For generations, there was nothing ambitious students coveted more than a four-year degree from an Ivy League school. Today, at Penn, a growing number are betting they can do better.
The traditional calculus of a prestigious education has changed for many of these students. A diploma is no longer the only prize worth their time — and for some, waiting until graduation to take a shot on a startup feels like the bigger gamble.
Penn’s Office of Academic Services has seen an increase in the number of students taking a leave of absence to pursue professional opportunities, according to Penn Engineering Director of Student Success and Advising Olivia Roth.
Shalini Nag — the executive director of Penn’s Venture Labs, a University-wide center for entrepreneurship and innovation — wrote in a statement that “students are thinking about entrepreneurship earlier and more seriously than they might have a decade ago.”
“Students simply have much more visibility into entrepreneurship than previous generations did,” she added.
But Roth remains committed to the value of the Penn undergraduate experience.
“Students have a lifetime to work, launch companies, and change the world,” she wrote. “The Penn undergraduate experience is a magical window of time.”
During his sophomore spring, Nanda Guntupalli took a leave of absence to found Taiga, a billing service that sends notes from doctors to insurance companies for reimbursement.
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After Y Combinator backed his startup, Guntupalli — who had been on track to graduate with the Class of 2028 — decided to take a gap semester. The accelerator program invests $500,000 in select startups four times a year, with the goal of compressing months of growth into a few weeks.
Guntupalli and his friends had been eyeing Y Combinator since high school, he said in an interview. The accelerator drills startups on sales, product, and customer communication, he explained, before a final stage where companies can raise additional money.
For him, taking a leave of absence from Penn was a “no-brainer.”
“I mean, I think the benefit of being young is that if the company doesn’t go as planned, I always have the option to come back,” he said.
Guntupalli still wants to finish his studies eventually, but he does not see education and professional experience as two separate things.
“I think they’re definitely very intertwined, especially early in your career,” he said.
Daichi Hiraoka arrived at the Engineering School with the Class of 2028 and was accepted to Y Combinator in his sophomore year. He applied with his childhood best friend and his roommate, Martin Pan, with whom he had “tossed ideas around” since freshman year.
Both Hiraoka and Pan decided to take a leave of absence from Penn to pursue their company, Korso. Initially an effort to modernize manufacturing software with artificial intelligence, their product then pivoted — to what the founders describe as “a desktop AI assistant that sits on top of all of your apps.”
Hiraoka said he and Pan saw college as the last point in their lives when they would have “little responsibility” and the flexibility to pursue what they cared about.
“We don’t have a job or anything, so if we get the opportunity to do something that we really want to do, we might as well just do it now, even if it means sacrificing a little bit of our college experience,” Hiraoka said.
While he felt he was losing the traditional college experience, Hiraoka said the degree itself was “a smaller consideration.”
A Penn degree carries less weight in the startup world, he added, than it does elsewhere. After spending time around a lot of “successful startup people,” he said, he concluded that being “motivated enough or passionate enough” to realize an idea mattered more than educational background.
Hiraoka said he could see himself returning to Penn to finish his degree, but, for now, the startup comes first.
“I don’t think I’ve made a concrete decision just yet, but I would say that I probably won’t come back at least for a couple of years, so that I can go all in on my startup and actually say that I give it my all,” Hiraoka said.
Maxwell Stone was on track to graduate with the Class of 2027, but took a leave of absence during his junior year to co-found SubVysion, an AI-powered software company that, in his words, “maps underground infrastructure for contractors and utility grid owners to prevent wastage from utility strikes.”
Like several others, Stone and his cofounder were accepted to Y Combinator’s acceleration program.
“We both felt that the impact we could have was significant,” Stone wrote. “I was happy to capitalize on current trends in AI and venture capital. Startups are about timing more than anything.”
Stone wrote that he weighed his options carefully before concluding that the timing “was perfect in every other way” and that it “made no sense to delay.”
“I was perfectly happy completing my degree and regularly advise the same, because the network and experience are hard to come by outside of college,” he wrote. “My leave was approved quickly, and the option to come back has a clear process that is easy to work through if I feel that’s the right decision in the future.”
If students decide to return, according to Nag, Venture Labs offers resources to help them “reconnect with mentors, peers, workshops, venture-building resources, and the broader entrepreneurship community at Penn.”
David Hsu, a professor of management at Wharton, said the forces pushing students toward startups go well beyond accelerators.
“There are a range of other circumstances associated with the present environment,” he said in an interview.
Some students, he said, see the “AI revolution” as a “very short window” of opportunity and want to capitalize on it. He pointed to a “myriad of circumstances tied to startups” — from founding a company to joining an existing project.
Hsu said students should think carefully before taking a leave of absence. “The longer you’re out,” he said, “the less likely you are to come back.”
College, he added, is “formative” in ways that go beyond any particular skill set — it offers social development and the chance to become, as he put it, a “complete person.”
Wharton professor Raphael Amit believes gap years are “a great idea” because they offer Penn students “practical experience.”
Like Hsu, however, he remains “torn” about whether or not to encourage students to take gap years in lieu of a Penn education.
“The danger I feel is that you get so excited and so involved in those other opportunities that you won’t come back to finish your studies,” Amit said. “My concern is that by not coming back to school you’re essentially hurting yourself.”
For Amit, returning to school is a critical step. It cements students’ understanding of the foundations of decision-making, he said, and prepares them for the workforce in case things do not go according to plan.
Wharton junior Ace Kim founded SphereUS, a marketing technology startup, without going through Y Combinator. He left in the spring of his freshman year and returned as a junior this semester.
“I feel great about the timing of when I came back to school,” Kim said. His return coincided with Penn’s decision to start offering his current concentration, Impact and Value in Sustainable Business. “It’s like the stars have aligned for me in timing.”
“If you had asked me a year ago, I was really, really convinced that I was dropping out of Penn,” Kim said.
During his leave, however, he realized the startup wasn’t what he wanted to do, a conclusion he would not have come to without his gap semesters.
“I discovered in my gap years how much it matters to me to build things that are meaningful. I want my work to be something that is valuable and good for the world,” Kim explained.
Engineering professor Jeffrey Babin said the “startup ecosystem has expanded significantly." Students have more resources available to them, he added, and more awareness of entrepreneurial opportunities.
“That expansion is happening within Penn and other universities, as well as nationally,” Babin explained in a statement.
Babin wrote that he encourages students to make thoughtful decisions about entrepreneurship without steering them in any one direction. If a student does take a leave, he said “may stay in touch and continue to be a resource.” If they return, his focus “shifts back to supporting their education and whatever comes next.”
Babin also said that taking a leave does not automatically mean a student is more committed to entrepreneurship.
“Students can build meaningful ventures while remaining at Penn, and they can develop an entrepreneurial mindset without ever starting a company,” he wrote. “There isn’t one path that defines success.”
Senior reporter Christine Oh contributed reporting.
Staff reporter Kori Robinson covers student life and can be reached at robinson@thedp.com. At Penn, she studies international relations.
