internship.
Rapidly and even unintentionally, we accept hypercompetitiveness as the law of the land. In context, opportunity has become a relentless, all-consuming pursuit. But does it need to be this way?
“C’est la vie,” or “that’s how the world works,” one might say. And mostly, they would be right. The arduous battle of landing any position at Penn is not dissimilar to the very real job market, where even 100 applications can be insufficient to secure full-time work. The lessons you learn while vying for a club spot — leveraging your network, presenting yourself, and prioritizing your goals — translate quite well into avoiding unemployment.
Given these parameters, how does opportunity really manifest itself for incoming students? Not necessarily how I had expected — not like jobs, clubs, and resources ready for the taking. It’s more meta than that. The true opportunity is the chance to pursue opportunity. That’s to say that honing your networking skills and perfecting your personal brand often proves more valuable than the content of the resulting resume filler. The process of trying to get into a club or seeking a resource is often more applicable (and productive) than the work of the club or the value of the resources themselves.
The optimist in me thinks this outlook emphasizes the journey over the destination, even when the destination is a six-figure job after graduation. But my inner cynic would say that this perspective makes Penn culture self-involved, insidious, and overly corporate, where every passing conversation feels like the other party is making a career move. The realist in me knows it’s a mixture of both. Penn students, for all of our complaining and catastrophizing, have an appreciation for the hard work that our career prospects require of us. At the same time, as any jaded upperclassmen will tell you, acquiring opportunity usually comes with the trade-off of connection or fulfillment.
I don’t need to lecture new admits on the moral bankruptcy of popular fields like consulting and finance or caution them against career funneling; that sentiment is pervasive enough. Instead, I want to offer that at Penn, the details matter, maybe more than they’re worth at face value. Sometimes it’s for the better, highlighting the unsung aspects of a given job.
Oftentimes, though, it amplifies the anxiety surrounding each step toward a goal. In the pursuit of opportunities within the Penn bubble, each choice feels uncharacteristically huge. Hierarchies surrounding clubs, Greek organizations, and even individual people, can turn interaction into a Machiavellian game of strategy. Perhaps this is a symptom of unfulfillment. The fast pace of corporate pursuits makes it easier to zero in on the next step than to zoom out over the (mostly dull) big picture. Regardless, this commitment to the “nitty gritty” colors our view of opportunity.
Ultimately, I think Penn’s culture surrounding opportunities will continue to be as it is, for the most part at least. Success within the walls of Penn will ask that you suspend your disbelief to accept the complex oddities of a new language and a strict pecking order. But turning that Penn success into real-world success will require you to think more broadly about your place in society. The connections and social capital that seem so valuable on this side of the Schuylkill River might be less valuable than the skills you learned while acquiring them.
To incoming students, I encourage you to take what resonates from Penn’s culture and insert it into your existing view of the world. Opportunity is everywhere, in the fine details and the big picture.
DEW UDAGEDARA is a College first year studying neuroscience from Long Beach, Ca. His email is dewdunu@sas.upenn.edu.
