Dear Freshman Rupa,

Very soon, you will experience a feeling (for the first real time in your life) that will shatter you for a little while. It is the fake smile you plaster on when you pretend to study in Ashhurst Lounge while everyone else is out creating Instagram memories. It is the storm of self-sabotaging thoughts that unceasingly swirl around you, rendering you mute in all of your classes. It is the folder on your computer filled with club applications that all receive responses that begin with, “Unfortunately…” This feeling is called rejection, and it absolutely sucks.

However, by the time you are the kind of person that underclassmen want to coffee-chat, here is a secret that you will learn: you can reject rejection.

What does this mean? It is:

— showing up to an open community service event held by a club that didn’t take you, meeting some of your future best friends, and eventually becoming President.

— participating in PAACH events despite feeling like you don’t belong at first and finding a welcoming space to unpack your cultural identity.

— signing up to volunteer at a Bangladeshi West Philadelphia tutoring center when college is overwhelming and spending time with kids who ground you in gratitude.

— taking a walk along the Schuylkill River at sunset and blasting Taylor Swift’s Red album when the day weighs heavy.

— weathering the dark winter nights and knowing spring will come around again.

— dropping MATH 104 when you fail the first midterm, retaking it over the summer, and making a perfect score on the final.

— reapplying for an internship program that previously cut you in the final round and subsequently growing your political conscience during a dream summer in DC.

— finding the courage to put on a pantsuit and go back into McNeil basement again and again after bombing countless OCR interviews and finally landing a MBA-level finance internship despite never having taken a finance course.

—starting from scratch when your boss tells you the model you’ve been working on for the last 3 weeks is completely wrong and creating a better one in 2 days.

— moving back to Philly last-minute during a global pandemic, interviewing every day for 2 months, and receiving multiple better offers than the one you didn’t get.

— pursuing “unconventional” academic interests and making “strange” jumps across professional fields that some people in your life will not understand.

— redefining senior spring on your own terms when Amy Gutmann’s “Messages to the Penn Community” bear bad tidings and embracing the quiet joys of chai three times a day, Gulf Coast sunshine on country road drives, and public interest client advocacy.

Freshman Rupa, there will be times when you view the story of your undergraduate years in the darkest shades of painful red, but remember that you hold the pen(n) and you get to choose the color of ink in which you write it. Rejection will always be painful, but when you learn not to fear it and realize that you are capable of achieving your goals regardless of the setbacks that come your way, you will gain ownership of your narrative and, consequently, true acceptance of self.

Your Penn experience will not be like one of those glossy pictures on college brochures, but you will be a better human than if it had been. I love you so much. You are going to do and learn about so many cool things that you don’t even know exist yet. I will see you soon.

—Rupa P

Dear Freshman Stacy,

I don’t even know where to start. I’ve written and rewritten this letter so many times that I want to tell you to stop reading and go figure things out on your own. Maybe that’s the best advice that I can possibly give. There’s nothing I can say here that you won’t learn for yourself over the next four years. After all, you are just a younger and much more naive version of me. But, to make it a little easier on you, here are some lessons I’ve learned throughout my time at Penn that I hope will help you along the way.

Most things happen for a reason. From the moment you decided to apply to Penn, you had your heart set on living in the Quad. Nights spent scrolling through the depths of College Confidential convinced you that if you didn’t live there your social life would be over before it started. And even though I’m sure you’ve already had to explain to a million different people that yes, Kings Court English College House is actually a dorm at Penn, and no, you didn’t want to live there, by the end of this year I promise that you would choose KCECH over the Quad in a heartbeat. Maybe it was luck, maybe it was fate, but the friends that you make on EH2 will become some of the closest friends you’ve ever had. Friends who will be by your side for the next four years, through all of the ups and the downs and the late nights and the crazy adventures. A lot of things are going to happen throughout your time at Penn that will be out of your control, but have a little faith that everything will work out the way it’s supposed to.

Mistakes are inevitable. You aren’t in high school anymore. You have much more freedom, but with that comes much more responsibility. Even though you might think you know exactly what you’re doing, I can assure you, you don’t. You’re going to screw up this year. A lot. Think Cs in classes, sleeping through lectures, submitting assignments late, getting MERTed, and the list goes on. Now, I would strongly recommend trying to avoid all of these things. However, I suspect that one morning you’ll find yourself crying in a stairwell and trying to explain to your parents over the phone why they’re going to have to help you pay $2,000 dollars in hospital bills. You’re going to feel embarrassed, ashamed, and stupid; the best deterrents from ever drinking so much again that you land yourself in the emergency room. Sometimes the only way to really learn a lesson is to face the consequences of your actions. You’re never going to stop making mistakes, but you’ll start learning from them- and become a stronger, smarter, and more resilient person as a result.

Go at your own pace. You’re going to meet tons of people at Penn who came out of the womb knowing that they wanted to be investment bankers or politicians. You, on the other hand, have absolutely no career plans. You feel like there’s something deeply wrong with you because the closest thing you have to a passion is hitting up Wawa at 2:00 am. This sounds counterintuitive, but the best way to figure out what you want to do with your life is to stop trying to figure out what you want to do with your life. Take classes that seem interesting, learn as much as you can, and make sure to thank your parents for convincing you to take that Marketing class sophomore year. Stop comparing yourself to others, and things will fall into place over time. I know you have a lot of ideas about how you want your life to unfold throughout college, and I hate to break it to you, but many of those plans aren’t going to work out. I’m still single, I still don’t have a full-time job, and I’m living in the midst of a global pandemic (I wish I were kidding). I won’t lie and say there aren’t times where I wish things had turned out differently, but all I can do now is look to the future and continue to grow.

Moving forward doesn’t mean moving on. The week leading up to the day you left for Penn, you cried every day. You cried because you didn’t want to say goodbye to your family, your best friends, and the hometown that you once hated but came to love. And as much as it may not have seemed like it then, those goodbyes were only temporary. Four years later, after countless visits, vacations, texts, late-night Facetimes, and seeing each other every holiday and summer break, you’re still as close as ever with the people you thought you were leaving behind.

Be grateful. I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting lately on how much I take for granted. You have the most amazing, loving family who will always be there for you, the best friends you could ever ask for, financial support, and the ability to receive an education at one of the best schools in the world. These are privileges that shouldn’t be taken lightly. There will be an infinite number of times when something goes wrong and you’ll think, why me? Change that mindset and gain some perspective. Nothing is ever going to work out perfectly, but there are so many people who would kill to be in your shoes, even with all of those internship rejections and days you forget to leave your apartment with an umbrella.

Have fun. Make memories that will last a lifetime. Skip studying for that midterm and go to Center City after the Eagles win the Superbowl. “Study” for finals with your friends in DRL until the sun rises. Sing karaoke loud enough that everyone in your hall can hear you. Go to frat parties and sit in Allegros laughing so hard you can barely breathe. Explore Philly. Go abroad, meet new people and explore new places. Travel Europe with one of your closest friends. Most importantly, do what makes you happy, whether that means staying out all night or taking a break and watching Netflix all day.

Your time at Penn is short. Even shorter than you realize now. The next four years will often be chaotic and stressful, but they will also be amazing, transformative, and exciting. Whether you listen to anything that I wrote in this letter, what really matters is that through it all, you always try to be the best version of yourself that you can be. You worked so hard to get here, and I promise it will be worth it.

Love,

Stacy G

sger@sas.upenn.edu

Hey girl, hey! I know that you are super excited to be off to college, your reward for being extremely dedicated to academics, your community, and social justice (in the myriad of forms that it comes in). You are not scared because you know that leaving Salem Academy’s small pond will allow you to explore who you truly are, and make friends with people that you truly vibe with. When you do find the snakes in the grass, you will completely leave that patch of land, and end up finding a better one. One filled with orchids, your favorite flowers.

I am here to tell you that you will survive one of your toughest years. One that was literally a shit show, but guess what? You made it. I am writing to tell you that you should always value your health because sophomore year will teach you that it is a luxury, one that you once took for granted. Your eight day stint at Salem Hospital over Christmas 2018 will show you what truly matters in life: your health, peace and wellbeing. Chasing popularity, desirability, and a fast life was never your forte, and sophomore year proved this. Through it all, you will stay strong, continue to excel at your academics, and prove all the naysayers wrong. You will also come up with your personal mantra during this time: when things go wrong, it’s okay to cry about it once, but after, make sure you pick yourself up, and continue being positive and fighting the good fight.

Life will never be easy, but like Aunty Tolu mama told you, “that is the spice of life.” Hospital stints, financial insecurity, and doubters are your spices of life. Not because they were difficult and strenuous times, but because all of those times allowed you to put your trust in God, and persevere. Always coming out on top, all without going low. People will gossip about you, and try to ruin your image, destroy your sanity, and turn people against you, and you will do nothing to retaliate. You know why? Because you are blessed and highly favored, always remember that. Those people are bitter and sad themselves, that is why they seek to bring people down to their despicable level. Continue to keep your head high and your morals higher because in the end, God will handle them for you. He always does.

You will meet some of the brightest people, and the future leaders of this world. These people will become your friends, confidants, and bosom buddies. They will inspire, encourage and lift you up. They will see you laugh, cry, laugh again, and you will all grow together. That is the beauty of college, meeting your forever people. You will realize that quality over quantity is important. You will use this benchmark for your friends, the clubs you are involved in, and your clothing. You will value deep and genuine connections, and when something is not working in a relationship, you will be unafraid to close that chapter and start anew. Always remember that mean spirited people are bad for the heart, and it is okay to leave something behind, even if you think it might have a negative impact on your life. P.S. it never does.

You will be wrong, many times. And with each of your wrongs, you have found ways to correct yourself, ask for forgiveness, and alter your behavior for the better. You have also misjudged the intentions of many, several times. But, with this misjudgement and burn you have felt, you have refused to be jaded and dislike people. Instead, with every failed relationship, you have thrown yourself back into the world, and have been open to new relationships and ties. Continue being open and unjaded, it will serve you well in all areas of your life. It allows you to be zesty and optimistic; two qualities that lead to a fulfilling, joyous and successful life.

These years have allowed you to experience so many international opportunities. You have engaged in difficult conversations, and have subsequently built bridges with people who seemingly have adversarial points of view. You have studied in a foreign country while taking classes only in that language and it has led to one of your biggest breakdowns. But guess what? That opportunity caused you to grow and become a better version of yourself. I look forward to writing another one of these letters in four years, I know you will by then have achieved amazing feats.

Before I go, I want to tell you one more thing. As mommy and Grandma Juliette say, “if you don’t know where you are going, always remember where you have come from.” I want you to take this to heart, and remember that you are the child of refugees who escaped a war torn country, and built up their lives from scratch in a new country, one that is faulty with racial injustice and a disdain for the poor. Remember that you are a walking testament to the adage that with dedication, tenacity, gratefulness, humility, grace and the love of God, all things will work together for the good of those who worship Him.

Sia, I love you and am proud of you. Continue shining, bringing your whole self to all that you do, and being extra and humble in every part of your life, and always remember that Jesus is Lord. It will serve you well!

Love you,

Mabeh

Dear small, small Rachel,

I know you. And you know nothing, except that you are obsessed with Penn and sometimes miss Brooklyn. You know you’ll get to leave your four years here with your own set of words (the pressure!). You know the privilege of getting to have a narrative here, and you wonder how you’ll find your place in it.

You retrace your steps from the summer you spent here during high school, when there wasn’t a single building that didn’t make it onto your camera roll. You remember what it felt like to want this place so badly, and to wonder if you were worthy of it. The auditorium that once brought you your first Penn information session now brings you your official welcome, your sorority bid, and high holiday services that you didn’t used to attend. The whole campus feels like a temple, really.

In your mind, you map memories onto their rightful places. This lobby is where you crowded around a laptop, listening to Taylor’s midnight album drop with new hall friends. This is the set of tables you staked out to “do work” at when a rainy week gave way to a sunny day. This part of Locust is where you picked up a flyer for a community service activity that caught your eye, choosing one type of college life over another unlived one.

You put pressure on the semester to be challenging yet fulfilling, on the week to be productive, on the day to be full, and on the night out to be memorable. How else can you make the most of Penn? Everything feels like a rite of passage: the meals you cook with friends (you know you desperately need their help), the anguish over dumb boys, the drunken dance parties. These buildings house your firsts and your lasts.

You find faith in preparedness, but soon you learn that you can never be ready. Not for exams you flunk, not for the people you love to grow older while you’re away, not for over a year of online classes. You want meaning even when there is none. You trust the weight of words. You search for worth in things that catch you off guard (and many things catch you off guard). And what you really, really want is worth in yourself. Your friend walks laps with you around the block when you feel lonely and confused, and he tells you that things are things, not symbols.

You end up in a career you scoffed at for the first two years of college. Which means you get the job you’ll have after graduation just two years into Penn, and you realize you have the freedom you’ve been working your butt off for, and you realize you’ve made the folks at home proud even though they don’t completely understand it (but who completely understands consulting, anyway?). You realize, too, that this is what you’ve been waiting for, and then you realize that this changes nothing.

You know freshman years are forgivable. You don’t know yet that with eight shiny semesters, you get to have them again and again. You are first to get to the party and last to leave. You lose friends, and you make friends. The B that stains your otherwise smooth record feels better once it has company. You hate having to leave campus and then you feel nervous coming back after a long break. You take out more library books even though this is your third time renewing the ones you already have. Sometimes you need to drop what doesn’t fit. Sometimes you need to sit in it instead.

You choose a boy who chooses you, too, and this you learn of love though it is of life—not everything starts deliberately. Doors that are closed can open and doors that are open can close. Nothing is sacred. Don’t worry when the gargantuan legacy of Penn makes you feel homesick. This fight is your fight for home.

So here’s me giving you permission to meet the moment—hold close the midnight Wawa bite, the breathless dash across the 38th St bridge between meetings, and the drink spilled on your shoes, not because of what you put into them, but because of what they put into you.

The moving realization that creeps up on you is basic: this campus is yours. It always was, simply because you made your way around it. The holy part is the aches of learning, the joy of realizing that try as you might to make something of this place, this place will make something of you. You are witness to your own growth.

This is what you come to worship: running down your carpeted stairs with your heels in your hands, behind schedule for a date night as always; echoes of music from neighboring houses; the quiet hum of empty classrooms from the Huntsman forum at 2am, your head bowed over notes; driving into Center City at night and discovering the colors it’s chosen to glow in that day.

These are the pieces you collect. Let them stand shoulder to shoulder. Let them dance and shout and stomp their feet and make you wish you had more of them. Let them fill you with breath and let them crumble inside you. Let them confuse you. Let them do the self-making they are meant to do.

I know you. You will leave Penn with nothing short of a set of worlds.

Love,

Slightly less small Rachel

~~

Rachel Kulik

W’21

kulik.rachel1@gmail.com

Dear Penn Freshmen,

I distinctly remember meeting upperclassmen in my first semesters at Penn and thinking to myself ‘Holy shit, they’re doing so much, they’ve accomplished so much - am I going to be able to do the same?’

Success felt so unattainable in my first semester. While I was loving the true American college experience of drinking and partying four (or even more) times a week, my grades reflected those habits, and I was struggling in most of my classes. In fact, I ended up with a 2.81 GPA that semester after quite abysmal performances in CIS 110 and CHEM 101. I remember calling my mom one night and telling her I wasn’t smart enough for Penn, and would never be an engineer. In December of that year when I showed my mom my grades I was expecting her to put me in my place and tell me to get my shit together. But instead, she looked at me so lovingly and said: “You passed all your classes, and that’s what matters.”

Writing this now feels surreal. We’re in April of 2021, less than 50 days from graduation, and I could not be prouder of where I stand today. I joined a sorority and became obsessed with my lineage. I went up the ranks in the Kite & Key Society to ultimately become President and got to create programs I never would have envisioned ever existing prior to the pandemic. I landed the job I’ve dreamt of since summer 2019 at a biopharmaceutical company that is manufacturing COVID-19 vaccines. Most importantly, I went from a 2.81 GPA to completing bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Bioengineering, both with honors, in 4 years.

I hope those of you struggling to find your footing at this institution realize that it will get better, the work is always worth it, and one rough semester does NOT define your Penn experience. Starting college means a lot of difficult transitions: rigorous academics, new-found freedom, having to take care of yourself, and being away from everything you’ve ever known. So to the freshmen thinking they aren’t cut out for Penn/their major/etc. … take a moment to reflect if your actions are meeting your goals. Freshman year me needed to learn that going to office hours is NOT lame, skipping parties to get work done will improve your mental health, and that real friends respect the grind.

However, there was also a time in my Penn experience in which I definitely cared too much about my grades. Please don’t take yourself too seriously. Seeing straight A’s on PennInTouch might give you a sliver of satisfaction at the end of the semester, but you’ll look back at that semester and realize you were deeply unhappy. At the end of it all, you only get 8 semesters of this craziness, and every moment is precious (yes, even the moments when you’re grinding on problem sets until 5am).

You can and will succeed here.

Sofia G

Dear Freshman Shaina,

I imagine that you are still going around introducing yourself as Shaina, "it's like China with a Shhh…" at the beginning. Beyond the perceived "quirkiness" of who you may appear to be—ready with a laundry list of fun facts prepared for your intro—the truth of who you are has always existed in your sense of self within your faith, your identity, and your communities.

In some ways, it feels like a small act of defiance to have people say your name correctly. To enunciate each syllable to the truth of who you are, rather than conceding to your Starbucks barista with a "generic" name. At the end of your senior year in high school, you wore your "University of Pennsylvania" hat in the hallways every single day. It felt like that was your truth, defiance of your high school norms to prove that you were going somewhere better: college. Each all-nighter, paper, exam, and conference at 17 was your right of passage as the first in your family to go to college, soon strutting down Locust Walk at 8TEEN.

Now you will walk down Locust, headphones in, world out. Your eyes jolting building to building as you make out the names written on the front entrances. Your friends are waving by and asking to grab a coffee as you walk (and occasionally run) to class. Your idyllic curiosity is overwhelming you as you realize that these 300 acres will become your new home.

I promise that with each step, the tracks that play on your playlist will hit you with a note of nostalgia. In a lyrical melody of high notes and low points, your love ballad to Penn is every bit as sweet as "Treat People with Kindness" and as sour as "Stuck on You."

People say I drive too fast, move too fast, live too fast

Ain't no such thing as too fast for me - Too Fast

You're coming to Penn with high energy, and you should know that you will talk too much, too fast. Learning to make space for conversations with the people you meet, you will quickly find yourself glued to your Google Calendar, meticulously planning each club meeting, work call, and social event. But you will realize that your fear of missing out is a manifestation of the fear of being consciously left out. While the spotlight effect makes you overestimate how much other people notice you, the reality is that you alone choose the people and environment around you.

Pause. Breath. Question. Reflect.

Who brings out the worst in you?

What is giving you peace?

When was the last time you were grateful?

Where is your favorite place to be on campus?

Why are you feeling burnt out?

How are you, really?

Think about the state of your soul and keep your bound journal close. There will be many memories and moments that live rent-free in your mind, but what's ingrained in ink on those printed pages will exist forever.

As the main character in your journal's detailed accounts, you always come back to questions on purpose, spiritual ease, and hopeless romance. I promise that reflecting on the things that break your heart and build you up will leave you with catharsis and release unlike any other. So, live out your "light academia aesthetic" and carry your journal with you wherever you go.

Reminder: Journal at 2 AM under the dim lamp at the Rodin bench—this is where you always had your go-to-late-night-guilty pleasure of a McDonald's soft serve.

We watched the sun go down as we were walking.

I'd spend the rest of my life just standing here talking.

You would explain the current, as I just smile.

Hoping I just stay the same and nothing will change. - Malibu

The hypnotic, hyper-sensationalized visions of what you thought the college experience would be are crazed with drinking culture and frat parties. In the first weeks of NSO, you thought you would be transferring out from Penn. Of all schools, why did you end up here?

You know that everything is destined, willed to be the way it is for a reason. You believe that, so believe me when I say that you belong at Penn. Your imposter syndrome never came at the expense of your values. You're going to leave college without a single sip of alcohol (or the empty calories) because of your moral conviction. Your reality of Penn will be different than what you expected, but you are going to cherish every single insatiable moment.

You will find yourself having 3 AM debates around whether or not to send your kids to public or private school, ranting to ~girls~ about t*xic relationships and Freudian love theories, and belting Taylor-Swift-singing-sessions all in the same day. You will leave Penn with a depth of knowledge that wasn't just from your professors but from the people you come to call your peers and friends.

As you meet more and more people, you will find yourself uncomfortable with surface-level conversations and quick coffees with acquaintances, but there is comfort in those relationships. Not every single person in your life needs to be vulnerable with you, delving into the things that keep them up at night. Every person's story at Penn can offer you a lesson, a different perspective, a laugh, a cry.

Reminder: Get a meal with the person you fell in (academic) love with in your freshman seminar because of how he talked about social policy—you always looked up to listen each time he spoke.

As a freshman, you know you want to create something, to build something tangibly—a passion project that felt like it would aggregate everything that mattered to you and centered on impact. While you will find yourself lost in work, writing out plans for social enterprises in your notes app, I don't think that you ever had the cognizance to know that the most meaningful thing you would create at Penn was your friendships (of virtue).

Anyone who knows you, really knows you, can attest to how much friendships of virtue—AKA best friends—impacted you. In this notion of friends of virtue, you find your most long-lasting, mature relationships where each person makes the other person better. That's rare, and in all honesty, there is only so much energy you can give the people around you, so be intentional. I know you have a hard time saying "goodbye" to people, but you have to learn to invest in the people that invest in you.

Ask yourself, "if you are the average of the five people you are closest to, who are those five people?" Carefully choose the people you want to give just a little bit of your heart to.

Your first year at Penn, you will befriend more upperclassmen than people in your class year. Your support system will come from mentors who identify with your struggles, older friends who break down "Penn face" to you, and tawakkul (consciousness) in Allah (God). Do not forget your gratitude for each of these things, and remind yourself that all my friends, from pleasure to utility to virtue will leave you touched in ways unbeknownst to you.

Reminder: Grab hot chocolate in the Radian and expect to spend at least three hours there with friends—you love that couch with The Simpsons playing in the background.

What am I now? What am I now?

What if I'm someone I don't want around? - Falling

You will start to live by this philosophy of being a source of relief in others' lives rather than a source of inconvenience. Start by paying attention to the little things.

Your friend's favorite Starbucks drink.

Your brother, Alyaan's, obsession with Talking Tom.

Your professor's hobby of baking.

Take note of the small details because it will allow you to be mindful and pay attention in the present, even as 3005 different thoughts constantly race through your brain.

While you're making a big deal out of the little things, you should remember that the biggest deal is the beliefs that ground you. This grounding force that centers us all is different for everyone. Your identity as a person of color, a woman, a Muslim has shaped who you are, but the one thing that transcends forward is your belief in the just-world hypothesis.

Social psychology will have you believe that the just-world hypothesis is a fallacy. But, you should know that good intention and fair, kind acts will keep you afloat no matter how many email rejections, below-average test scores, and sadboi simping hours you face.

The absolute truth is that the just-world hypothesis* should come with an asterisk warning. There will be systemic and institutionalized causes and unfair advantages that will not work in your favor. While nuance and privilege is tied so much to how the world works, the good side I believe in rewards what is right—even if it isn't in this exact moment right now.

Your freshman year, you will dance, laugh, and cry for nights on end.

Your freshman year, you will feel emotions you never knew existed.

Your freshman year, you will spend hours on homework and still do poorly.

Your freshman year, you will get 30's on your exams more than once.

Your freshman year, you will see how every moment was an opportunity to learn if you choose to see the world that way. Put on your rose-tinted glasses that weigh the world in its reality of being beautiful but enclose it in the shade of acute curiosity. Pushing yourself to ask difficult questions, recognize your privilege, and constantly evolve to become the person you know your kids would be proud of. No song is released without writers, producers, background singers, and a production team behind the scenes. As your life credits roll out in fine print, remember the voices and values that have brought you to your freshman year at Penn. Deja vu: The soundtrack to this playlist is just starting, so find your new national anthem or favorite record as you step out on Locust.

Reminder: Continue making a playlist with 365 songs every year on your birthday—we have to share these bops with Alyaan.

Love Forever & Always,

Senior Shaina (Follow along to my letter’s soundtrack on this Spotify playlist!)

shainawzafar@gmail.com

Mean Girls maps out the available identities in a high school cafeteria. Pick one, or you’ll be eating your sandwich in a graffitied bathroom stall. But I never had my thing. Never had my clique. Didn’t pick one sport or club to devote my life to. I was that person who tasted every flavor of frozen yogurt and then walked out the door without buying anything. Oops.

With award-winning performance artists and record-setting athletes all around me, I felt pushed to concentrate on the one thing that sets me apart, that makes me special and worthy of my spot in the Class of 2021. My sister was a dancer, my brother a football player, and I was…vibing?

As college went on, and I realized that I wouldn’t be the next Vanessa Bayer or [insert famous athlete if I know any], I embraced my prioritization of breadth instead of depth. My friendships became more like a social scatterplot than a circle; my clubs and activities had nothing to do with one another; my classes ranged from “Environmental Science” to “Sex and Socialism.” No identifier, no concentrated effort on one particular aspect of myself. Sure, I’m a bit lost, but I’m definitely not bored. That’s the point of college, right, to “expand your horizons” and engage with “new perspectives”? Surrounding myself with diverse opinions, opportunities, and experiences allowed for maximal exposure and growth in these formative years.

Throughout my freshman year, I made plans with dozens of different friends/acquaintances each week (individually!) to keep on meeting people and hold onto them all in case we someday became best friends or soul mates. I accepted invitations to events I didn’t actually want to attend, saw shows I wasn’t that thrilled about, and applied to jobs I knew I would never do. College felt like a series of opportunities I didn’t want to miss out on, but in doing it all, I somehow missed out on the whole point. I was burnt out at the ripe old age of 19.

Because I felt inadequately average at everything, I sought breadth as my solace, self-identifying as the girl who wanted a range of experiences. But stretching myself and my friendships thin didn’t make me whole or any more sure of myself. Narrowing my scatterplot allowed for the essential quality time with my friends to truly be there for one another, as opposed to rushing a vulnerable conversation in a 40 minute lunch. I didn’t want those to be scattered anymore.

College is supposed to be a time of self-discovery. I planned to ‘find myself’ during my gap year and then arrive at Penn ready to be my authentic self. What does that even mean? How can anyone wholeheartedly describe themselves with a singular identifier? Just like my experiences, friendships, and intellectual curiosities, I’m multidimensional, chaotic, confused, and never bored. And that is more than okay.

Sophia L

Right now, it’s a Wednesday night. There’s about 3.5 weeks left until you graduate. You’re a Mike’s Hard in, and it’s a quarter till midnight. You just spent the last two hours watching a B average Netflix Original while also listening to Bon Iver through one ear of your wired earphones (you were too lazy to charge your airpods). And, there are fully 8 hours worth of lecture videos that you need to get to, but you’d rather start Breaking Bad. Some things never change.

They say that hindsight is 20/20. You know this. You say this all the time when things stupidly work out after you feel like life just slapped you in the face for an extended period of time. Your anthropology class would say that this is what religion is for--to explain why things happen the way they do. But, you prefer pop culture. More specifically, you quote John Lennon: “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” As much as you hate cliches, can’t deny that, right now, there is nothing more true.

Let’s start connecting some of these dots, shall we?

I still remember that car ride back from the post office with dad a few weeks before you started Penn. Dad was talking about something with his credit card, and you paused (knowing full well you’d regret what you’re about to say), looked at him, and asked “what’s the difference between a debit card and a credit card?” He looked at you, smirked, and said “Wharton 2021, huh?” You knew he was joking, but, in a way, he wasn’t. You didn’t exactly ask to go to business school. In fact, you were fully going to not do the whole “finance-bro-end-up-on-wall-st-I-am-Jordan-Belfort” thing, telling yourself that it wasn’t for you, but knowing full well that you were more scared that you would fail, so denial is the better solution.

Failure. What a concept. As much as you tell people that you embrace it, your default is to avoid it, which is why you’ve always been somewhat of a planner. If you follow a plan you can’t screw up, right? You join a lab, immediately put yourself on the premed track, find the volunteering listservs, try to force yourself to go to the library in your free time instead of hanging out with your friends because you couldn’t fail that test.

But then it’s 1 am on a Friday, and while your friends are playing beer pong, you’re nicely scrubbing cholera off your lab coat, questioning your existence. But then, you spend all your time studying for a bio test, and only get the average, and then lose motivation for the field you’ve committed to. But then, you fall for a few frogs, spend long nights making bad decisions to hang out with them, knowing that you’ll get in trouble, and then lose faith in both relationships and your ability to get your head back above ground. But then, you realize that even after rushing, going to date nights, and getting to know just about everyone on this campus, you still find it hard to feel like you’ve got some real memories with real people

You followed a path, right? It’s supposed to work, right? You came in ready, didn’t you?

Lav, if anything, the hardest part of this is that these moments during freshman year felt like you were about 10 ft above rock bottom. And there were some points where you were sure you hit rock bottom, but then something else happened, and you managed to go down another couple of feet, so that’s when you knew that you hadn’t hit it yet.

But this is where the connecting the dots comes in.

You’re right. Your major didn’t give you passion. It’s very hard to admit to yourself. And those harder bio classes you chose to take early on helped you realize that. You learn to stop enabling your fear by recalling small things like that car ride from the post office. You learn to jump, and you end up loving yourself more because you feel like you’re finally writing your story.

Those lack of quality moments teach you to focus more on developing relationships with the people you enjoyed hanging out with (not for the titles or the insta pics or the stories). The people who you wouldn't mind ordering a pizza and watching Wedding Crashers with on a Friday night. Those ridiculous clubs you joined helped you find your future roommate--someone you wondered how you managed to take 17 years to meet. That bet that your friends made you, saying that you couldn’t last 2 days in rush, helped you find some girls that you’d go to the trenches for--gave you late night gut laughs and great Ben and Jerry’s pint sessions.

And those frogs that you kissed...oh boy did you learn. They taught you to focus on yourself and the friends that you make. You learn to watch your mental health triggers, eat better, watch your sleeping habits, and be more aware of the type of people you put in your closest circles. The time that one of those frogs caused you to pull trigg at a date night (yeah, dude, it was embarrassing, remember to not drink an entire franzia box before chugging ⅓ of a bottle of fireball), led to you meeting some of your best friends/mentors in that bathroom--one of them would even introduce you to your future career. Who would’ve thought? A stupid move at a date night led to a bond that catalyzed your life’s passion (sorry, cheesy line alert, can’t think of a better phrase right now).

As a senior, none of what you are right now was at all planned by the girl that set foot on this campus 4 years ago. Actually, I don’t think that girl even knew the name of the industry you’re about to enter. And, I promise you, during your college experience, everything that you were completely scared of happening will definitely happen and then some. These next four years are going to be one hell of a ride. And, you, my friend, need to learn that if you do this right, you can’t plan your way out of the biggest L’s of your life. But those lows are what led to the very moments that defined your story.

So, listen to your gut, trust the process, go through the pain, and ease off the gas. You’ll be able to connect the dots looking back in the end.

Much Love,

Lav

P.S. Learn to have some better experiences with Vodka. You won’t be able to be within 5 ft of it after freshman year. Also, chill with the UberEats.

To you, my freshman baby:

Oh man, you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into; to be honest though, neither do I.

A lot happens in 4 years, and I mean A LOT. You were told that college would be some of the best years of your life. You came into college feeling excited, full of nervous jitters and names you’ll probably never remember, gaping and gazing at this new unfamiliar home. It was like playing League of Legends or Genshin Impact for the first time – you spend the first 15 minutes standing agape at your surroundings until someone comes and chucks you into your first of many battles to come.

This is a letter from your seasoned gamer girl -- just kidding, the last time I played games was when Runescape was still popping. But, here are a few words that will hopefully leave you with a few less tears and a few more dreams.

Enjoy the chaos

I’m sure right about now you feel a little bit like a headless chicken -- flailing around drowning in club applications, class assignments, and social interactions, hoping that, like a Venn diagram, two of the three will work out. Maybe you’re filling your phone with numbers you’ll never contact, or maybe you’re getting locked out of your room without your PennCard after taking a shower. You’re probably getting bombarded with listserv emails after signing up for every club from Actuarial Society to Penn Appetit.

I’m sure you’ve already drank more vodka sodas than cups of water this week, and eaten more Allegros curly fries than vegetables. Part of me wants to tell you that the Freshman 15-- I mean 50 -- is going to bite you in the butt, but the other part of me sits here and reminisces about the late nights I can no longer stay awake for and the munchies I no longer crave.

For however many messy situations you get yourself into, clubs you get rejected from, people you say “let’s get lunch!” to and never follow up with, I hope you’ll relish in the excitement and buzz of being a freshman. There are few moments in life in which you can utterly embarrass yourself throwing up outside the Quad or dfmo’ing with an unexpected future acquaintance. Regardless of what or how many reckless freshman mistakes you’ve made thus far -- I promise you there will be plenty more of those moments in these next 4 years. You are meant to explore and make mistakes and expand your horizons. It’s okay to feel like a headless chicken -- I hear their head grows back eventually.

Embrace the confusion

Through all the neon lights and crowded Commons meals, though, you’ve also felt a little disoriented, a little lost, and a little confused. Maybe you’re not sure what you want to study, or maybe you’re nervous about meeting unfamiliar people in an unfamiliar environment. Maybe you’ve never touched alcohol until tonight, or maybe you barely even know where Philadelphia is on the map.

I’m sure you’ve already met people who’ve surpassed the stars. You’re probably sitting in WH101 not knowing the difference between marketing and management, wondering how everyone already knows what they’re going to study and where they want to be. I’m sure you’ve sat in class knowing absolutely nothing and desperately trying to take notes. As I am now, I would just say: don’t take notes (just kidding, you might actually fail that way).

Coming to college isn’t meant to be a walk in the park. As energetic and breathtaking freshman year is, it’s equally jolting and disorienting -- even when you’re sober. You aren’t meant to have your life figured out yet; it’s 4 years later and I still have no idea where I’ll be 2 years from now. Penn may not make it easy for you to explore your passions, but it’s ok for you not to have an answer to questions like: “What are you going to concentrate in?”, “Where are you gonna work this summer?” Even now, the fog hasn’t quite cleared up yet, but that’s ok.

If freshman year taught me anything besides getting the right ratio, it’s that it’s okay to feel confused and overwhelmed by your surroundings. Like The Weeknd, we stagger and fumble around trying to figure our lives out. And like his half-time performance, that’s what makes it memorable.

Accept the failures

As a freshman, you haven’t dealt with this just yet. You, who were top of the class and well known by most people, have yet to feel what it’s like to pour your heart and soul into something, and fail. I also did not expect some things to be as unbearably difficult as they were. But sure enough, college will knock the wind out of you, force you on your knees, and hold you there.

When that time comes, I hope you’ll have someone you can rely on. These are the moments that I hope you won’t cry, suffer, and feel alone. Something I wish I knew these past 4 years was that it’s ok to fail. I wish I knew that failure does not necessarily reflect your own abilities, characteristics, or core. Sometimes, failures happen for reasons beyond our control. You’ll learn that it’s ok to not know how to use shortcuts on Excel, and that you don’t have to work at Morgan Stanley or McKinsey to be successful.

As much as everyone will act like they have their life together, that they’ve never struggled through anything or experienced failure -- they have, just as you will too. Like High School Musical, you’ll find that you’re All In This Together.

When they said that these 4 years of college would change your life, they weren’t lying. However, there’s no way I would ever have been able to predict any of the things I’ve gone through. From making certain friends to falling in love to failing hundreds of interviews to living in a global pandemic to finding new passions to crying unstoppable tears to losing other friends and everything in between.

These 4 years will be chaotic and confusing and painful and beautiful and exciting and stressful. You’ll grow not only physically, but mentally and emotionally. You’ll learn more about yourself and how you interact with others than you ever could’ve staying in your little suburban hometown. Maybe you’ll have no idea these things are happening when they do. Maybe you’ll feel like you haven’t grown at all, that you’re being left behind or failing to pick up things as easily as others.

You may have no idea what you’re getting yourself into -- and that’s the joy of it.

From ya girl who knows marginally more than you,

Shirley Y

Dear Penn Freshmen,

Penn is a crazy, complicated, and busy world, that can seem completely overwhelming. It feels like Penn is a tornado, and if you’re not careful enough, the tornado will sweep you along with it. My biggest message to you is - jump head first into the tornado, but while you’re along for the ride, remember to look around and appreciate the things around you.

Say yes. When an opportunity presents itself, don’t worry too much about if it’s the right thing to do or if it’s your place to be doing it or any of that. Just say yes and see where it takes you. Saying yes to random things ended me in some crazy places, like knocking on doors in Virginia, or playing lacrosse for the Penn Lacrosse team (which I wasn’t on). Saying yes to lunch or dinner with random people has led to some of my lifelong friends. Volunteering myself for random tasks has propelled me to leadership positions in clubs, given me new job opportunities, and allowed me to be part of valuable discussions. Some of those were one-off experiences, like playing lacrosse, and some of those turned into long journeys that made a huge impact on me. The notable part here is that before them, I had no idea which ones would make an impact and which ones wouldn’t, so don’t limit yourself to what you take part in!

Be kind. First, be kind to yourself. Penn is a whole new world, and you’ll learn things about yourself and about the world that you never would have imagined. Things are going to happen that are hard to handle. Don’t pressure yourself to handle them in the “correct” way and allow yourself the time to handle them in the way you need to. Take care of yourself, and don’t feel bad about it. If you’re tired, take a nap - you don’t need to be working every second of every day. Second, be kind to others. Everyone else is dealing with the same kind of hard things that you are - just because they don’t show it and don’t choose to share it with you doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume the best in everyone.

Enjoy the moment. If I had to describe life at Penn with one word, it would be chaotic. It’s easy (and enjoyable!) to get caught up in the chaos, and be swept up in everything happening around you. Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, it’ll be Senior spring, and maybe you’ll be sitting here trying to write a letter to the new freshmen. Try to remember to take some time to pause, and recognize the things around you. Appreciate the people experiencing the chaos with you. Appreciate the things causing the chaos. Appreciate the chaos itself, because even that ends eventually.

The messages above are helpful, and I encourage you to remember them. But if you take away one thing from this, I want it to be the fact that I did not talk about grades, jobs, or accomplishments. Those things feel so incredibly important in the moment, but they’re not the things you’re going to remember. The excitement of getting a job wears off - the excitement from the memory of an amazing night with friends doesn’t. Choose how to spend your time based on how it will make you feel and what is important to you, not based on what others deem to be important.

Love,

Jules P

Dear Freshman Maddie,

Hi, it’s me, your older and vaguely wiser self. Here’s a preview of what to expect from your next four years. I’m sharing all of this to give you perspective, not to make you do anything differently. After all, we wouldn’t be who and where we are today without all the choices, both “good” and “bad.”

First of all, don’t take advantage of every opportunity Penn has to offer. That’s terrible advice. I’m still offended that so many people told us that when we started college. If you did that, you’d be in five places at once and never sleep. Penn is full of people who did everything in high school, so when you put all of us on the same campus, none of us can do everything anymore. Use these four years to figure out which activities you actually care about. Pro tip: choose your clubs based on how much they make Penn feel like home, not how good they’ll look on your résumé.

You won’t find a “friend group” until late October, and that’s ok. The fact that you spent every weekend inserting yourself into some new acquaintance’s life made you the girl who says hi to an embarrassing number of people on Locust today. So, take advantage of the fact that everyone is new, awkward, and lost, and introduce yourself to as many people as you can.

Fisher Fine Arts Library is a silent library. Don’t study there and talk to your friend from math class in your anything-but-an-inside voice. The computer labs in Huntsman are much more your vibe.

Despite having over 10,000 undergraduates, Penn is smaller than you think. You will run into that random frat boy you made out with at a party more often than you’d like to. Take pride in saying hi to him and making him feel a little awkward.

You will get a C+ in STAT102 freshman spring and think your future is ruined forever. Trust me, it’s not. People will still hire you, I promise. Your GPA will bounce back too, especially once you’re done with business fundamentals and start taking classes you actually like for your concentrations.

Sophomore year, you will start to learn that doing what makes other people happy doesn’t guarantee your own happiness. You didn’t know what Goldman Sachs was before you came to Penn, or McKinsey for that matter. You don’t want to go into investment banking or consulting, and that’s ok. There are over 18 concentrations in Wharton for a reason. Celebrate your “untraditional” interest in marketing.

You will cry in front of your public speaking professor during office hours. Don’t be embarrassed. He’ll offer you a handkerchief and be supportive. You’ll end up TAing for him.

You will apply to 45 internships junior fall before you finally get an offer on the last day of the semester. It will be more rejection than you have ever experienced before. There will be some companies that never get back to you, and others that will string you along for multiple interviews before rejecting you without an explanation. You will even complete, and somehow pass, a physics test for a sales job in Chicago. TL; DR recruiting is a long and arbitrary process, but it will work out the way it’s supposed to. In the meantime, be sure to take care of yourself and lean on the support systems you’ve built.

It’s cliché to say but studying abroad will change you. Despite your magical semester in Madrid being cut short due to COVID-19, you will manage to travel to 10 new cities in 4 countries. You will take all your classes in Spanish, live with 5 complete strangers, finally start using Google Calendar, start wearing high-waisted jeans, and discover your talent for napping on any form of public transportation. There will be a moment before you go where you will consider giving it all up to be the president of your sorority. Listen to Maddie Freeman’s advice, and take a year for yourself after devoting a year of your college experience to everyone else. Zeta will survive without you, I promise.

Don’t be afraid to let go of friends who aren’t matching the effort that you’re putting in. Friends of convenience aren’t convenient forever. It will take you a half semester abroad and a pandemic to figure this out, but it will be such a weight off your shoulders when you finally do. So reciprocate, but don’t overextend yourself for the sake of people who only reach out when they need something from you.

Senior year won’t be anything like you expected it to be. All of your classes will be online. Half of your friends will have graduated, so you’ll scramble to find new ones over the summer in Philly. You will live alone after two years in your sorority house, which will be a productive exercise in learning to be comfortable being by yourself, but also a reminder of just how extroverted and energized by other people you are. You will join both a giant beer pong league and a cornhole league in Old City. You will take an acting class. Feb Club will be April Club instead. You will graduate in Franklin Field, wearing a mask, while your family watches through a computer screen. It’s all strange and character-building and vaguely anti-climactic, but that’s ok.

So, was college the best four years of your life like everyone says it is? It was certainly the best four years so far, but I’m sure that there’s lots more to come. I can’t wait to see what we do next.

Good luck and lots of love,

Senior Maddie

For you -

I watched the notorious TED talk by Brené Brown, in which she announces that vulnerability is, in fact, courage, towards the end of my sophomore year. I remember being taken aback by this idea, but feeling that it had punctured a truth.

For a long time, early in college, whatever the opposite of Penn Face is, was my problem. I agree with Brown in that vulnerability is courage, but a lesson that was important for me to learn was that I was enough. That all of the problems that life had thrown at me were handled by me, and would be continued to be handled by me. For example, we often reflect, “It takes a village,” but what I had to remember was that the village began with me, that it encircled me, that I was a part of that village. It takes both a village, and the life I have led.

Below is a list of miscellaneous advice I would give myself, all sort of oriented around this idea of being able to supply the answers for yourself, and the confidence for yourself:

I think I would tell myself to take some time alone. Walk into the city. It is easy to be alone there. Don’t get lost in the throngs of people.

When you ask yourself why when considering whatever dimension of your life or of your individual meaning, you want to find yourself in a position and orientation in which you can answer the question. Always give yourself the space to be able to answer those questions.

I think that college is an exercise in recognition--you need to continually find ways to return to yourself, and it is only natural, that over time, this self will take different forms. But it’s important that you be comfortable with whatever self you exist in at the moment.

Play the Indian music, and don’t turn it down or apologize for it! Talk in Tamil to your parents.

Try not to make yourself smaller to make others feel bigger--at first, for this sentence, I wrote “under no circumstances make yourself…” But that’s a huge ask--trying is also a huge ask, but slightly more manageable.

When you feel wronged, it’s important to speak up and stand your ground, but also know that some interactions, some conversations don’t reflect on you at all. As they say, pick your battles, and as you pick, continue to cultivate comfort in and with your body.

This is something that I still struggle with, but, of course, there are those conversations, those interactions, those battles that do reflect on you. Do the critical work, and be a better version of yourself. But also, you can make excuses for yourself. Pick your battles with yourself.

Losing friends is natural. Your path will naturally diverge from that of your friends at various stages in your life, and that is so incredibly normal! You will find other friends, other people whose paths, whose values align with yours, and they will be better for you in the long run. Be kind to the friends that you do have, and look out for them. You want to be proud of how you treat the people around you, and you want to be proud of the people you surround yourself with. And be kind to yourself.

Be content with what you have. Find the good in what you have. I can tell you that often the grass is not greener. And give without expectation.

My dad’s final message as he left me at the beginning of freshman year was that when the hard times hit, remember this too shall pass. That saying has held through these past four years--it hasn’t been easy by any contortion of the word, but you have weathered each storm, and that is an accomplishment that should be honored.

From Nikita B

Dear Freshman Maher,

There is so much I want to tell you, so much I want to show you, so much I want to warn you about. I know that’s not quite possible, and I am far too aware of my faults to attempt to change history should that chance be offered to me, for fear it would change all the good. But, for just a short moment, please indulge me as I bask in the catharsis of pretending to do just that.

You’ll soon learn that you tend to ramble - a lot - so I’ll do us both a favor and keep this as short as I possibly can. Also, as an aside, sometimes (only sometimes) it’ll help you a lot to shut your mouth and “Talk less, smile more” as Aaron Burr from Hamilton would tell you so kindly.

First, SLOW DOWN. You’ve been waiting eighteen years for this moment, to meet the world, to leave your limited bubble holding you in stasis and are ready to see what’s really out there. You want it all: the trials, the fame, the glory, the excitement, the challenge. You enroll in Math 240 because you want to get it over with and sign up for twenty clubs. You joke about Penn being a candy store and you’re a wide eyed six-year-old let loose with a hundred-dollar bill. Now, four years later, you don’t quite remember how you did on that first midterm nor what clubs you were a part of. You know what you do remember, though? You remember when you stayed up all night at the Radian talking about how bananas are going extinct, you remember the sweaty frat basement, you remember that Uber on the way to Latin BBQ. Nobody cares what you do on paper; YOU won’t care what you do on paper in just two years, let alone four. Take the time to enjoy the moment and be present. Take the time to have good conversations. Take the time to be true to yourself and, quoting a good friend, I urge you to embrace the “good weird”. Life is not a fire hose you’re going to have to struggle to drink out of, it’s a butterfly that lands on you when you least expect it, when you’re still and present.

Second, some friends, in this place far away from where you grew up and spent most of your life, will become family, in ways you cannot even imagine. They are going to hold you together in ways you cannot expect when the world hits you in ways you never thought it would. I won’t spoil the movie and tell you who these people are, but please promise me that you will find them, love them, be there for them. Be a good friend, be their brother, hold on to them like nothing you’ve held onto before and don’t be afraid they’ll push back. I wish I could have read this my freshman year:

“But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.” – David Whyte

Third, love unabashedly. You come from a background where that isn’t very acceptable or encouraged – but who cares. Love your friends, your professors, your mentees, your neighbours, and even that girl in your hall who hates you for not drinking almond milk (you know who you are). People are just as confused and anxious as you, and every person is their story’s protagonist. The sooner you embrace your belief that people are inherently good, the better. Consider your inner light a superpower if that makes you feel better. Changing the world doesn’t necessarily mean bringing about the climate revolution. It can mean being a source of positivity in people’s life. Crack a joke, get excited about stupid things: it rubs off on others. Inspire others if you can; help them in other ways when you can’t. I know you’re scared of giving without bounds because you’re scared of being taken advantage of or stepped over; don’t be. You’re not going to experience happiness until you embrace that part of yourself. Embrace it early: pick a friend and do something kind, brighten up their day, solve their problem, throw eggs at their ex’s chapter house! Start with someone you trust and take that giving everywhere. I promise, it’s worth it.

Finally, have faith. Even in four years, you’ll look at those who believe everything is going to turn out okay and think “huh, how do they do that?”. No matter how hard you try, you’re going to struggle to trust the process; you’re going to struggle to find comfort in the idea of “God’s plan” or “what’s meant to be.” I just opened a letter that you, my freshman self, wrote me, your senior self – and by the way, you should DEFINITELY write a letter to your senior self talking about your hopes, fears, dreams and whatever. In that letter, I saw that your fears, while completely valid, were not the things I ended up struggling with the most. The biggest problems in life are often things that you don’t expect. I did not expect my country running bankrupt and my parents’ life savings fizzling away. I did not expect their divorce. I did not expect wondering if I’d be able to wire tuition for the next semester. No amount of planning can stop these things. I saw that many dreams you feared wouldn’t come true didn’t come true, because something better was destined to happen. You didn’t get that data science job at Facebook, and I’m so happy you didn’t. You didn’t keep talking to that girl from high school, and I’m so relieved that you didn’t. Some of your dreams didn’t come true, and I’m so happy they didn’t.

What got you through it all? Faith. Faith, my friend, is better than planning, scheming or fighting. The sun will rise again, it always does.

My point is: it works out, I promise. I know you won’t believe me. But, I promise you Maher, trust the process, and have faith that the universe will always give you exactly what you deserve.

Penn will be the most insane, eventful, transformative, and by far the best four years of your life. Oh, and for the love of everything good, stop wearing size small shirts.

Good Luck Habibi.

Love,

Maher AS

Dearest 18-year-old Julie,

You turned 22 today! As a sneak peek into the next 4 years, here are 22 stories for our 22nd birthday.

1. Try everything once. If you don't like it, at least you tried. Things you tried that you'll probably never try again: squid ink pasta, carrot cake (walnuts), and politics.

2. You'll have insane imposter syndrome freshman year. Don't judge yourself based on other people's priorities and strengths. You belong at Penn as much as everyone else.

3. Good things do happen after 2AM. "We're staying up until 5AM" Night will start at smokes, continue to climbing fences, and end in Huntsman.

4. You've had the same new year's resolutions for 4 years: going to bed earlier and journaling more.

5. You'll meet an upperclassman who you think is the coolest, smartest person in the entire world. He'll give you the best advice and does an internship at your dream company. You'll think "that could never be me."

6. He becomes one of your best friends. You end up doing the same internship.

7. You'll move to SF with no plan and live with your 2 co-founders turned best friends. Your tiny 2-bedroom will be multi-purpose for: fundraising calls, Costco hauls, 2L bottles of cheap moscato, ~ design thinking ~, enough stickie notes to cover every balcony, and playing music at all hours. You'll spend 15 hours a day building something special.

8. That project will teach you the most that you'll ever learn...if you let it. It'll expose you to worlds you never got to see in Pittsburgh — catch yourself before you're quick to judge.

9. It's weird that seniors want to hook up with you as a freshman.

10. You'll hurt your best friend from high school and never forgive yourself until 3 years later blasting Mac at Blue Slide Park.

11. You can always fake it, but you won't always make it. Getting rejected from all the Wharton clubs you applied to, having some C's on your transcript, not having a job April of senior year — will all be ok.

12. You'll go through a srat girl phase. You'll spend your 1st Pattys with your new lin, finding green mustaches in our hair and tucking everyone into bed. They'll show you how to be a better friend and be some of the first people who you open up to.

13. You'll date your first new friend at Penn.

14. You'll stand on the College Hall steps and count down until Holi and feel utterly on top of the world.

15. Say yes to all concerts. Regardless of the interview tomorrow, sold out tickets, all-nighter driving home before work, or even who's playing.

16. Your body’s going to change in college, and that’s normal. You’re not done growing at 18.

17. You'll feel the worst you've ever felt during a year-long pandemic. Your Google Search history has read every article for the query "how to be more confident." The 3 different therapists you tried all suck. Put on the damn playlist, fake the secureness, and make plans. That much alone time is not good for you.

18. Put love into people's birthdays. For 4 years, you'll get to smash cake into your friend's face. It'll turn into your favorite tradition. Honestly, celebrating your friends' birthdays is more fun than celebrating your own.

19. ALWAYS bring a friend to date nights and formals. It's guaranteed more fun.

20. The pandemic will force you, for once in your life, to slow down. It'll help you show sides of yourself that you haven't shown anyone. You'll realize you've been hiding everything in for no reason. You'll spend hours driving up down and all around with your best friend that summer. That'll be your college best friend. The girl who'll be an aunt to your kids.

21. You'll sit in a Portugal Airbnb watching the world crash from your laptop screen. You'll have the best 12 hours and the worst 12 hours of your life one after the other.

22. Stop crying on all of your birthdays it's YOUR DAY!!

Love,

22-year-old Julie

Content warning for mentions of death and suicide.

Dear Penn Freshmen,

I debated a long time on whether or not to write about this. It might not be as light-hearted or hopeful as some of the other letters you might read and I was originally planning on writing a letter telling you all to skip class. But for better or worse, I have decided to write the following for it is something I wish I heard as a freshman.

Before I had even finished the first two months of my freshman year Penn, four Penn students had died. Even though I didn’t know the individuals, I felt a great sense of loss. After getting another email from Penn about a student who had committed suicide, I remember asking an upperclassman this question.

“Real talk-is it normal for so many Penn students to pass away in like the first month of school...It’s heartbreaking. None of the students talk about it, none of the teachers mention it or act differently, the emails being sent out regarding the deaths look generally the same.”

So we talked about it. We talked about the stigmas of mental health. The pressure that students face at Penn. “Penn face” and how many of our struggles we hide from others. Then life moves on, and you create your own plans, and enjoy the college thrill, until death crashes the party again.

It was the summer of 2020. I was talking to my good friend about housing and who we were planning to live with. 2 days later he gets into a car accident and passes away.

The following week was one of the hardest in my life. So many things I wished I had said. Things we had planned to do but never did. No more memories to be made but instead, I was left holding on to the ones we had from the past.

Many of you have experienced your own loss, especially coming out of this pandemic. Some of you haven’t, and I hope you never will. But here is something I would tell my freshman self.

First, love.

Love those around you. Life is too short to be self-absorbed, and it’s too short to make enemies. Build strong friendships, and be there for one another. Forgive and grow. Apologize when you ought. Reach out, even if it’s someone you haven’t talked to in awhile. Love those you haven’t met. Love those that are close to you. Laugh, cry, and be vulnerable. Even if it’s scary. As hate and injustice only seems to rise in this world, let us be quick to love.

Second, live.

Hey, life is so much more important than your grades or what job you get. You are special and you are alive today. Make the most of it. Go pursue your dreams, career related or not. Life is too short to do both what everyone else wants you to do and what you actually want to do. Stop pushing things off towards when you’re older. Faith? Take time to explore and think about what you actually believe. Fun things you want to do? Plan for them now, and hold tight to the memories you create. Family and friends? Pour into your relationships and call home more often.

Lastly, hope.

Yes, there are times I am still deeply sad and it hurts. But even as I can’t seem to let go of hurt with one hand, I hold on to hope with the other. I have hope knowing that this world is still beautiful. I have hope knowing that even when I feel alone, I am not. I have hope knowing I will see my friend one day again. To quote Vision, “For what is grief, but love persevering?”.

Eddy Y

eddyyu101@gmail.com

Dear Penn Freshmen,

Welcome! I know you’re probably excited but also nervous about starting the next chapter of your life at Penn. I don’t blame you! It’s a really exciting time with many uncertainties and even more possibilities and opportunities. The idea of even getting settled at college seems overwhelming at first, but you’re not alone. You’re wondering how you’ll fit in, make friends, choose a major, and navigate the next four years of your life. I hope that I can provide some insights from the other end of the tunnel, and if you remember nothing else from reading this, just make sure you don’t let the next four years slip by.

From the moment you step foot on campus, you’ll be inundated by freshmen-specific NSO events, parties, clubs, classes, and thousands of other students in a similar boat. You’ll hear about notoriously difficult professors and ‘must-take’ courses, club recruiting (yeah...), and, as much as you try to avoid it, peer pressure. This pressure will take many forms, whether it be through partying and alcohol to selective programs and resume-building. With time, you’ll find your place at Penn with friends who understand you, courses that (hopefully) interest you, and resources that support you.

But the time this takes is really relative. It could take you a few months if you’re lucky or even a year or two before you find the place where you belong on campus. You’ll be reading these words over and over in this letter, but please do yourself a favor and don’t compare yourself to the people around you. Some of the people who find a group of friends within the first month of being on campus are actually really unhappy and are crumbling under pressure, while some of those who can’t find solid friends until their sophomore year end up making friends for life. You never truly know how another person is feeling, so when it comes to evaluating your social life (and academic, professional, or romantic lives), think clearly about what you really want and pursue that with a passion.

So, when I said “Welcome!” earlier, I forgot to finish the sentence. Welcome to the rat race! Although I hope that you can avoid this during your time at Penn, I know that it’ll inevitably find many of you in its grasp. The rat race isn’t really a Penn exclusive concept. Actually, we all should be pretty familiar with it since we were admitted into Penn. The rat race is a grind. In high school, we all had to study hard to get good grades and high enough standardized test scores while also juggling some combination of sports, music, and other activities, all with the end goal of getting into a ‘good’ school to pursue our hopes and dreams. At Penn, if you’re not careful, it’ll be an all-encompassing grind that will define your social interactions, academic goals, and career aspirations without allowing any room for those hopes and dreams to blossom.

I’m sure by now you’ve heard that Penn is pre-professional. Unfortunately, this is true to the point where it places an unwelcome and unnecessary expectation upon our shoulders. From day one, Penn students are pitted against each other in selective club recruiting sessions. From that point on, it seems like you are competing with everyone for everything, whether it be a seat in a required course, an A in a curved class, an interview slot, or a job offer. To make things worse, Penn students are obsessed with clout-chasing. You’ll see this come to bear in the sheer number of Wharton transfer or dual-degree applications in a given cycle and the number of students one top firm can pack into the Inn@Penn’s ballrooms. My hope for you is that you can avoid the rat race mindset.

I don’t want to tell you what majors to pursue or careers to aspire for; as I said before, that’s what you’re at Penn to find out! In fact, you can go through club recruiting, get great grades, interview for coveted internships and full-time jobs, all without embodying this mindset. This goes back to what I said earlier: don’t compare yourself to the people around you. If you live your life at Penn comparing yourself to everyone around you, you will find it hard to be satisfied and will feel trapped in an endless race towards a non-existent podium. And, unfortunately, if you get trapped in the rat race mindset, you will go from freshman fall to senior spring before you can process it.

I know this letter so far hasn’t been a rosy rendition of my Penn experience, and trust me, I’ll get to the good parts, but I want everyone reading this to know that having control over your own mindset towards your college experience will ultimately define how well college goes for you. And by “well”, I don’t mean your grades, internships, research positions, or job offers. I mean the memories and experiences you will look back to as the highlights of your young adult life. No one’s going to remember the endless nights spent grinding away at who knows what. But we will always remember the stupid 2 AM adventures with friends, skipping class to play basketball at Pottruck, group dinners at fancy restaurants, escape rooms, trips to nearby cities, formals, and everything that isn’t the grind. Everyone has to work hard to achieve their goals, and as Penn students, we all know that. But we also have to live!

The Class of 2021 knows this pretty well. Our entire senior year was made remote and 1000% less than ideal. Instead of living the grind, I would really encourage each of you to evaluate each semester using this metric: “if my time at Penn ended today, what would I be excited to tell everyone in my life about”.

To all of you freshmen, your Penn experience is an empty book waiting to be written. As hard as it is to believe, you have the power to make your experience live up to your expectations. Penn gives you an amazing opportunity to meet incredible students from all over the world, explore your interests in many different ways, and have fun.

I write this because I let the first one and a half years of my time at Penn fly over my head. I was obsessed with grades and club prestige and getting a dual-degree from Wharton, all without thinking twice about what I actually wanted to do at Penn and beyond. I followed the herd and assumed they were leading me to “success”.

By my sophomore spring, I realized that if I took classes that I was more interested in, the grades would come more naturally. I realized that if I didn’t get along with people in an organization, I would be a lot happier when I quit. I realized that if I didn’t get into Wharton, I dodged a bullet, because I was never really interested in the Wharton courses I took. Thankfully, what I did gain from those first three semesters was a great group of friends, a deeper understanding of what I did not want to do, and an out from the rat race mindset. Taking that out was the best decision I ever made at Penn. Not caring about what everyone else was doing or how other people viewed me from a competitive lens did wonders for my mental health and confidence. And fortunately for me, I still had five semesters to truly enjoy my Penn experience in my own unique way.

My hope for you is that you can spend your whole time at Penn this way.

I leave you with a verse from “The Incredible True Story” by Logic:

“We'd like to be painters, we'd like to be poets

We'd like to be writers, but as everybody knows we can't earn any money that way

What do you want to do?

When we finally got down to something which the individual says he really wants to do

I will say to him, "You do that"

And uh, "Forget the money"

If you say that getting the money is the most important thing

You will spend your life completely wasting your time

You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living

That is to go on doing things you don't like doing, which is stupid

It is absolutely stupid

Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing

Than a long life spent in a miserable way

And after all, if you do really like what you're doing, it doesn't matter what it is

Somebody is interested in everything

Anything you can be interested in, you'll find others will

But it's absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don't like

And to teach our children to follow in the same track

See, what we are doing, is we're bringing up children and educating them

To live the same sort of lives we're living

In order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life

By bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing

So it's all retch, and no vomit, it never gets there

Therefore, it's so important to consider this question

What do I desire?”

Kudos to you if you made it this far.

Best of luck,

Sid J

Dear Freshman Ally,

There’s so much I wish I could share with you, but no advice I give right now will make sense until after you’ve experienced the pain, joy, and confusion. That being said, I’ll start off with some simple ones that will make your years at Penn a lot easier.

1. Stop taking all the free t-shirts. You don’t need them, and you don’t have enough room to store all of them.

2. Connect to the Huntsman printers early (at least two on each floor). Not sure how legal this is, but walking from the west side of campus to Engineering to print an assignment is 100% not worth it when you can just go to Huntsman.

3. Get a SEPTA card early on! There’s so much more outside of campus that you can easily reach and explore. Don’t get stuck inside the Penn bubble.

The transition from high school to college is not easy, and you will reach new lows you didn’t know existed. But amongst all these will be so many great memories that you will cherish. The only thing you should be aware of is that nothing is constant and the only constant is change.

You will learn that the most efficient way to do something is not always the best. Stop working alone, even if you are more focused, and start working with friends who will lighten the mood and stop you from panicking. The midterm tomorrow isn’t that important so go play soccer with your friends in the halls of NCH. Pregame with your classmates before writing that essay due tomorrow. Accept the L on an assignment if it means you can mentally and physically be in a better space. Stay up all night to play piano and sing with your friend in the practice room, regardless of how busy you are the next day.

Sometimes everything comes together to form a perfect storm and all your constants will be swept away. You will get physically injured and unable to even make it to the elevator to leave your dorm. You then miss the career fair you were banking on. This also is the week that the guy you thought you liked starts ignoring you, and you are truly just left in your room overthinking everything. To top this all off, you can’t even go for a run to relieve your stress- the one activity that has been a go-to in your life whenever things get difficult. But from this experience, you learn that you are surrounded by friends who truly care for you; friends that will go out of their way to bring you food and keep you company; friends who will celebrate with you when you get your first offer and stop you when your slightly-inebriated self makes dumb decisions. Love them and appreciate them. These are who you will remember when you finish your time here.

The changes are never-ending. Junior year spring semester, a pandemic hits and your inbox will be flooded University Notifications: A Message to the Penn Community. You will become immune to these emails, usually sent when a tragedy takes place. However, this presents you the perfect opportunity to be home and connect with your parents again. When did you last have this much time to spend with your family and when will you ever have it again. But these emails don’t stop as summer comes and the world is grieving from not just the deaths of Covid but also the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and endless others. Then once again as hate crimes rise against the Asian-American community, the community you identify as home. It’s exhausting, but racism and inequity don’t rest. I challenge you right now to recognize where you stand in relation to systems of privilege and oppression. Question your privilege and unlearn habits that protect those systems. If you want to call Philly home, get involved and give back to your community. Leverage your power to support those around you and amplify their voices. You will grow to love the Philly community, cry with joy outside the convention center when Philly flipped Pennsylvania blue during the elections, and rage with anger and disappointment at the police brutality and continuous inequity for the citizens. Do your part to make a difference.

You will come out so much happier and confident at the end of your four years here. You will room with three amazing friends who you met in Platt freshman year while nervously auditioning for a dance troupe that managed to flyer you 20 times amidst the chaos of SAC fair. You will spend countless late nights Latex-ing but make some of your best memories and friends there, and even fall in love with one of them. You will find that the only commitment you absolutely refuse to miss is your tutoring session with the girl that you’ve learned from and grown with for four years- her from 6th grade to high school and you from the first to fourth year at Penn.

Nothing is constant. Your morals and values will change. You will suddenly become allergic to your favorite snack- peanut butter :(. A pandemic will hit and you will finish your last 1.25 years virtually. But as long as you stay open-minded and hopeful, you will find that these changes also bring new opportunities to make new friendships and strengthen old ones, allow more time to explore and love your community, and give you the chance to shape and take command of your own life.

With love,

Ally Z

ahzhang99gmail.com

Dear Freshman Adel,

Even if I told you these things before, you’d probably just brush them off and forget them soon after. I still believe advice isn’t truly digested until you experience things yourself, but hopefully these reflections can speed up the process

You’ll come into college thinking 4 years is an unbearable amount of time, but now you realize it passed in a blink of an eye. All those times you wished time would just pass faster and be done with stress and work, you now wish you slowed down, were more patient, and enjoyed little things. 4 years is just a fraction of your life, and graduation isn’t the end, it’s the beginning.

By no means will you master these things by your senior year, but you’ll try your hardest to keep working on them:

If you listen to yourself, you can’t go wrong.

People say that comparison is the thief of joy, and oh boy is that true at Penn. You’ll be surrounded by valedictorians, startup CEOs, book authors, influencers, and tons of people “smarter than you” who all look like they’ve found their life calling, but when you talk to them you’ll realize nobody has it all figured out. You’ll think you want to work at certain companies, join certain clubs, or look a certain way when deep down you know it’s for external validation. I want to tell you that it’s okay to not like what other people like, or do what other people do. Once you listen to yourself, that jealousy will start to fade away. Constantly re-evaluate and ask yourself why you are doing what you are.

Listening to yourself also means prioritizing your health and body, which you didn’t think was very important. Every year without fail you will push your body past its limits, causing you to be sick for at least 2 months per year. Sleep! Drink water! Eat healthy!

Make time for the things you love, and the people you cherish.

Too many times have you said no to things in order to finish homework, or study more for a midterm (like that would’ve made a difference)! The relationships you make with the people you meet are the highlight of college, and they are the things that matter the most (unlike your GPA which a recruiter has never asked for before). Be generous in carving out time for your friends and also passions that matter to you, like dance, art, and cooking. You’ll join two dance teams on a whim and end up giving them your all. You’ll explore Philly’s restaurants and write embarrassing Yelp reviews. You’ll pick up making clay earrings over quarantine and make way too many to wear. Reach out and ask people to hang out, catch up, and express gratitude to the people who support and love you. Call your parents more.

Failure is inevitable, but how you choose to learn from it will determine your success.

Everyone faces setbacks and has things that don’t go their way. Failure is something nobody can avoid. It is okay to fail when you try new things, okay to struggle seemingly more than others, and especially okay to ask for help. You sort of “cruised” through high school academics, but the college course pace and CIS class difficulties will really test your endurance. Recruiting will wreck you both physically and mentally, but you’ll come out of it stronger and more knowledgeable than before. You’ve grown up thinking failure meant giving up, but now you know what matters more is the grit needed to keep going. Stop wallowing so much and dwelling on your regrets and mistakes, rather use them as motivation to improve more next time and internalize the lessons you’ve learned!

Do things that make you uncomfortable.

Adel, you’ll pack your GCal until it has stacks on stacks of multicolored blocks. You need to learn how to say no, not spread yourself too thin, and voice your opinion on things you disagree or don’t approve of. As an agreeable introvert, you’ll find that no one will be advocating for you unless you do. Some of your greatest missed opportunities will be because you were too anxious to talk to that person, speak your mind, or apply for that thing. Is there another Penn student you really want to be friends with? Message them! Is there a cool famous person you really admire? Cold email. Remember, discomfort is temporary, but what you gain from the outcome could be more than you ever imagined! Every time you do something you were scared about, you always come out the other side glad you did it.

If you’re ever embarrassed, just remember that people don’t pay attention to you as much as you think LOL.

Believe in your abilities.

You worked so hard to get to where you are now. Just because everyone around you is smart and hardworking, doesn’t mean you aren’t. You don’t give yourself enough credit! Also, don’t be so worried about everything; you’ll often find that if you just try, you CAN do things you thought were impossible before. Never in a million years would freshman Adel think she could get to where senior Adel is today.

Take advantage of Penn’s resources!

You’re terrible at this last point, but befriend professors, apply for grants, be a TA, study abroad! Penn offers so many programs and deals that nobody knows about; tech treks in Silicon Valley, classes that go to Japan, artist grants, scholarships for conferences -- the list goes on!

With love,

Adel W

Dear Little Jill,

I know you have so many questions for me. I’ll do my best to answer the big ones.

Yes, you will find your people.

No, you will not major in Biology.

Yes, you will pull all-nighters.

No, you will not date the boy across the hall.

Yes, you will find love.

No, you will not be friends forever.

Yes, you will be okay.

Okay, no more spoilers.

I know right now it seems like college will last forever. 8 finals weeks seem daunting, 4 Homecomings are exciting, too many Sunday Scaries to count sound exhausting. Don’t be fooled; what looks endless in front of you will one day have a clear end in sight, so hold these moments close to your heart and don’t let them slip through your fingertips. You will only be in this city with these people once, so don’t be afraid to take chances.

If you’re looking for advice, I can’t say you came to the right place. It would be arrogant to think after just 4 years I have all the answers (don’t trust anyone who says they do). College is complex and ever-changing and I know that if I had 10 more tries I would still make a million mistakes. You will be presented with challenges that shake you to your core, make you question the very nature of you. But things must shatter to be built back stronger. Let yourself fall into the good, the bad, the unknown. You must fall before you can fly.

You will find inspiration in upperclassmen, those who have lived your struggles and grown because of them. One person in particular, a senior on the club volleyball team who seems to have her whole life together (she has a bike and everything), will tell you something you’ll never forget. One day you’ll be walking down Locust, twisted Apple headphones in (the days before Airpods), listening to a song you heard at a party and wanted to learn the words to, and you’ll see her and wave. That night at practice, she’ll tell you:

“Take your headphones out when you walk down Locust. You’re only here once. Absorb everything – the people, the trees, the noises, the DP distributors handing you newspapers, the squirrels, the ivy, the buildings, the loose bricks. There is so much out there when you open yourself up. Don’t drown it out, take it in.”

I think about this everyday as I step onto the red and gray bricks of Locust Walk, look at what’s around me, and take out my headphones. She was right. When I stopped acting like I was in Times Square, head down, music up, weaving in and out of classmates like Mario Kart, I found there was so much right in front of me.

So Jill, in the times when it all comes rushing in, having just bombed a test, speeding from Towne to Huntsman in the seven minutes before class starts (an uphill trek), it may be easy to turn inwards, headphones drowning out the external pressure that feels endless. But I am going to challenge you to turn outwards. Let the cherry blossoms on college green calm you, the kids popping out of the holes in the button soften you, the sounds of passing conversations heal you. It’s all there, you just have to let it in.

I know the time is coming when I will walk down Locust for the last time, perhaps in a cap and gown, hand in hand with my best friends. Memories will flood back like water, maybe they’ll leak like tears from my eyes, and my heart will be heavy with my love for this place I called home. I’ll find solace in knowing that I won’t be noticing anything for the first time. I’ll know that 3-block walk, loose bricks and all, like the back of my hand.

So, take the headphones out and take it all in.

If anyone out there’s still reading this and needs someone to talk to, I’m always ready to listen.

Email: jillpesce44@gmail.com

IG: @jillpesce

You got this <3

Jill

Dear Freshman Valerie,

I hope you’re ready for what’s to come because the next 4 years are really going to be a ride of a lifetime. They say that college is a time where you live and learn, and I can fully agree with that. Now that I only have 5 weeks of college left, I want to impart on you the little bit of wisdom that I have gained over the past 4 years:

1. Be true to yourself

I know this may sound cringey, but I can’t stress this enough. Coming into Penn, everyone tries to be someone they’re not. Regardless of what year or school you are in, it seems like everyone has their shit together. As someone who wants to fit in the norm, I’m here to tell you that you don't have to join certain clubs for clout or get an investment banking job to feel accomplished. It’s important to do things or get a job that makes you feel fulfilled and I really want you to spend time figuring out what you’re passionate about. And even if you still haven’t figured this out yet (me 4 years down the line), trust me, you’ll get there someday.

2. Don’t be Selfish

Even though you may not be the most selfless person out there, I want you to remember to not be selfish and to always think about the consequences of your actions. There will be many people that you will meet who only act on their self-interest and trust me, this is nothing personal. For many of us, it is our first time living alone without our parents and the first time that we have had to think for ourselves. Always make decisions based on how it will make you feel, but also consider how it would make others feel.

3. People come and go

One of the biggest lessons you will learn in college is that people around you will come and go. Coming into college, I thought I would meet lifelong friends that I would celebrate every moment of college with. I had this idealistic version of what college friendships should be like. However, only recently when I had time to reflect on the relationships that I have formed, did I realise that I have lost and gained people on the way. Things change; pandemics happen and your relationships with people around you will inevitably change. This doesn’t mean that the friends you’ve made aren’t there for you or that you’ve lost them. You need to trust that if these people are meant to stay in your life, they will be there for you.

4. No more “what-ifs”

Being in a school where people do so much will often make you feel like you’re not doing enough. There will always be the “what-ifs'' that will go through your mind and regrets you will have with your college career. But I’m here to tell you that it is ok to have those moments when you doubt yourself. It is important to seize every opportunity that comes your way, but also learn to move forward and live with #noragrats.

***************************************************************************************************************************

I really hope I didn’t sound too cynical, because I have truly loved every moment of my past 4 years of Penn. Even if your college experience wasn’t what you expected, I want you to know how much you will grow and learn. I am so excited for you to embark on this journey, because I know you will meet so many amazing people and form memories that will last a lifetime.

Welcome and best of luck for your next 4 years at Penn.

Love,

Valerie

Content warning for mentions of sexual assault and suicide.

Writing this letter has been a long time coming. I know that you’re reading through countless of these letters from seniors, hoping to find comfort in them, hoping that they will convince you that things will get better after freshman year, that you will find a home at Penn. So many of the letters seem to present complete arcs of transformation: depressed, unhappy freshman to happy, fulfilled senior that has found the perfect community and home at Penn. As you browse through the letters, you feel even more alone, because you don’t believe that you can find that type of home at Penn, that fairy tale journey from (metaphorical) rags to riches. It just doesn’t seem possible.

Here’s the cold, hard truth: it’s not. You won’t find a perfect home and community at Penn like so many people write about in their letters. It isn’t the perfect school for you. But, that’s actually okay. Even though your life won’t form a complete 180, things will get better, and you will change and grow for the better. One skill that you learn is how to let go of the black and white, all or nothing thinking. Just because something isn’t perfect, doesn’t mean it’s not good.

I’m writing this letter to the freshmen who don’t believe that they can find the perfect home at Penn, who don’t believe that they will find the perfect community. I’m writing to tell you that you might not find that, and that’s perfectly okay. You can live a fulfilling life, you can grow and change, and you can form meaningful connections without finding “your people” or “your home” in a specific friend group, club, or sorority/fraternity at Penn. Everyone tells you that you’ll find your home, but you might not. You might have to create that home and community for yourself.

You’re an anxious freshman, full of fear and imposter syndrome, trying your best to get by in an environment so shocking to your system that you feel completely alone. On the outside, everything is fine: you have a 4.0, multiple close friends, are involved in extracurriculars, and land great internships. While you work hard to maintain this perfect exterior, things on the inside feel like a nightmare: you’re depressed, suicidal, and sick with pneumonia for almost the whole year. You’re sexually assaulted. You’re struggling deeply with compulsive heterosexuality. You’re surrounded by neoliberal capitalists who only care about partying, something that disgusts you to your core but that you feel too scared to call out for fear of losing all of your friends. You have to ask for financial aid to afford BYOs and club fees, and you feel alienated from your wealthy friends. You realize that the people who you thought were wealthy before getting to Penn were just upper-middle class. The culture shock of freshman year is intense and takes an extreme toll on your mental and physical health.

The summer after freshman year feels like a turning point. You deeply immerse yourself in yoga, running, meditation, minimalism, and meal prepping, hoping that you can heal your mental and physical illnesses through lifestyle changes (rather than therapy). And it kind of works: you’re way less depressed and sick than you were freshman year. You run a half marathon, achieving one of your life goals. You still don’t love your classes, extracurricular activities, or job, but you feel like you’re making great strides in terms of your health. Your best friend freshman year was an exchange student and now she’s gone, so you feel isolated socially but still have some close friends. Your dating life is nonexistent, which isn’t a bad thing - you’re trying to concentrate on yourself. But you obsess over routine. You’re afraid that, if you don’t meal prep, wake up at 6:30am, sleep for 8+ hours, run 3+ miles/day, and meditate daily, that you will unravel, that you will return to that dark, scary place inside of yourself where you no longer want to live. So you create the perfectly structured routine, trying to (literally) run away from your problems.

The summer after your sophomore year, you have the opportunity to intern abroad, and you see the world outside of the U.S. for the first time. You solo travel to multiple countries, vastly improve your language skills, and grow immensely in your self confidence. For the first time you consider an international career. You’re slowly getting closer to what you want to do. You thought that your dream job was to work in politics in the US, but you start to realize that maybe your dream job is to work on human rights issues internationally.

Junior fall is a wild time. You finally come to terms with your queer identity - you’ve identified as bi for years, but only dated men, and now you suddenly realize that you’re actually a lesbian. You go back to therapy for the first time since a disastrous therapy experience freshman year (when going to therapy actually made you more suicidal), and make huge strides in conquering your anxiety. You realize that you don’t love what you’re studying, so you spontaneously add on a third minor and start studying Arabic, something you’ve always wanted to do. This is by far your most academically challenging semester: you routinely stay up studying until 3AM, but you’re also the happiest and healthiest you’ve ever been mentally. You form some amazing new friendships. You’re doing so much, but for the first time at Penn, you actually like the majority of what you’re doing, and you have an amazing living situation (mostly) free of drama. You start to love school again. You begin drinking coffee for the first time in your life and savor the early mornings doing homework over oat milk lattes in WilCaf and UBB.

Junior spring was a shock - that’s when COVID hit. You’re studying abroad, living an incredibly hectic but fun life, full of Spanish and Arabic, when the pandemic arrives and you return home from March until April. This is one of the darkest times of your life. I’m not going to sugarcoat it - it is incredibly traumatic. You return to therapy, you try your absolute best to cope, but it’s still hell. When you arrive at your apartment in August, ready for senior year to begin, you reflect on your COVID summer and are honestly shocked that you’re alive and made it through. It takes you many months to recover from the trauma that happened while you were living at home.

Senior fall, you also enter into your first relationship. It’s exciting, scary, exhilarating, and terrifying all at the same time. You experience so many firsts. You grow more comfortable in your queer identity. You bleach your hair and experiment with your style for the first time. You join three new clubs, all focused on social justice, and find the closest thing to a community that you’ve had at Penn. None of these spaces are perfect or feel completely like home, but you’ve realized by now that “home” isn’t that easy to find and “safety” isn’t that easy to feel. You love the activist spaces that you’re part of - they are such an upgrade from the centrist, neoliberal spaces that you used to be involved in on campus. Classes are great, you’re working on your thesis, which you love, but things in your living situation aren’t easy - your roommate has vastly different views than you, and you don’t feel comfortable in your own home, a feeling that you’re (sadly) used to by this point. Your relationship ends, but it’s a good ending, an amicable separation that leaves you missing her of course but also empowered in your knowledge of who you are and what you need in a relationship to thrive.

Now, it’s senior spring. We’re almost there!! You’re about to graduate. This is HUGE for you, especially since you dropped out of high school and have never gotten a real graduation in your life. You finally finished your thesis, you have an amazing job lined up for after graduation, and you have some wonderful friendships. You’re rejected from all of your dream jobs/fellowships, but then you find some other amazing options and realize that rejections aren’t the end of the world. The perfect isn’t the enemy of the good.

Thinking back to my freshman-year self, I find myself tearing up. You are so brave. You are going through one of the hardest times of your life. I know how utterly alone and hopeless you are. I know what it’s like to go to CAPS every week, fill out the suicide-prevention worksheets, go through your daily activities feeling numb inside, and hate yourself so so deeply. Your life isn’t going to be a fairytale. It doesn’t have a magical ending, at least in college. But things are going to get better. They are going to get so, so much better. You are going to grow into a person that you never even imagined possible. You are going to transform from an anxious, type-A, closeted, insecure freshman to a (still anxious but working on it) more chill, spontaneous, confident, and proudly queer senior who is a little closer to finding her place in the world.

When reflecting on my past, I often tell people that younger me couldn’t imagine what current me wanted or desired because my world was so much smaller. I know that your biggest dream is to work in Philly City Council, to live in NYC, to study abroad in Spain. But you’re going to realize that so much more is possible. That the possibilities are endless. That you can do whatever you fucking want. Your world is going to grow so much these four years.

I know that you are cynical reading these letters. That you feel like none of them could understand how alone and hopeless you feel. But I assure you I do. I 100% do. And I want you to believe that nothing is truly permanent. That this too will pass. That you are loved. That you are enough. You’re so anxious that you got into Penn by accident, that you don’t have what it takes to make it here. In fact, you’re a brilliant scholar, incredible activist, talented writer, and a deeply kind, wonderful person. You deserve to be here. You belong. The admissions officers didn’t make a mistake.

Penn is a hard place. A very hard place. But I promise you, it’s okay to struggle. It’s normal to struggle. I know it seems like everyone else has their shit together, but that’s not true. It’s so, so normal to be struggling at Penn. People are just good at hiding it.

Keep on going. Even when it’s so, so hard, keep on going. Because I promise you it’s worth it. The joy that you’re going to feel, the places that you’re going to visit, the people that you’re going to get to know, the love that you will feel, are so much more than you could have imagined. I know the pain that you’re in. But I also know how strong and resilient you are. Let go of that all or nothing mindset, that belief that if you’re not perfect then you’re a failure. Realize that all you can do is your best, and that your best isn’t enough. I love you. I wish that I could jump through this screen and hug you. Because you’re absolutely perfect. And everything is going to be okay.

Love,

Rachel S

Dear Fresh Becca,

You remember Vine (RIP) better than I do. The app was home to so many iconic moments, including “and they were roommates.” This line touched many lives, including acting as a solid Instagram caption to announce one’s arrival at college.

Among many jarring transitions to Penn, having a roommate was up there for me. Up to this point, you’ve only shared a room on one-off trips to conferences and language camps. While you didn’t understand it then, these experiences left your introverted self overstimulated. Action-packed days without a moment alone made you excited to unwind on your own.

Of course, when you first arrive at Penn, you don’t lean into this aspect of your personality, like, at all. You pack the days with activities and pour energy into expanding the depth and breadth of your friendships. Your first wonderful roommate is Grace and you get used to one another over time. You also frequently leave your dorm door open, inviting anyone to stop by for a chat. You stay up late laughing and chatting in dorm rooms and common areas.

And, of course, you wouldn’t change it for the world. Freshman summer proved to be a weird departure from action-packed Penn and roommate life. Working on your own in Mexico, you bounce around different Airbnbs and residence halls. Amy kindly makes you breakfast in the mornings and you chat through your research on strategy and management in emerging economies.

Back on campus, you and Grace add Joshita and Elliot as roommates. Every semester at Penn is tough in its own way, but this one especially so with 6.5 classes and starting a new club. Delving deeper into classes in URBS, you think about what it’s like to live on the 20th floor. You also room with Lauren from Ohio State on an awe-inspiring trip to Iceland. The two of you navigate nature and networking while trying not to fall behind on assignments.

2019 brings many different living situations. You start off by crashing in 404, welcoming in a whole new set of vibes. You then trade a couple of sophomores for a 70-year-old host mother, Mercedes, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She wishes you well on your day as you have your morning instant coffee. In the evening, you catch up over empanadas and hear about her life in Argentina. In between, you help Mercedes work her Netflix and Gmail accounts. That summer, you share a room with Carmen in the Dzingel Hotel in Tallinn, Estonia. You connect over the shared experience of working with teenage girls and enjoying sushi and Rupaul’s Drag Race.

You move into A-302 with some amazing gal pals. You build some glorious mems with Sarina, Christina, Madison, Lauren, and Alexa. It’s kinda crazy to remember how many people we would cram into the apartment (pre-panini press) but I’ll never forget it. Your roommates also provide some *ahem* bonus roommates, some more permanent than others. At your adoptive apartment, 404, you spend many nights hanging out with Anna, Lynne, Liam, and Mander. Can’t think of a better crew to eat frozen snacks and watch Frozen with. You also develop a healthier attitude toward your time and energy, not stretching yourself as thin and taking more time for just Becco.

In 2020, your last plane ride for a bit is to Salt Lake City for a conference where you get to room with Lauren (#3, if you’re counting) from BYU. In March, your old roommates Bets and Chuck take you in to wait out the early days of the pandini. By the summer, you’re reunited with the roommates and the creative juices are flowing to make the best of senior year.

All I can say, fresh Becco, is that you have so much to be excited about. So many new experiences and new people to surround yourself with. General, maybe not so useful advice is to soak it all in, but still make time for rest. By your senior year, you’ll be filled with gratitude toward all of your roommates. For all of the laughs, for the games invented and played, for the drinks and cheese boards shared.

You are so grateful for Will, the most unexpected and wonderful thing to come out of WH 101. He teaches you how to sleep in, the wonder of sweatpants, and to make cold brew in the french press. Will is your favorite roommate (besides George 🐶) and you plan to keep it that way for as long as he’ll have you.

Penn is so much more than Kings Court, Hamco, and a host of other places. Your roommates are so much more than names on a lease. Four years of college look and feel very different than four years of high school. So will the four years after college, and the four years after that. *shrug emoji* let’s get it!

Love,

Becca B

Dear August 2017 Fridah,

Where to start?

First of all, I gotta tell you, the United States considers you to be a Black person. I know that sounds weird right now, given that you’ve never really identified with the word (or even thought about it really), growing up in a predominantly Black African country. Well, you are Black, and it will largely shape your experience. (In fact you will be one of the co-founders of a Black affiliation group within your academic program- shout out to Black Huntsman!:)). You will suddenly realize that you are the only Black woman person in a room. Sometimes the only Black person. This will make you feel some type of way. You will feel the sting of people talking over you (especially white men) or invalidating your points. You will not know how to express or even process what you will feel. You will sometimes gaslight yourself and decide that there must be something wrong with you.

Oh and your “accent” won’t help. Some people will make it seem as if anyone who does not speak the “American way” (if it can be consolidated into one thing) has an accent. Later, you will realize after a while that everyone has an accent. It is just a way of pronouncing words. You will contemplate changing your accent. Or at least code-switching. You will decide against it because you will feel like you are betraying your Africanness by it. Well, your accent will evolve over time. This is not a bad thing. Do not feel guilty. You will maintain your “Kenyan accent” but over time learn to pronounce certain words differently. Your friends back home will notice and tease you. It is okay that this may happen. Identity is not static or immutable. It is a constantly evolving phenomenon that is dependent on, among other things, geography at a specific time. Allow for this dynamicity. You are not betraying your roots.

Your accent will factor into how some people treat you. A professor will tell you that your point is invalid because your accent is something he cannot understand. You will want to hide under the earth’s crust and to drop the class (but it will be a requirement class, ugh). This experience will make you shy away from speaking in class. You will wonder if you are becoming more withdrawn and losing yourself because confidence will become a luxury you can no longer afford. You will not recognize yourself or be able to reconcile your former talkative and outspoken self with this new shell of insecurity and isolation. I am sorry that you will experience this.

You will try to fit into spaces, including your program, that are overwhelmingly white. You will feel strange. People will speak too fast, and too superficially. They will use words that are so fake and shallow and extremely exaggerated. You will wonder if that girl on Locust walk “LiTeRaLlY aLmOsT dIeD” from that experience she was describing. People will say “hey, how are you doing” as they walk away quickly, your response following them behind before disappearing into the wind. People will pretend to be interested in you and your story, yet will ignore you on Locust walk and anywhere else ever. They will be lying. Someone will tell you you only got into Penn because of affirmative action. (They will be lying). You will wonder if you belong at Penn and even at Wharton. Everyone is so competitive and cut-throat. Most everyone is interested in everything your ideologies are opposed to. You will feel like a walking definition of a misplaced student. Everything about you will be just so un-Wharton-y and un-Penn-y and you will wonder if you made the right decision being in these spaces. Do not try to fit into these spaces. Be. You are allowed, at all times, to be exactly as you are. Find communities that affirm your existence and your ideas. Craft your own journey, even if it means swimming against the current. You will eventually find these spaces. In fact, you will participate in the creation of some of these affirming communities yourself. Again, I am sorry that you will go through this. But I can tell you for free that on the other side, you will realize that there was never anything wrong with you. The system was stacked against you. And despite that, you prevailed.

You will struggle with asking for help. You have always romanticized suffering as a virtue and it will be difficult to move out of this and seek help for yourself. You will struggle where you don’t need to. You won’t need to struggle because there are endless resources at your disposal that you can explore. You will discover this late in your college career. You will realize that people are not smarter or dumber than you. Some people are just better at playing the game of college than others. Better at standing up for themselves, better at asking for help, including from professors and TAs, better at being confident, even when they are wrong. There is no honor in struggle. Pain is sometimes unnecessary and if someone can do something to alleviate your pain, you would do yourself well to utilize whatever resources exist towards that.

You will start seeing a therapist (I know...girl...I know). And you will love it! You will learn a lot about yourself and unpack a lot of your trauma. (Yes you have trauma- trust me). You will not “find yourself in college”. You are not one thing or another. You are a multitude that keeps evolving. You will discover many things about yourself and explore many things about yourself. You will grow and you will break. You will cry and laugh and sing and dance and sleep hungry and eat and stay in bed for three days because you will be too sad to even brush your teeth. You will discover the power of love and many people will pour love into you, unfettered and unconditional. And many people will also disappoint you. You will realize that there is no one way to describe your college life. It will be neither good nor bad and it will be both all at the same time. But also, it just will be. And it will be a complicated and tumultuous journey. You will have many victories. You will surpass your own expectations (which are rather high). You will also experience many failures and will be surprised by how much you can exceed your own threshold of failure. You will de-pedestalize yourself and realize that you are just as vulnerable and needing of help as anyone. Your path will not be easy because it will not be straight forward. It will have many bumps and turns and plot twists and you will often feel like you cannot muster the strength to continue anymore. But you will. And you will be spectacular. And even now, from the “other side” I cannot say that I have it all figured out. But you will realize that a lot of life is winging it and discovering as you go what will unfold. I hope that when you experience those difficult days, you will lean on people who will nurse your wounds with love. I hope that you will not stress too much, because in the end, nobody really knows what they are doing, we’re all just winging it. And you will figure it out. I promise. I promise that that bad grade will not be the end of you. I promise that that rejection will not be the end all be all for you. I promise that you will survive letting go of unreliable people, even though it will hurt deeply. You are so large and there is so much to you and I hope you will give yourself the grace to just be, because you will figure it out as you go along. And nothing will be as consequential as you might imagine it to be.

You will learn and unlearn so many, many things. You will travel to so many places. You will try things you never thought you would and you will love some of them and hate some of them. You will evolve in soooo many ways, all the right ways. You will learn that most of life is not black and white but a whole messy conglomerate of grey nuances. I hope you live it to the fullest, whatever that means for each day, even if it looks like just eating a bowl of ice cream and watching Key and Peele sketches. Also, I am so proud of you and I love you so much.

With sunny and soft grace,

Fridah A

To my freshman self,

I’ll be blunt and say this: A lot will happen to you in the next 4 years of your life.

You will experience incredible highs you could never have possibly imagined, coupled with unbelievable lows that will leave you reeling in pain for days on end. You will meet people who will start off as strangers to you, but as the years go by, you’ll grow to truly appreciate their wonderful complexities, subtleties, personalities and quirky senses of humor that make them who they are, and you’ll thank God for having sent such thoughtful, interesting, hilarious and precious friends your way. You’ll end up sharing laughs, deep existential thoughts, pensive 3am musings, stories, homework, insecurities, snacks, and just about anything with them, really (even socks).

School won’t be at all like you expect it to be. You’ll watch the sunrise, bleary-eyed and feeling like your brain’s been stuffed with cotton balls, after each all-nighter spent poring over yet another programming assignment or latexing a CIS 160 problemset, leaving you to question upwards of a thousand times a day whether you’re smart enough for an engineering degree.

On top of the ceaseless workload, life will throw unexpected, heartrending curveballs at you left and right, to the point where it’ll dawn on you that security - in family, health, friends, academics - is really all just an illusion and your life could be upended at any moment. You’ll come face to face with grief when you hear news of a friend’s passing, and it will seem so cruel and heartless that the world continues to move on relentlessly while you fall apart into millions of pieces as you try to imagine a world without him in it. You’ll watch in horror as disease gradually begins to wreak havoc on a close family member’s health, and you’ll experience frequent waves of panic at the thought of losing your loved ones. With these moments, however, you will recognize more and more with every passing day how beautiful, and fleeting, life truly is.

It’ll be a lot to handle, and trust me, being overwhelmed is a feeling you’ll become all-too familiar with. Remember to breathe. Being at Penn will often feel like you’re stuck in a perpetual race characterized by pre-professionalism and toxic hustle culture, but take deliberate moments to step away from the OCR hubbub or frenzied Huntsman GSRs or even just Penn itself. Once you zoom out, you’ll realize how silly it all seems in comparison to things that really matter. Don’t waste energy freaking out because you haven’t yet “figured out what to do with the rest of your life”, as if it’s some one-and-done deal. It’s not. You’ll spend the rest of your life growing, learning, failing, breaking, mending, and so forth - so don’t feel like you need to have everything in perfect order before these 4 years are up (spoiler alert, rarely anyone does). On that note, don’t idolize college either. You’ll hear people constantly preaching that “College is the BEST 4 YEARS OF YOUR LIFE!”; take it with a grain of salt. College is great, but I’m almost certain that it doesn’t just go downhill from there. That’s like finishing the appetizer of a fancy meal then getting up to pay the bill - there’s still the main course to look forward to! Enjoy the ride, think long term, and don’t let absurdly high expectations ruin the experience or cause you to get unnecessarily disappointed when reality doesn’t exactly match up with what you see in the movies.

Take moments to slow down and live. Laugh abundantly and find people who intrigue you, appreciate you, encourage you, share your humor and taste in memes, and keep them close and strive to be as good of a friend to them as possible. You’ll soon realize that life becomes infinitely more meaningful when you step away from yourself and start putting others first. After all, it’s usually less about what you’re doing, but more so who you’re doing it with that makes anything worthwhile. You will have moments when you’ll feel as if your heart is so full it could burst - and no, it won’t be because of any academic or professional milestone but rather because of the people you surround yourself with.

Funnily enough, you’ll find out soon enough that you’ll learn more from your peers than you could ever learn from a professor. Take time to appreciate and learn from the friends around you. Soak in their presence like a sponge and be an avid listener to their stories, backgrounds, histories, troubles, dreams... Learn from them hungrily, strive to be a part of their lives and love them to the best of your ability. Don’t let your prior cynicism towards people get in the way of you forming new relationships. Allow your heart to be softened. Be open to sharing emotions freely even though you used to be wary of it; vulnerability is terrifying but there is an entire world of growth, compassion, and empathy waiting to be discovered once you chip down those carefully constructed walls you’ve so laboriously spent your adolescence building up.

On a more exciting note - make spontaneity your brand. The impromptu 2am Wawa runs, late night pillow talks with your roommate, random, unplanned hangouts with friends that end up becoming unforgettable memories, jam sessions with strangers - they’ll all enrich your life more than you could’ve ever expected. Don’t turn them down for the sake of comfort, you’ll probably regret it.

About failures - try not to take things personally. You’ll face rejection after rejection, from internships, jobs, or clubs, and your instinctual gut reaction will be to feel hurt when it seems like a door has been slammed in your face. It’s okay to feel this way. But soon, you’ll realize that there are still infinitely many opportunities out there, and it’s not worth wasting your time on what could have been. One door shut can lead to another, better door opening. Keep in mind that life is not a zero sum game, as your negotiations professor will remind you repeatedly; it is indeed possible for all parties to reach beneficial outcomes in some way or another. So get up in the face of failure, brush yourself off and stroll right onto the next opportunity that might be better suited for you anyway. Wear your failures like badges of honor; don them proudly like tattoos on your arms. Let them decorate your life story. While they might seem shameful in the moment, learning to be unfazed by failure will help you cultivate an undefeatable spirit, undaunted by setbacks here and there.

On faith - You’ll enter college uncertain about your spiritual life, and you’ll go through several phases where you try to explore different crowds and different identities to adopt apart from Christianity. You’ll soon realize that throughout the steep ups and downs that life brings you through, God and your community in Christ will keep you grounded through it all. One of your best decisions in college will be opening up to a community to commiserate with, share burdens and joys with, and grow together in faith with.

Lastly, remember your roots. Amidst the craziness and fun of college, remember the people who raised you and just want to know if you’re eating enough. It’ll be tempting to check out completely and ignore calls from your grandmother, especially if it’s at an inconvenient time for you. Answer the calls, if you can. You’ll be grateful you did :)

All in love,

Grace

gjchong25@gmail.com

Dear Penn Freshmen,

I moved in by myself on a hot August afternoon with five suitcases.

When other people had their parents to help decorate their walls and fluff up their pillows, I sweated as I tried to figure out how to drag up all my suitcases at once through the narrow Quad stairs. I spent the entire day decorating my room, putting up photos of my friends and placing artificial plant pots on the windowsill. My “Dorm Room” Pinterest board that I had been assembling since senior year of high school was finally paying off. This was it. Just like my room, my college life was going to be picture-perfect.

Or so I thought.

You will be surprised at how much college can break your rhythm. In high school, everything was more or less predictable. You go to class with these people at a certain time, you eat lunch together, go home, do homework, and everything repeats the next day. In college, everyone you know is doing a different thing at the same time. You can’t expect the people you meet during New Student Orientation to be your best-friend-lunch-buddies forever. Everyone’s trying to figure out what to do and where to be - and there may be conflicts of interest.

I thought I was going to have a new regularity. But all I found was irregularity. I found myself getting sick for weeks at a time, multiple times throughout the first semester (the freshmen flu!), and finding school really, really hard. On top of that, I was dealing with a lot of family and personal issues that rose to the surface only when I had left home. I didn’t know what to do.

Everyone else seemed like they were having the best time of their lives. And I wanted everyone to think that I was having the best time of my life, even when I wasn’t. I showed up to social events while being preoccupied with other worries. I sat in class thinking about how I wasn’t fully myself during those events because I was preoccupied. Everywhere I went and everything I did seemed vacant and pointless.

At this point, I was thinking - do I even have someone that I can rely on to be there at a certain time of the day to talk to? All my friends seemed so busy, and I didn’t want to plan a dinner 3 weeks in advance and put it into my Google Calendar. I was exhausted.

Then one random weekday, I was at the Hill dining hall with few of my friends that I had met from class. It was just like any other day. As the hot, stir-fried noodles were dumped into my bowl from the dining hall staff, tears started falling down uncontrollably. I’m pretty sure the people who gave me my food were very confused.

I sat down with my friends and told them things that I have never told anyone before. About how I was feeling, about what I was going through, just about everything. I had never planned to tell any of it to anyone before, but the words just poured out of me.

At first, I thought I had just created the biggest disaster of my life. Me, being vulnerable? No way. The high school me would be horrified - I had always kept many things to myself and never truly opened up to anyone.

But this unplanned, unexpected incident opened up a brand new chapter in my life.

I learned that nothing has to be a concrete routine. Sure, you have classes at a certain time of the day, and you do have to complete your assignments at some point. But if you want to just text a friend out of the blue and have late-night talks, go on a random walk, or just chill together, you can make time for it. I grew close to so many of my friends just by opening up myself in random conversations that weren’t planned.

My biggest mistake in the beginning of college was refusing opportunities like this to work on an assignment. Trust me on this, but an hour of having a heart-to-heart conversation is not going to destroy your grades. Those numbers aren’t going to be your core memories of these four years, but your moments with your friends will be.

Amidst all the regularities of school, like that homework assignment due next week and your midterm next month, you will find irregularities like this. A pocket of time spent with a friend that you didn’t think to catch up with. A random walk down a street that you haven’t been on. A random burst of emotions that you cope with by getting mashed potatoes from Wawa.

And you will have to seize that irregularity and make it your own.

With Love,

Hyewon L

Disclaimer: This letter is not meant to promote all-nighters. It is recommended that adults receive between 7 and 9 hours of sleep per night.

Dear Penn Freshmen,

I am so excited for you to begin your time at Penn. I don’t think I’m wise enough to be giving any advice, but if there is one thing I can confidently tell you, it’s that you really need to sleep. I’ve always struggled in college to maintain a healthy sleep schedule, so I decided to write my letter based on some of the lessons I’ve learned from those sleepless nights.

Lesson #1: On Studying

I pulled my first all-nighter of college during the spring semester of my freshman year. I had an anatomy exam the next morning that I put off studying for until the night before. Upon realizing that I was royally screwed, I downed a cup of black coffee at 8PM, preparing myself for the long night ahead. I have zero recollection of what I studied that night, but I vividly recall having heart palpitations all night due to the coffee.

The sleepless nights spent studying for exams taught me the perils of procrastination. I did not come into college with effective study habits or time management skills, and I paid the price in the form of lost sleep. Initially, I was proud of my ability to procrastinate and still perform well on exams, but over time, I realized how detrimental it was for my mental and physical health. The long-term compounding of academic stress and exhaustion from sleep deprivation is completely unsustainable. Invest in good study habits early. It makes life so much easier. Trust me on this.

Lesson #2: On Relationships

I pulled another all-nighter the summer after my sophomore year. I am a little embarrassed to admit that I was crying over a boy, but I was. After a breakup, I spent the entire night bawling under the covers and no matter how hard I tried, I just could not fall asleep. Eventually, the sun crept through the blinds of the bedroom. I crawled out of bed, washed up, and then went to work as usual.

I never want to relive the heartbreak of that night. But looking back on it now, I am comforted in knowing that what comes after heartbreak is a process of healing and self-discovery. The process of healing isn’t linear, and it certainly isn’t easy, so don’t be frustrated when you feel like you’re stuck. Extend grace to yourself and celebrate the small wins along the way.

Lesson #3: On Spontaneity

The summer after my junior year, I went on a WIP trip to China. On one of the last nights in Beijing, some classmates and I decided to go out and enjoy the city nightlife. We stayed out for too long and by the time we got back to the hotel, the sun had already begun to rise.

I’ve never been a big fan of going out, and staying out all night is definitely out of character, but I had so much fun. I vividly remember visiting the coolest speakeasy in a sketchy alleyway and riding a pedicab for the first time. Take advantage of the spontaneous adventures that come your way in college. Set boundaries, but allow yourself to have fun and be a little (just a little) reckless from time to time. It’s worth losing some sleep over.

Lesson #4: On Friendships

One night during my senior spring semester, three of my close friends and I piled onto my tiny twin-sized bed. I honestly don’t know how we all managed to fit. We played a game called “Peel the Onion” in which we asked increasingly deep questions about each other with each subsequent round. I don’t remember everything we talked about, but I do remember thinking to myself how lucky I was to have them in my life.

You will miss having your close friends by your side after graduation so make sure to take advantage of the time you have with your friends and tell them how much you love them. I hope that in the midst of difficult moments, you have a community to turn to. Surround yourself with people who are compassionate and loving and relay the same compassion and love to those around you as well. You will meet some of the most amazing people in college, and I am so excited for you.

During your time at Penn, I hope that you will prioritize your wellness, relationships, and sleep. If you do end up pulling an all-nighter, please spend it doing what you love with who you love.

Love,

Joanna Joannah0078@gmail.com

Dear freshman me,

You have nothing to prove to anyone.

You have nothing to prove to anyone, not to the NSO people you aren’t really comfortable with but hang out with anyway just by way of going with the flow.

You have nothing to prove to anyone, not to debaters whose love and practice of the activity far outpaces yours.

You have nothing to prove to anyone, not to people who think you’re not as smart as Wharton or Engineering students.

You have nothing to prove to anyone, not to your friends who take more/harder classes than you and make you feel stupid.

You have nothing to prove to anyone, not to your friends who manage more clubs than you and make you feel like an underachiever.

You have nothing to prove to anyone, not to your friends who will earn more in their first year out of college than you will in your 30s.

You have nothing to prove to anyone, not to grad school adcoms (of course you will play their game, but it’s just a game.)

You have nothing to prove to anyone, not to professors whose mentorship is generous but shouldn't chain you to research you don't enjoy.

You have nothing to prove to anyone, not to people on the internet who tell you asexuals aren't queer enough.

You have nothing to prove to anyone, not to other Indians who are more deeply integrated with Indian culture and language and politics than you.

You have nothing to prove to anyone, not to your partner who will expect things that you can't give.

You have nothing to prove to anyone, not to your parents who want the best for you but don’t live inside your head.

You might reject these statements on face, or you might acknowledge them as superficially true. But you won’t really feel them. You will want to prove yourself to all these people anyway. Because at the heart of it, you aren’t satisfied with yourself. You see the expectations you have to fulfill as a person in society, and for some reason you internalize them as part of your self-worth. You want to be more: smarter, more ambitious, more of an economist, more ace, more Indian, kinder, happier.

But you have nothing to prove to anyone, not even to yourself.

Phone: 609-647-0906

Dear Freshman Imran,

You come as a bright-eyed freshman from half-way across the world. Like many, you’re proud of what you have accomplished prior to Penn: how you strung together your disparate academic interests, activities and involvements into a cohesive-enough narrative that granted you admission to this seemingly out-of-reach school.

Navigating Penn will be a challenge that forces you to rethink and rework your perception of your identity, your direction, and your ambitions. While there are too many “aha” moments for me to pen, there are a couple key things I want you to know coming in.

Know What You Know, and Know What You Don’t

You come in with a set of budding ideas of what you want to do with your time here at Penn. Your memory of the kids you spend seven months tutoring in a home for abused children keeps you engaged in public policy reform. You want to bring more equitable education to the lives of these children. Your countless nights volunteering at soup kitchens make you think about the lottery of birth and buds an interest in philosophy.

You also have preconceived notions about yourself. Having switched away from engineering, you doubt your ability to do anything science related. This is compounded by mentors telling you to keep your eyes on “the bigger picture.” Your smartest friends tell you that the introduction to computer science class here is impossible, quashing that spark of interest you had.

This turns out to be quite far from where you end up. You absolutely hate philosophy, and just enjoyed the idea of being a wise chap. While you appreciate learning about public policy tools, your frustrations with the influence of politics in public policy push you towards the private sector. You learn to reconcile the underlying cynicism of capitalism you had and begin to embrace the idea of business as a force of change.

You end up biting the bullet and taking CIS110. You end up loving it, becoming a teaching assistant and mustering up the courage to pursue a second degree in computer science. It ends up being a creative outlet for you — you build nifty tools to help manage and grow your photography gig.

Again and again, Steve Job’s ‘04 Stanford commencement speech is a common recollection — “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future”. You came in thinking about these dots and looking forward to finding some coherent story to connect them. As the line in those dots cracks, you worry. But worry less because those lines will draw themselves. Focus on creating those dots and trust the process to connect them later.

Embrace Your Identity

You come in thinking you know yourself pretty well. However after some time, you develop underlying insecurities about your myriad identities. Your lack of cultural understanding, values that fall outside the mainstream as well as your seemingly alien heritage and upbringing begin to make you question your fit here. You begin to suppress some of your identities, electing instead to stay silent and attempt to fit in.

As you wrestle with these thoughts, you will be inspired by some very loud-and-proud individuals you meet. People who, like you, aren’t from here and don’t necessarily agree with the majority of those around them. But unlike you, they elect to have themselves be known and heard. They are unapologetically themselves and they inspire you. They learn to both acclimatize to their ever-different surroundings yet tactfully acquaint those around them with their nuanced experiences, perspectives and opinions. Some of these people become your closest friends. They not only respect your identity, but champion it.

Find these people; learn to find your footing and rejoice in the comfort under your own skin. As you reflect on how Penn continues to shape you, be proud. Know that your experiences, concerns and ideas carry weight. Your worries about your lack of relatability are the very reason your voice and opinions matter. Your experiences are unique and therefore carry more weight than you know. Realize that your uniqueness is more of a strength than it is ever a weakness.

Finding Your Spaces

Finding your space is a challenge. As you continue to explore your interests, you may bounce around different clubs, groups and activities. The people with which you share your home, meals, classes and extracurricular activities will change. Embrace that change and don’t be afraid to venture into new spaces. Along the way, you will meet some of the most intelligent, kind-hearted, and dedicated people.

As you venture into some of these spaces, you will be discouraged by the fact that you aren’t a good “fit” for some clubs and jobs. But don’t fret. Remember that your 19-year-old self can never be encapsulated, assessed or summarized in a 30 minute interview, 3 digit number or any other singular measure of intelligence. Instead, focus on the opportunities and multitude of open doors ahead. Sometimes, this will even lead to creating your own doors and spaces for yourself and those around you. It’s funny to think that exclusivity breeds inclusivity.

Follow Your Flow

As you look around, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer rapid pace at which everyone moves. Some of your close friends will have internships lined up three years ahead of time, some will do research with world-renowned professors, and some will go on to found their own multi-million dollar companies while still in college. You might not do any of these, but that’s okay.

You lean into the fact that you enjoy taking pictures, being an ear to others, and tutoring. You learn to harness your talents and leverage them to build rapport, create informal communities, and be a conduit of success for others. You unlearn the constant concern of where you are on the leaderboard, and learn to enjoy taking the curves of the road.

You eventually graduate from Penn somewhere in between a business analyst, economist, and computer scientist. But it’s not the theories and fine-grained details that will resonate in your head as you venture out into the world —it’s the new set of lenses through which you will see this world. These lenses will render the world a kaleidoscope of the colors and experiences which are yours to seize. You will come to see the world less intimidating than you initially thought.

As the dust settles from your first few weeks here, I hope this has provided some clarity and direction.

Best of luck,

Imran Idzqandar

[imranidz at gmail]

I've re-written this a couple of times. I wanted to avoid just writing a snippet or sentence that summarised my time here because it's not that simple. My time at Penn has been chaotic, silly eyeopening, and challenging all at the same time. Going to school in COVID times is a lot in general but even more when we blur the boundaries between family, school, and work. Family, school, and work were crucial to my experiences at Penn. Whether trying to balance going home to see my sibling’s games or trying to juggle a work-study job with 6 CU semesters and club work on top of that was generally a mind-numbing rat race of an experience.

Looking back, I wouldn't say that I disliked any of these times. I opted into them entirely for the sheer fact that I liked what I was doing.

As someone who used to have post-it quotes all over their room, I love a good inspirational quote. Quotes were my armor, a protective shield from my imposter syndrome. Be yourself is something teachers, family and friends repeated to me before I went to college, I thought I knew who I was when I left high school, and by spending time alone, I learned more about myself than I was anticipating.

I was scared and anxious about making friends in college that I clung to clubs to match me with people who would have similar interests or retreated to my room. I would best describe how I spent my time either on 100 running from thing to thing or sitting in my bed watching Hulu.

I’m grateful for the amount of time I’ve spent by myself at Penn. I've spent more time alone than I ever have in my entire life throughout college, which sounds scary, but it's also empowering.

And I am so excited to say that happened to me. Opting in to just kind of doing things for yourself, whether mind-numbing work, nurturing interests, or reconnecting with old talents. I choose me, which led to random experiences and interactions becoming incredibly meaningful and led to friendships and connections that I could not live without. Dancing to music in my room, reading books, watching enough animated Hulu right, or walking in West Philly for hours alone. Are the times I learned most about myself. So when my family remarks to me that I am different: admittedly, I am more cautious, I more snarky, I am more now than I've ever been. Because I have spent the most time with myself than I ever have, which is really exciting. I am a better version of myself because I know myself better. I’m not leaving Penn with a renewed love of Economics or Business, but a renewed sense of self. Which is really exciting and scary. You don't need permission to do this, but I will give you mine anyway. Think about yourself, think with yourself, especially if it is the first time you’ve had the privilege or space to do so.

P.S: Grinding all the time doesn’t make you special; drink more water and tell your support system you appreciate them more frequently.

I’m proud of you,

Mikayla

mikayla.angel.4.29@gmail.com

It’s difficult to distill what seems like a lifetime into just one letter. Where do you even start? It feels both like yesterday and an eon ago that you were getting your first burrito from Mexicali.

There are just so many significant moments, so many memories and lessons you will form, so much heartache and pain, and at the same time, so many triumphant moments.I want to tell you every little bit of it. I want to recount to you every single little piece of our journey because, oh boy, what a journey it is.

But, I have to start somewhere and as much as I wish I could, I can’t put down every single detail here, so, even though this is oversimplifying your journey, let’s go lesson by lesson:

Your path is your own.

As cliche as it is, this is a lesson that you don’t really internalize for quite some time. And as with all lessons worth learning, it takes quite a painful and difficult experience to truly take in.

Coming into Penn, you’ve spent your entire life believing in what your family says. Your parents’ word is gospel and your only alternative viewpoint is your sister’s. While it's true they have literal decades of experience to share with you and only want the best for you, you need to understand that you can’t just follow in their footsteps mindlessly. You have your own path to take in life.

Here’s how you learn.

You spend your freshman year miserable as you take courses you don’t like, join clubs you’re not passionate about, and interview for positions you don’t care about. You take your sophomore year and somehow decide that you are now a CIS major, even though you hate coding and spend the rest of your year in hell as you take CIS course after CIS course. You finally wake up and realize that your life can be so much better in the spring semester, and so decide to take an even more impossible major (Computational Biology). You switch again and again and again and again, dropping majors and minors and taking up new ones so many times you’ve lost count.

You spend so many sleepless nights preparing to interview for careers that you hate, giving into the pressure of the pre-professional funnel that is Penn, just to get rejected. (Don’t beat yourself up, you end up fine!) You fall in love time after time and then realize you can’t be happy with them because while others think you’re great together, you know you’re not and so spend an entire year of your life questioning your life and feeling trapped.

You forget about friends back home because you believe that you will never see them again and that they don’t fit in with your future, only to realize that you just voluntarily isolated yourself for no real reason.

You go through so much heartache taking the weight of all of the advice given to you, without realizing that the decisions you thought you were making, weren’t yours, but rather those of others.

I want you to know that life isn’t meant to be lived like this. You can’t just lean on what people tell you. They’re going through things so different from what you are going through. While it sucks, and it's harder and more painful learning your own lessons, making choices for yourself, and going into the unfamiliar. It is the only real way for you to find your happiness.

Be honest with yourself - especially when you’re lost.

Denial is a powerful thing. It's so easy to just deny a hard truth, even when it's staring you in the face. You try your hardest to not internalize it, to not believe it, because taking it in might ruin you. Because taking it in is painful and difficult and you’d do anything for it not to be true.

But the thing is, regardless how much you try to deny something, no matter how much you try to run away, life has a way of catching up with you. And the thing you thought you were running away from, slams into you.

You learn this through love, through school, through careers. You learn it through investing in things you believe are good for you even though you don’t really feel them. You learn it through 4am conversations about inflated worth, through working through problem sets you have no understanding of, through spending summers living by yourself to go through internships you hate.

At the end of the day, if you don’t enjoy something, don’t do it. If you do it just because you think it will be building into a long-term goal that will fulfill you, stop. There are so many other pathways, so many other roads you can take to get there. You don’t need to sell your soul to cross the bridge.

The beauty of life is that you can make your own path. There’s no need to follow in everyone else’s footsteps. Chances are that that’ll just make it harder for you because it's easier to walk a path that's clear cut. But just because it's well-treaded doesn't mean the destination is for you.

Savor every fleeting moment. Good and bad.

How can you tell the good times from the bad? In all honesty, you can’t. Even in the best of times, there will always be stressful moments. Even in the worst of times, there will always be moments of relief.

That’s the thing about life; it's continuous, not discrete. Moments, feelings, thoughts all flow into one another, never ending, never starting. Everything leads into everything. Because of this it is difficult to establish the times in your life you’re going to look back on fondly. Feelings in a moment are determined relative to the recent past. It's only when you’re able to look back and see them in the context of a larger time frame that you’re able to see them as they truly are.

This makes it so easy for important moments to sneak up on you, to do so in a way you never see coming. You later on realize these moments have become cornerstones of your college experience. No one really thinks that getting Dim Sum House at 1am with friends is going to be memorable down the road. No one goes into recruiting looking forward to all of the people they’ll get reconnect with because of casing. No one goes into quarantine thinking they’ll form some of the most life changing relationships of their lives.

It's not the moments that you consciously form that become the fond memories that you later look back on. The things that you fixate on more often than not are not what you remember. Instead, life has a penchant for surprising you. For making the most irrelevant details the most relevant. For bringing your life to places you would never have thought of.

Life has a funny way of surprising you - not in the moment, but after. So keep a wide eye open and remember to treasure each waking moment because you never know which one you’ll miss most after it's passed.

Don’t regret - reinforce positively instead.

Penn is going to be the most challenging four years of your life. You’re going to cry a lot. You’re going to wonder whether or not you belong here, multiple times. You’re going to question who you are and what you’re doing with your life so so so many times. But I want you to know, it is all worth it. The journey that you go through, although difficult and sometimes redundant, will be incredibly rewarding.

Life is full of uphills and downhills, peaks and troughs. No day is the same as the last, but every day is equally full of potential. Even though you don’t know what to expect, the fact that there’s always something new around the corner for you to learn and grow with should excite you.

Even though you will reach some of the lowest lows of your life, you will also reach the highest highs. Focusing on one instead of the other helps you change your perspective in life and allows you to stay energized and eager for what comes next. What does not work isn't what matters. What does work, does.

Instead of dwelling on your gaps, focus on your strengths. You can’t be the best at everything. You’ll understand this in your junior year when you start taking classes that you like. You’ll understand this when you quit clubs to focus on your other priorities instead. In these moments, you don’t dwell on your regrets. Instead, you focus on your strengths. Instead of trying to work on things you have no interest in, you invest and double down on things you do.

Remember to stay excited. Remember to love life. Not just because of the unpredictability, but also just because of what it means - every day has the potential to be the best day of your life, but only you can make it so.

Don’t dwell on the past. Keep pushing forward to that better tomorrow.

Keep learning.

Life at Penn is life accelerated. You give a lot and gain a lot. You learn far more than you ever thought you would at university. Sure, you learn what’s expected like how to use Lagrange and what marginal utility is. You learn life skills like how to cook and clean and write a resume. But more unexpectedly, and more excitingly, you learn things that you never would ever need to learn.

You learn that squirrels are cute but love to bite. You learn not to skateboard in the rain. You learn that insurance does cover ambulance rides up Locust. You learn that 3737’s other roof has the best view you will ever have of the Philly skyline. You learn that the halal food truck on 41st is the best food you will ever eat. You learn that Philly’s music scene is unparalleled.

You also learn to expect the worst but also to hope for the best. You realize that even though things can always get worse, they can always get better. You learn to grow and pick yourself up from where you fall. You will fall time and time again. You learn to savor the moments as they come. You can only live them once, even though once will never be enough.

Learning is the reason why you came to Penn. Not prestige, not networking, not anything else. Learning is the reason why you do what you do. It's what drives you and what motivates you - learning about independence, learning about failure, learning about music, learning about life.

As an Economics student, you learn to understand how the world works.

As a Cognitive Science student, you learn to understand the people around you.

As a Penn student, you learn to understand what it truly means to be you.

Here’s to some of the best and most formative years of your life,

Eduardo P

Hi, Anya.

You are a Penn freshman, even though for the next year or so you will keep believing it’s a profound mistake of the universe and the Admissions Office — sorry, [former] Dean Furda! You made it, Anya, and you are yet to realize that you deserve to be here. Brace yourself for a learning journey, but do not get ahead of yourself — there are more kinds of learning out awaiting you than you can imagine right now. I have no concrete advice to equip you to deal with the years ahead, but I can tell you a story about it.

Ready?

You will come to college from a very supportive and nurturing place you hold closer to heart than your actual family home and wonder why it is so hard to feel at home here. You will expect college to get easier; it will not. The truth is, it will always be like this - 'a for adversity' type of living, oh-my-god-does-it-ever-get-better. You are yet to learn to be patient. You are yet to see why you need patience, too.

You will spend your first year doing yoga and pacing the streets of Center City. You will memorize every corner of faraway places, escaping campus and fellow students, anxious about how you can't choose your major. You will go through the entire year on straight As in every class and see no trace of meaning in studies. You will sincerely believe that failing to identify with a course as your life calling is the reason why you do not belong here. You will want to drop out and only stay because there is nowhere else to go.

Early sophomore year, things will get better. You will create your own job at Penn for a cause that you strongly believe in and even speak at a conference about it - tell me more about a fulfilling college experience. Soon, however, you will learn that some of systemic oppression falls onto those who advocate, too. You will write a paper about your experience - the nicer parts, of course - and attempt publishing it, perhaps successfully. You will believe you are having the time of your life in a course with the word despair in the title and get (of course!) an A in it. In that class, you will meet a boy who awakens capital-D despair in your bones just one year after the class is over. When you can’t take it anymore, you will run away and slowly start learning what it's like to be sad.

You will believe that you are fundamentally unlovable and try to escape love as a concept in every dimension that could be romantic; but do not worry, you’ll see much irony in these conclusions before too long. Later yet, you will learn to be thankful for the boy you ran away from - for closeness, for oatmeals, and most of all for teaching you to respect your story - all the rocky beginnings of a difficult childhood, not speaking proper English until you were 18, crossing oceans in search of a better life all by yourself. You will learn to feel joy and gratitude for the good and stand firm on the idea that you want something better, no turning back.

Junior year, when college authorities ask you to leave your dorm in the midst of the pandemic though you have no money for food and shelter, you will pack your belongings to a friend's place. You will often wonder what kind of future to expect when you cannot survive on your own and counting on your parents is not an option. When someone reaches out to check in on you for not showing up, you’ll push him away, asking not to refer you to counselling for a quick fix. He will hear you more than you think; he will say no man is an island and start building bridges out of words. It will be a beautiful beginning, maybe. You will want to find out. You will begin to learn about patience and want to be patient with all your heart.

By senior fall, you will stand firm on your major choices and at last realize that college is not about majors at all. You will keep coding and indeed get better, and you will discover the beautiful strangeness of Computer Security. You will feel excited about some - many! - of your Philosophy papers and manage to do well. That fall, you will lose ties to your home country for long and uncertain years, which will shatter you for quite some time. But you will keep going; by senior spring, you will get back to acing every paper and still convert all your grades to pass-fail. Sometimes, transcript letters are not how you want to define your success to others.

You will see that, much as you enjoy coding at six in the morning, you are not a Computer Scientist. You like cracking algorithmic puzzles, but what you long to optimize the most is not time and space complexity of the code on your screen but joy in the people around you. You will learn that, much as Philosophy entertains you at times, you are not a Philosopher either; you enjoy going for walks with real, flesh-and-blood philosophers so much more than reading the dead (and the living!) authors of papers for your classes.

You will learn that, first and foremost, you are a human being with a beating heart, and you will learn to take better care of your heart, your mind, and the body that keeps them going. You will learn to be loving-sad - to meet your emotions with compassion, spend time with them, and watch them fall into peace and calm again. This discovery will carry you through senior spring. There will come days when you feel like you are walking the Earth so lightly, and you will hope to carry what you learned into days well after Penn.

College is about more kinds of learning that you imagine; though some of us students here fall in love with Calculus, remember that it won’t teach you how to connect with yourself and others or find the right words to best support someone. Try to accept that, perhaps unlike some people you meet here, you’ll want to live all your life, not just the Calculus parts; treasure what you learn about living the way you treasure a Computer Security project.

It won’t come easily or soon. You will feel broken, a lot and often. In your most broken moments, would you believe me if I told you you are in for a lot of beautiful things?

For the moment you surprise one of your friends by giving her the book "Tiny beautiful things" on a simple walk to Woodlands, and her hummus recipe you make for everyone else who visits you; for the moment your other friend says that you’ve been part of her healing; for weekly Skype calls to London on Sundays at 5pm and Saturday day trips to NYC, ending as you know them - how poetic! - on Brooklyn Bridge; for late-night stir-fries that will make you feel so close to a human being that you are ready to go through anything for you two to be together; for how you will learn that sometimes, when everything you've got to give seems like it's not enough, you oddly become enough again by letting go.

For the moment a friend will come over to Philly on his birthday just to make sure you are ok; for the moment another friend books you a flight to LA within two hours from the end of your call to take the best possible care of you when you need it the most, and for all the days of acai bowl and avocado toast bliss on Santa Monica that follow; for an 11-page letter you will write to your friend on the flight to LA just to tell her how much you miss her, how you’ll spill water and tea all over those pages when the plane is shaking and still send it.

For almost marrying someone whose personality you treasure and not letting the tragicomedy of it all put an end to your interactions; for running away from your feelings, for honestly trying, only to realize that sometimes you can't. That sometimes, no matter the storms of your life, you can brave the cold windy nights and open up to someone special about how special they are to you. That sometimes, waiting just makes sense, and whatever you look for is on its way to you, if you are on its way there.

I know you do not believe me yet, Anya the freshman. I know I've got to tell you the truth anyway, so that one day, when you see so much more than your college dreams come true, you can look back and wonder why you assumed the worst every time, why you felt broken beyond repair if you had it in you to heal, get up, and smile at cute dogs and bird songs and blue skies again.

One day you will look back on this time and thank yourself for college as four years of falling apart and slowly, without ever believing that you could, putting yourself back together, again and again and again. You will thank countless others for never having to do it alone. You will thank the universe for the time when sadness became beautiful at last and gave you the much needed room for growth and learning to trust the course of your life.

You will learn that you’ve come so far and keep going not because you are a ‘sadgirl' you once were, running away from your past, afraid to turn back. You will grow brave enough to dream your wildest dreams and work tirelessly to make them reality. There is too much light all around to deny yourself it all, believing you do not deserve to be here. You will come to see it, I promise. Until then and always,

I am holding you and supporting you,

Anya M

(215) 594-7820

Dear Penn Freshmen,

This letter will be short and sweet, as I think no matter how much advice you get on how to make your college years the best they can be, in the end you will need to explore on your own, make your own mistakes, and seek out your own mentors. The one piece of advice I will give to help make your Penn experience better is to, sometimes, get away from Penn.

College is a hard place. Your schedule is probably going to quickly become cluttered with demanding coursework, leadership meetings, social gatherings, group projects and the like. It is critical to feel like you have a place to go when you really really just need to escape it all for a bit. And Philadelphia is a great place for that! There are terrific restaurants, outstanding art museums, great music and dance scenes, tranquil parks and gardens, and nature parks not too far away. Some of my best memories of Penn, quite honestly, have been outside of Penn--apple-picking trips to Linvilla Orchards, hiking with friends in the Wissahickon, acroyoga on paddleboards in the Delaware River, and dinners with my partner at hidden gems like Hardena and upscale restaurants like Vetri Cucina. It’s important to find people at Penn that you can lean on and vent to, but it is just as essential to find communities outside of Penn that allow you to extract yourself from the stresses and social pressures of college. Because life is so much more than papers and problem sets.

Good luck,

Yarden

Dear Freshman Olivia,

Hello from the other side! I know you are nervous, and you’ve just emerged from the best year of your life so far and can’t imagine leaving Archmere and Delaware and can’t imagine how college will live up to being the best four years of your life.

Spoiler alert: they will be difficult. Your first year, you’ll be forced to grapple with who you are outside of academic success and being a little fish in a big pond. You’ll question whether you are smart enough, social enough, driven enough, or hard working enough to be here. You’ll worry about letting everyone down from back home who believed in you. You’ll hear about your friends’ experiences from other colleges and think that everyone is having a better time than you and you’ll wish you went to a smaller, warmer school. You’ll learn what imposter syndrome really feels like. You’ll cry every time you come back to campus and have to leave home again.

On the flip side, that year you will also meet some of your best friends for life. You’ll pick the absolute best hall to live in (RIE forever) and you’ll take for granted coming home every day and being surrounded by your best friends, the people you’ll still be hanging out and living with three years later. These are the people who you’ll celebrate Friendsgivings with and spend your twenty-second birthday surrounded by.

You’ll also take classes that are really hard but make you realize the kinds of things you can figure out if you give yourself a chance. You’ll take your first CIS classes and fall in love with it. You’ll join the Signal, a club filled with upperclassmen that seem so worldly and accomplished, and you won’t be able to believe that one day that’ll be you. You’ll go through your first breakup in college but you’ll be proud of yourself for choosing you. You’ll join the frisbee team and start to find a place at Penn, an Olivia you don’t recognize but that is starting to feel more like you. You will even join a sorority, which feels ridiculous at times, but you will also meet some of your best friends here, even the most unexpected ones. You’ll surprise yourself by choosing to pursue your faith, and you’ll meet some of your best friends when you take a risk and go to that Newman retreat even though you don’t know anyone. You’ll have a breakdown over Easter break about not having an internship yet, and then a couple weeks later you’ll get the best internship you’ll ever have. You’ll spend the summer at home with your family and you’ll take the time you need for yourself.

You will also face loss, a lot of it. You’ll attend four funerals of boys your age in your first year and a half of college, and your friends will hold you while you cry and will buy you ice cream and spend nights with you. You’ll learn to ask for help when you need it (though this is a lifelong work in progress). You will learn to start telling people how you feel and that you love them more often and even when it’s scary because life is too short not to.

Your sophomore year will be the hardest, most draining year yet, and you’ll spend an endless amount of time in office hours. You’ll bond with Jill for life after taking the CIS trio (120, 160, 121) with her this year, and you’ll share lots of light moments in an otherwise stressful year. You’ll be in charge of making your own food for the first time. You’ll get into a long distance relationship.

Junior year, you’ll struggle through recruiting and leadership positions and feel like you won’t get a second to breathe in the fall before you head off to Edinburgh for what you anticipate will be your best semester yet. You’ll get there and you’ll hit the jackpot with your flatmates and you’ll fall in love with the city and you’ll finally feel like you can breathe again. You’ll learn how nice it is when your schedule isn’t packed full 24/7 and you can spend intentional time with other people and with yourself. But then, COVID will hit.

You’ll go home three months earlier than planned, and you’ll spend months with your family. In the midst of all the uncertainty and loss, this will be a silver lining - you never thought you’d be at home with your whole family for this long again. You’ll watch Downton Abbey and your little sister will become your best friend and you’ll watch all the (or all the important) Marvel movies. You’ll learn phrases like ‘Zoom fatigue’ and ‘mask’ and ‘socially distanced’ and ‘quarantine.’ You’ll join Oracle and you’ll start your internship remotely when you were supposed to be in Boston.

You will also go through a breakup, this time the hardest thing you’ve ever gone through. But from this, you’ll go to therapy again, and you will invest in your friendships, and you will learn to stand on your own, and finally, Penn will feel like home to you.

Your senior year won’t be at all what you’ve expected. But despite this, it’ll be your best year. You’ll go on adventures and you’ll have that space to breathe and you’ll find yourself grounded here and you’ll find yourself dreading graduation, trying to soak in all the little moments you have left.

Here’s some advice: take those creative writing classes, they will ALWAYS be your favorite, and you’ll never regret it. Say yes a lot, especially to spending time with people, but not too much - don’t be afraid to take the time you need to yourself. Listen to your friend when she tells you maybe you should go to CAPs. Send the thank you note and write the birthday cards. Read more - those Game of Thrones books will get you through freshman year. Go on walks all over West Philly - it’s not scary, it’s beautiful.

Above all, don’t be too hard on yourself - those dumb things you did when you were drunk will lead to funny stories that your friends will still make fun of you for (don’t worry, they’ve got plenty of their own). Trust me, you will not remember the homework assignments or exams you did poorly on - get enough sleep instead, and take care of yourself. You will get multiple Cs, but you will also literally never get asked for your transcript by any company you go to work for. You will get rejected by jobs, and clubs, and boys, but you will also turn down boys, and clubs, and jobs. The good ones will handle it with grace and respect.

And! You have so much to be proud of! Tangible things: starting the anti-resume project. Running a marathon and so many miles all over Philly. Taking a leap of faith and going abroad. Surviving recruiting season your junior fall. Becoming the type of person who brings people together and puts yourself out there. Learning to rock climb, learning to love yoga, learning to cook. Being vulnerable with others, which will forge some of your deepest relationships.

Remember that you are here for a reason, and you belong here, as much as you question this. You will be so inspired by the people that came before you and surround you, and you will inspire others.

Best of luck, and just know -- I wouldn’t change a thing.

Lots of love,

Olivia O

Dear baby Rachel:

Welcome to NSO. You are on the roof of Huntsman Hall, and, in true Penn fashion, the ice breaker is sharing where you see yourself in 5 years. Your partner will explain that they want to be a quant at a hedge fund (I swear, this will happen), and you, my dear, innocent Rachel will ask this boy what in the world a quant and hedge fund are. I suppose I should warn you that this interaction -- and so many like it -- will define your first two years here.

Too often, you will feel as though you are scrambling to learn the rules of a game that has already begun. While you are asking what investment banking is, your classmates will be posting on LinkedIn that they are an “Incoming Analyst at J.P. Morgan.” Terrified of falling behind, you will jump into their pre-professional game -- without knowing any of the rules associated with picking a career.

You will view your uncertainty as a weakness, something that should be covered up with some well-honed Penn Face. This will lead you to announce a concentration in finance; to take easier classes to boost your GPA; and to spend hours-on-end in the QSR. Then, finally, after many trips to the OCR-suite, you will reach their game’s metaphorical finish line. You should be happy; after all, it is finally your chance to post that not-so-subtle flex on LinkedIn. But, here is the tea: catching up to your classmates and achieving what they deem “success” won’t make you happy. Instead, you will be left with a pit in your stomach, wondering why you tried to play their game in the first place...

So, while I stand on this soap box, I am pleading with you to take a breather. At Penn, your goals won’t be as concrete as they were in high school. For the first time, your future is undefined. Penn will open thousands of doors, and you get to choose which one to enter. Is this incredibly frightening and overwhelming? Yes. But, this decision is an exciting, essential part of growing up. It will be easy to follow a default option, assuming that those who came before you were told some kind of secret to success. But, the reality is that what works for someone else won’t necessarily work for you. Instead, you need to select the door that is best for you.

This leads me to another truth. There are an infinite number of ways to do Penn “right.” If you embrace everything that Penn throws at you and chase what makes you happiest, the rest will follow. So, take that random Greek Mythology class that interests you and apply to that club that has nothing to do with your concentration. The next 4 years will fly by, and you shouldn’t waste your time bending backwards to fit someone else’s definition of thriving at Penn. And, I promise, if you take the time to try on a few versions of yourself, you will ultimately discover who you truly are (which is someone pretty great!!). After all, life doesn’t just piece itself together; it requires you being deliberate in your actions to figure it out.

I could go on-and-on about building your own path, but I suppose you get the jist. While I hope that my buddy from NSO is loving life as a quant, I have spent the past 4 years learning that you don’t need to (and shouldn’t!!) have the next 5 years planned out! Instead, continue to try on different versions of yourself and learn as you go — embracing uncertainty as the adventure that it is.

So, baby Rachel, get excited. You’re going to love it here. I promise that even your lowest points will be followed with the highest of highs. So, be you, be patient, and explore. Most importantly, if you’re feeling lost, remember that you’re not alone and it’s part of the journey. I am so proud of you, and I can’t wait to see all that you will do here!

Love,

Rachel B

Dear Class of 2025,

Let me be honest with you...

I wasn’t supposed to be here.

“I wasn’t supposed to be here”- I found myself repeating those words over and over as I cried in my dorm room, suppressing my sobs so my roommates couldn’t hear. But I had finally realized where I was. It was the second semester of my junior year, but it had all just hit me then- I wasn’t supposed to be here.

See, I had immigrated to the US from Korea when I was three, and my family’s first apartment was a one-bedroom apartment that cost less than my off-campus apartment now. During our first few years in the US, my family barely had enough money to pay for rent, didn’t have a car to get around in, and repeatedly failed to attain permanent resident status. I remember my dad telling me about how one night, when I was three, my application for permanent residency had been rejected for the third time, and he had broken down crying because he didn’t know if I would be able to stay in the US.

Though I eventually became a citizen, I still struggled with feeling as if I didn’t belong, and the racism and discrimination I experienced growing up only made me feel like more of an outsider. My differences, rather than being celebrated, were mocked and used to make racist remarks about my “small eyes” or my non-English speaking parents. I found myself wondering if I could ever call this country my home when I struggled so intensely with imposter syndrome.

When I came to Penn, I brought these struggles with me. In fact, being surrounded by smart and high-achieving people only made me feel like an imposter even more. However, as time went by, I grew to call this place my home. While high school was a place where I had experienced racism and struggled to feel accepted, Penn became a place for me to heal and grow. At Penn, I found a first-generation, low-income community where I no longer felt ashamed of my background but instead felt proud of my parents for their resilience and determination. At Penn, I was able to study sociology, where I learned more about the structures of opportunity and inequality in our society, the same forces that shaped my life. At Penn, I had the opportunity to address those inequalities through service trips and social impact classes and found professors that truly cared about me, beyond my role as a student. At Penn, I found a community in my Christian fellowship, where I felt like I was finally accepted and didn’t need to worry about changing the aspects of myself that made me who I was. At Penn, I finally felt like I belonged.

And this is a struggle that many Penn students have faced, and a struggle you may also face when you get here. But when you encounter those challenges, just remember: you’ve proven to yourself and others that you belong by making it here.

See, when I broke down in my dorm room that one night, it wasn’t because I felt like an imposter who had finally been figured out. Rather, it was because I was incredibly grateful. I had taken a moment to reflect and realized just how many opportunities and resources I had been given at Penn. I realized that my life circumstances and challenges made it so that I wasn’t supposed to be here. And yet by the grace of God, I was.

Now as I get ready to graduate, I realize that my experience at Penn is just the start to my journey. Penn hasn’t been easy, but the road ahead is also filled with challenges. But I’ve learned this, class of 2025, and I encourage you to remember this-- that love prevails. See, my story in the US could have ended with the rejection of my application for permanent residency, but it instead began with my parents who, out of love for me, applied a fourth time for us to all eventually become citizens. The story of me coming to college could have ended with me feeling like an imposter, but it instead began with the love of the people and communities at Penn that embraced me. And now, the story of the class of 2021 could end today, but it instead begins with us paving the way for you, Class of 2025, so that you can use your experiences and skills to love and serve others, especially those who still feel as if they don’t belong.

-Shawn

Soli Deo Gloria

shawnkim07@gmail.com

Dear Penn Freshmen,

I've been thinking about how to describe college to you. Here's something to start: college will be the most unreal 4 years of your life, where everyone is a bundle of perpendicular lines – people pulled together only by this similar experience who then diverge forever. It is one big, weird, mosh pit. One long and unpunctuated experience of freedom and growth. A place where you take responsibility for the first time: for your successes, but also your mistakes. A place where you realize that wherever you came from and who you were in that place is not who you are now, is not who you will be.

The first thing I want to tell you is to never dilute the things you love with the expectations for what you should love. For the longest time I struggled with wanting to be ‘taken seriously’ by adopting ‘serious hobbies’ that proved some type of skill or value to others. I thought writing about emotions, life, and the small joys within it would make me seem weak, less capable, too sensitive. But growing up means realizing that your individual joy does not have to be explainable to anyone else. In my case, I found out that, as Didion puts it, I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Look, if there is something that pulls you, stop yanking yourself away. Lean into it, because the experience of being open-hearted fundamentally changes you. It makes you receptive, kind, passionate. When you do what you love, you see the world as a warmer, more luminous place.

One of my favorite quotes is: “Every new sensation is a blessing, every anxious thought is a theft." (Havrilesky) Please remember that most things in college are blessings (even if they don’t feel quite like it). The long afternoons running down the Schuylkill river trail, heart thudding. Keeping your dorm room door unlocked and people streaming in until midnight talking about everything and getting late-night Korean food and using a cardboard Amazon box as a makeshift table. Sun-warmed weekends by the Clark Park farmers market, hefty loaf of fresh warm bread in arm. Every place has endings and beginnings. These are the places I've been, but the places you will be too. I think that's the beautiful part about college: that some aspects about your life can be broadly experienced by many, but so intimately specific when you live within it.

On independence, aloneness, and selfhood:

People in your life will come and go. And it hurts sometimes because it's human nature to hold on to things, make them fit into a world that they've outgrown, or maybe a world you've already left behind. I think of it like this: someone meets you in a moment of your life, and you meet them for a moment in theirs. It doesn't have to last forever. It just has to teach you something.

You'll realize that Penn can feel pretty lonely. There's the loneliness you feel by not being in the presence of others, and there's the loneliness of not being heard or understood. You'll feel both of these, well at least I did, quite deeply. But you'll learn that being alone doesn't equate to being lonely. My best friend wrote this in our shared newsletter: "completeness can co-exist with solitude" and I think about that line all the time. You don't need anyone to complete you. But at the very same time, Penn isn't all sunshine – sometimes it'll feel like a perpetual 4am disillusioned moment where everyone is exhausted and feeling kind of crappy about themselves. Trust me, you'll make terrible mistakes and choose the wrong things to do and the wrong places to be and the wrong people to love. When these times come, you also have to learn how to lean on your friends. I know it's hard to be both independent and vulnerable, but somehow Penn will teach you to walk that line faster than you can imagine.

At some point you'll return to these questions that people return to across centuries: what do I want, how do I get it, will this make me happy? I don't have the answers, but here's a diagram from the blog Wait but Why instead. 

Right now, your life is at that ‘Today’ line – there are so many paths available and open to you. The world branches out in a million lives and you struggle and experience love, loss, tenderness in a different way in each one of them. I love this diagram so so much because it reminds you that every day you make a choice to get closer to the version of you that you wish to be. There are no wrong paths, there are only different routes.

I've been counting the days down to graduation (hasn't everyone?), saying to my friends that it's insane we only have 2 weeks left. It reminds me of this quote by Doerr:

“I count the days because I love them too much. I count the days already knowing that one day I will remember how tactless it was of me to have counted the days when I could have so easily have enjoyed them. I count the days to pretend that losing it all doesn't phase me."

Most of the friends I know feel this in their own way. This is a nostalgic, bittersweet end. The worst bits of Penn are over, but so are the best bits. But there is anticipation, hope, excitement for the next branches in our life.

So maybe the best thing we can do is to stop counting the days we have left. Instead, we'll hold onto the memories of the late night hours after the party has long ended and we unpile ourselves onto the streets, or the last stretch of a run where everything is aching and light, or maybe just on to the moments where we felt were exactly where we needed to be.

You are exactly where you need to be, dear freshmen. Good luck, and I'm rooting for you.



– Nicole S.

seahsuilin@gmail.com