When I opened my Penn acceptance letter and watched the confetti appear over the words “Congratulations, future Quaker!” I felt a wave of excitement, relief, and, perhaps regrettably, validation. Like many applicants, I had spent high school constructing a story — or what college counselors might call an “application persona” — about who I was. Years of involvement in speech and debate, mock trial, high school journalism, and community service had reinforced a fairly clear narrative: Luna is an aspiring lawyer interested in public policy and advocacy. By the time I submitted my application, that story sounded coherent and intentional on paper, and Penn’s acceptance seemed to confirm that I had gotten it, at the very least, somewhat right.
After years of building a narrative strong enough to earn admission, it becomes easy to mistake that narrative for your definitive identity. However, incoming Penn students should resist the temptation of becoming too attached to the version of themselves that got admitted. While college applications reward premature hyperspecialization, committing too strongly to a path chosen before arriving on campus can limit the exploration, intellectual growth, and self-discovery that higher education is meant to provide.
Intellectual breadth, developed through interdisciplinary learning, often produces insights that hyperspecialization alone cannot. Research on interdisciplinary collaboration has found that individuals and teams drawing from diverse fields are often better equipped to generate novel ideas and solutions because they approach problems through multiple methods and perspectives. Similarly, a 2024 study published in Creativity Research Journal found that people with a wider variety of interests and experiences demonstrated greater cognitive flexibility and originality.
The positive impacts of interdisciplinary problem solving are also visible across a multitude of fields such as bioethics, which draws on biology and philosophy to address complex moral questions; climate science, which requires collaboration between environmental research, economics, and engineering; and public health, where effective responses depend on integrating medical data through statistical modeling as a means of influencing government policy.
It’s no secret that exposure to a range of disciplines fosters ways of thinking that remain useful even if students ultimately stay within the same field they originally planned. Penn students, specifically, have access to four undergraduate schools and hundreds of courses, meaning countless perspectives they may never encounter again. A student from the Wharton School could benefit from taking a Nursing course to better understand healthcare beyond management, a School of Engineering and Applied Science student might study political science to better understand how government decisions can shape technological development, or a College of Arts & Sciences student might take a course in Wharton to better understand how theoretical ideas about human behavior are applied in institutional settings. Therefore, it’s counterintuitive to arrive at a university designed for intellectual exploration only to immediately narrow oneself to a single path.
Over-identifying with the version of yourself that got you admitted can also make it harder to change direction once you arrive in college. Switching paths is not unusual — according to the National Center for Education Statistics, about one-third of students enrolled in bachelor’s degree programs change their major at least once. Yet despite how common this is, students often feel pressure to treat their initial interests as fixed, especially in competitive environments such as at Penn, where peers appear to have clear and stable career trajectories. This mentality reinforces the idea that deviation is opposed to growth rather than part of it, making students less willing to explore fields that fall outside of the identity they arrived with.
This isn’t to say that students should completely discard the version of themselves that got them admitted, or replace their future career plans with a more “prestigious” one for the sake of status alone — a tendency often reinforced by Penn’s preprofessional culture. Current interests are still real and meaningful parts of one’s experience, but the problem arises when those interests are treated as static, inhibiting growth or change. In both cases, whether students hold tightly to their application identity or feel pushed toward more conventional preprofessional pipelines, the result is the same: students feel pressure to commit to an area of study rather than explore.
As I prepare to enter Penn, I am excited to see what college has to offer that sets it apart from high school. I want to experience unique classes and programs that I have not yet had access to beyond those more directly aligned with my current career plans: perhaps taking linguistics or music theory simply because the course descriptions sound interesting. I want to stroll along Locust Walk or sit in a dining hall and strike up a conversation with anyone open to talking. I want to try it all and more.
So to incoming first years: try to stay open to those opportunities, even when they don’t fit neatly into the story of yourself you are coming in with. The most valuable part of your Penn education may not be confirming who you thought you were at 17, but discovering who you can become.
LUNA BOUHAIRI is a College freshman studying law and society from Irvine, Calif. Her email is lunabou@sas.upenn.edu.
