Dear Penn Freshmen,

Dear Penn Freshmen,

I can’t say I have much advice for you, for I too, have so much to learn. The only differences between you and me could very well be the fact that I can rent a car in some states, I don’t get nervous showing my ID at bars because it’s real, and I sleep in a full-sized bed. Ultimately, even after you read this, you’ll need to learn and see for yourself. You may need to make the same mistakes twice— three times, even. It’ll be awesome— it’s good for the soul!

In fact, throughout my time at Penn, I’ve gotten quite good at it. I didn’t have a New Student Orientation. I started college online. I joined (and dropped) a sorority that was a terrible fit for me. I was in and out of a long-distance relationship. I’ve had troublesome living arrangements. Somewhere along the way, I learned that going to Penn and being a nursing student were my only personality traits (yikes). During the first two years, the number of resources overwhelmed me and I felt too anxious to truly enjoy learning. I thought the club culture was strange and I didn’t want to spend every second of my time being busy. I didn’t—and still don’t—get it.

Even with all that being said, these were the most beautiful years of my life thus-far. I found love in the most strange of all places. I met incredible people, learned some fantastic lessons (after many tries), I developed a passion for learning, and I learned to better love myself and what that means for me. Four years later, I can say yes as easily as I say no and I am able to be where my feet are most days. Best of all, I’ve never had a dream that was too big for this school. As someone who didn’t grow up with the capacity to dream, that was one of the greatest gifts I could ever ask for.

However, as I alluded to above, these outcomes did not come from listening to an upper classmen’s advice. They actually came from taking the advice into consideration but needing to learn the lessons for myself. Knowing the value of first-hand experience, all I can say is what I hope for you.

I hope you learn to take your headphones and put your phone down when you’re walking on Locust. I hope that on some days, you start taking the long way home because you’re enjoying a good conversation and you know that the work can wait. If you’re ever so brave (and it’s accessible to you) I hope you say yes to the summer job as a server (Yes, Boston Consulting Group can wait!) I hope that you become honest with yourself and others when things are hard. I hope you grow to feel comfortable leaving spaces that aren’t a good fit for you and maybe even learn to not take it so personally. I hope that you start getting 8 + hours of sleep as much as you can. But I hope that on some days you wake up tired but fueled by yesterday’s memories. I hope that you remember to thank the staff in the dining hall. I hope you learn to say yes when you want to and no when you need to. That you start feeling safe enough to cry into a new friend’s arms. Soon, they’ll be the first person you call with good news, and they’ll be the ones to pick you up and swing you around to celebrate you. I hope you always look to make new friends. I hope that you give yourself permission to dream and that you are constantly aware of and grateful for the opportunities that Penn gives to you. I hope that you often feel like you have no idea what you’re doing and that you don’t have it figured out. If nothing else, I hope you act your age. Be curious! Be playful. Ask questions. Make mistakes, even if you know the outcome (BE SAFE THOUGH!) Be embarrassed. Tell your friends, laugh about it now, and reminisce about it in years to come.

Please don’t take my word for it. In fact, I hope that this whole letter slips your mind. Because most of all, I hope that it takes you four years to learn these lessons—at your own pace— and that you don’t realize what you’ve learned until you have the opportunity to write a letter of your own.

Hopefully to be considered, forgotten, and remembered again when all is said and done,

Mari A

Dear Freshman Maeve,

Picking nursing as your major was the best choice you’ve ever made. Picking Penn? Probably the second-best choice you’ve made. Right now, as you sit in your childhood bedroom and worry about how zoom classes are going to work and how you’re going to move across the country from your friends and family it all seems a little wrong. You’re a little worried if you made the right choice in colleges, a little worried if you deserve to be here, and more than a little worried if you’ll make it to the end of four years.

That doesn’t sound great, but let’s get back to the reason nursing was the best choice you’ve ever made. You’ve always liked a plan. A plan that is set, where everything stays in its own lane. That makes it easier to navigate. Well, let’s just get it out of the way now that none of that is going to happen. There are going to be bumps in the road and then there are going to be enormous potholes that make it feel like you can’t get out of them. But you will. It’s part of the reason why nursing is the best choice you’ve ever made.

Nursing is going to humble you. And I’m not talking about the classes (but yes anatomy and physiology is hard but I promise you’ll get through it, your study buddy will turn into one of your best friends). Nursing will humble you in a way that makes you so grateful for all that you have. Humility isn’t necessarily something that runs rampant around Penn’s campus. Penn Face and the pre-professional environment everyone talks about are going to make it feel like everyone is competing. But, you’ll only feel that competition sometimes, because your nursing class is full of people who are cheering you on. In fact, that girl you sent a Group Me to after that first nursing zoom? You’ve lived together for the last three years. She’s your best friend. And the family you’re worried about leaving? Give it two years, you’ll live two blocks away from your sister who’s now also a Penn Nursing student. But I’m going to be honest, your humility isn’t going to be born out of the best moments at Penn. It’s going to be born from the moments when doors are shut in your face, when people who you thought were your friends show you they aren’t, when you don’t get that award or that grade; and then you’ll truly find the depth of your humility when interacting with patients who are dying.

Right now freshman Maeve, whenever someone asks what type of nursing you want to do you say something along the lines of “I’m not sure, but I definitely never want to do oncology or hospice nursing”. Surprise! You are going to do the nursing you swore you would never do. You’ll provide post-mortem care to oncology patients who had been on hospice. Patients you were terrified would remind you too much of your grandmas. Patients who you’d seen walk the line between life and death and a patient who you were trusted to take care of after they took their final breath. That line between life and death is the bump in the road you’ll try to avoid during your first three years of nursing school. It’s the bump that you were scared would knock you off the road. It won’t. You’re going to be okay. You’re going to learn from it, you’ll feel grateful you were trusted to learn from that patient. You’ll understand that death and dying is so much more than one moment of pain or sadness. You’ll learn there is something incredibly humbling about getting to help people be comfortable as they leave this life.

And Maeve, don’t worry, nursing and clinicals won’t all be bad. You’re also going to celebrate birth days and cry the first time you watch a birth. Every time you see one going forward it will be one of the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen. At the end of your four years, you’ll have seen the end of lives but you’ll have seen the start of even more lives. You’ll only have choosing nursing to thank for being able to find the beauty and humility of those moments.

One day Maeve, you’re going to walk out of the hospital with nearly 1000 clinical hours under your belt and hundreds of wakeup before 6am for clinical and class. You’re going to have seen hundreds of patients and you’re going to fall in love with the idea that you can make a difference in some of the worst moments people’s lives. You’re going to make friends that are lifelong and who you can’t picture living without. Because, that’s nursing. It’s messy and beautiful and what you put into it, you’ll get right back. More importantly, you’re going to leave Penn with a deeply grounded sense of humility that is going to guide you. One that is going to push you to always be open to opportunities to grow and one that is going to make it easier to pull yourself out of your hard days. A sense of humility that will remind you of how lucky you are for the things you do have. One that will make it easy to celebrate your classmates, even when they get a job you didn’t. One that will let you feel confident in what you do know and strong enough to ask others for help when you don’t. This humility will make you so sure of the decision you made to apply as a nursing major at 17 years old.

It’s now 4 years later and I swear Maeve, picking nursing as a major was the best choice you could’ve made. In these past four years, nursing has made you a better person. It has helped you surround yourself with some of the best people in your life and it has helped you grow more than you could imagine.

And, you’re not scared to take a manual blood pressure anymore.

I promise you’re not to going to regret this.

Maeve G.

Dear Daniel,

Dance.

You’re not going to know how to do it for a long time. And, to be honest, you still won't know how to do it four years from now but you’ll dance anyway.

You’ll realize that, like dancing, college is a series of tumbles, falls, and stumbles. Daniel, you’ll feel more than just lost. In freshman year, you will cry when your roommate group backs out last minute. In sophomore year, you will punch the door to your 18th floor Harnwell apartment and scream in anger when you get a D on your first CIS160 midterm. In junior year, you will start your nervous tick of picking your thumbs because you’re anxious about this whole “LSAT” thing. In senior year, you will feel like a failure and sit alone at the biopond at 1am crying, screaming, and picking your thumbs.

Here’s the secret though: it’s totally normal. Embrace it. It just means you’re stretching beyond your comfort zone.

Because while that original roommate group backed out, it allowed you to get close with Om, Bo Wen, Ahren, and Cody. Failing that CIS160 test turned you into a resilient badass who ended the course with a good grade. You never actually take the LSAT and you realize that law school is totally not for you (and thank goodness that you make that realization). And that fellowship, girl, and audition that rejected you senior year have already opened up new and different opportunities that excite you.

In four years, you’ll look back and realize that every misstep, every wrong turn, and every slap in the face led you to exactly where you needed to be. So dance, Daniel. Dance through the uncertainty and embrace the journey.

You’ve got this (except maybe not that one dance move you tried).

Always rockin’

Daniel Gurevitch

daniel.gurevitch@gmail.com

Dear Freshman Peter,

You might not believe this - but you’re less than a month away from graduating from Penn. The world around you is nearly unrecognizable, and so are you.

You will come onto campus in 2021, dazzled by the crowds of familiar masked figures that used to just be online pen pals. You’re going to sit in lecture halls after 3 long years away from school, run to practice right after, and somehow still have energy to go out and make friends. Philly will be your new favorite city - yes it’s far from perfect, but the character (and food scene!) will have you realizing that this is exactly where you needed to be.

You will lurch from change (crisis?) to change (crisis?), doubt every fiber of your being when you recruit for every single job under the sun, and you will be crying a lot more than you envisaged. Times will be tough and yes, you will apply to over 200 jobs during your time at Penn. You will go from hating this strange country and vowing to go straight back to Asia, to giving up your soul in an eventually successful attempt to stay here post-grad. Wharton will test you - at times you’ll question how you even ended up here, but most of the time you’ll be inspired by the incredible people around you, and the sheer number of opportunities this school presents to you. You will learn to live for yourself: your career is your own, and not anyone else’s.

You will fully come to terms with your identity. The closet you were in is well and truly dismantled. That in itself deserves a pat on the back.

You will learn to fight for the causes you care about. You will witness the hypocrisy, close-mindedness, and astonishing ignorance brandished around you, but you will also be inspired by the strongest leaders you’ll meet. You will be caught in an international media storm, have the paparazzi stalk your team in Florida, and witness one of your friends endlessly harassed by her own teammates. You will feel out of place in the world of college athletics. You will consider quitting the sport you’ve devoted thousands of hours to, and you will wonder why you even swim when all you get in return from the sport is permanent exhaustion. You will come to terms with your standing in this sport - yes you aren’t the fastest, but this is a sport you love with your whole heart. You will battle to represent the underrepresented and carve a space for yourself and others like you.

You will realize that this is where you belong and these are your people. You will meet your best friends here, friends that would drop everything for you, friends that have cried with you, friends that have seen you at your saddest/drunkest/happiest/messiest/sloppiest. You will never stop peeling back layers of the Penn community, and for better or for worse, always be surprised by the people here. You will make memories everywhere: the forum computer lab in Huntsman, the high-rise fields, the umpteenth overpriced downtown party you go to, the Uber rides you barely remember, your favorite cafe right past Kensington, the United by Blue (RIP) that you’ve had conversations with half the student population in. The friendships you will forge will move you, and will make writing this farewell piece a teary exercise.

If there could be a single piece of advice I could give you: quit thinking about the future. Don’t give into the 2+2+2 plans that the finance bros peddle; don’t cave into the “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?” interview questions. You’re going to end up going down paths you would’ve never imagined and the world around you will never stay stagnant for you - there is no way you know what’s up next for you. Do what’s best for you and never beat yourself up for taking a longer time to figure your next step - easier said than done, but let all the missteps and detours you encounter guide you to where you truly want to be.

Peter, you might not realize this now, but the Zoom meetings you log onto and the Instagram friends you make are going to be where you find yourself belonging. Everyone before you has told you that these are the best years of your life, and as much as your 4am LGST classes disagree with this, they truly are. You will cry so many tears along the way, but fret not, these are always wiped away by the endless memories that will make the last month of your college years so incredibly tough.

You’ll look back on these days, even the days you just wanted to go home, and you will be willing to give everything and anything to be in your shoes again, wide-eyed and ready for the best years of your life.

This letter will never do the time you had at Penn justice, but I know you will. This is where you belong, and where you wish you could stay.

Love,

Peter

leechongzheng@hotmail.com

Dear Freshman Stephan,

It’s always hard to say what will happen in four years. Or even a couple months, really. You didn’t even think you’d come to Penn at first because they didn’t reach out until after you graduated. But now you’re here, leaving behind all your friends who are staying in-state, taking a shot at somewhere new.

The future will seem bleak at first. Scary, even. The world is in lockdown and it’ll look like college might just be an at-home thing. You’ll cherish that first semester that you spent at home with your parents because you’ll miss home when you’re stuck alone in your double-converted-single in KCECH. Zoom classes, socials, and that green checkmark on Penn OpenPass will all seem a little unreal at some point, and the five weekly problem sets that you have will hit you like it never ends.

But you’ll find the positives in those around you. You’ll lean on those friendships you made by messaging random students you met on the Class of 2024 Facebook group, and they’ll be some of your closest friends. You’ll join a dance troupe that becomes your second family, and shiver through 30 degree weather to practice outside on top of the Acme garage because that’s the only rehearsal space you get. It’ll thicken your Texan skin, I promise. You’ll even perform chamber music over Zoom calls even though only one person can hear it at a time.

You’ll realize that as things get better, when it no longer becomes cold whenever you want to eat lunch outside with people, that if you can get through that hell of a freshman year, there’s really nothing worse. Although, it’s ok to be a little jealous when you see all the new freshmen come in and have all their regularly scheduled NSO programming and meet twenty times as many people as you did.

When things go back to normal, you’ll ask all the same questions that every college student starts asking. You’ll wonder what you really enjoy doing after graduating, even though it seems like graduating is so far away. You’ll wonder if you should really join three more clubs like everyone else, even though you already spend an excessive amount of time on one or two*. You’ll get sucked into the perpetual grind of finding that next internship or summer research opportunity, and realize after a summer of loneliness during that internship that you really hated it.

Really, it’ll be okay not to know what you want to do. Listen to that gut feeling. Don’t get sucked into a life you regret, and make bold moves to go after what you want. When you realized you didn’t want to software engineer your entire career, you started asking other people around you for help. Professors, friends, family. They changed the course of my career and gave me the opportunities to kickstart my aspirations as a scientist and researcher. Probably the best advice I received on this was literally a month ago, when I was on grad school visits, and a professor told me: “People always tell you to explore your interests. I spent many years doing that, and it helped me realize what I didn’t want to do. But that advice misses something crucial – the commitment. So explore as much as you can, but once you get the right feeling, commit as soon as you can.”

But at the end of the day, don’t worry about the perils and plights of college too much. Uncertainty is scary, but it’s also extremely exciting**. Well, let me correct that. It’s extremely exciting when you experience it together. Here in April of senior year, I’m very fortunate to have a group of people I deeply appreciate and love, and all I want to do is to spend more time with them.

I don’t really have much other advice for you — and I don’t think you should listen to me more than that, either. I’d just let college happen, because things have a way of working itself out, even if it doesn’t seem like that at the moment. Just make sure you take it all in.

Sincerely,

Stephan X.

*When I complained about this my sophomore year, my great chamber partner once said: “I’d much rather be deeply invested in one or two communities than to spread my time among everyone. Why would I give my time to people that don’t care that much about me?” That really stuck with me.

**A professor also just told me this a month ago in the context of research lol. But even now to me, looking forward is equal parts scary and exciting.

Dear Freshman Year Arnav,

You were confused about the instructions for virtual Wharton orientation on circle.es: you wrote a letter to your graduating self instead of the post-freshman-fall self. Given the nice letter you accidentally wrote me, it is only fair I return the favor. Looking back, life seems to have come full circle, changing but also staying constant.

Freshman fall was a weird time. You didn’t know what the next year was going to be like and how long the stay-at-home quarantine in India would last. You read the collection of “Dear Penn Freshmen” letters to understand what life at Penn could be like someday. Even without the pandemic, I doubt you could have guessed what it turned out to be.

Several positives came out of the pandemic. You were able to stay at home with family for longer. You bridged familial relationships that you didn’t focus on for a long time in high school; forcing everyone to stay at home for six consecutive months can do that. Even today, you’re able to call family every day as a reminder of the values and connections you cherish. Regardless of where you or those you care about end up, I hope you’re always able to do that.

Through the pandemic, you learned to deal with FOMO. Not being able to attend Quaker Days was the largest concern on your mind. All the ED kids seemed to have their friend groups sorted already. It seems like the stupidest thing to worry about in hindsight. Friend groups change and so do people: you will find your place at Penn regardless. You eventually learned to be comfortable with yourself: I doubt you could have imagined doing a solo trip someday. I would tell you to take a deep breath and “touch grass” but I know you wouldn’t listen to anyone but yourself (even a future version of yourself). Sometime during your time at Penn, you will realize to trust other people, follow their advice, and ask others for help.

While there are a lot of things I probably should have done differently, I am not sure I would change them if I could go back. You will learn something from all your mistakes. I am glad you learned from these mistakes and made changes, instead of regretting them. You will learn where the line is between humor and offense, you will learn to move on when someone hurts you, and you will learn to appreciate that people change and to not fixate on your previous version of them. There’s no going back once you break someone’s trust: I hope you tell people how much they mean to you, cherish your relationships, and practice authenticity and transparency.

With all the changes, a lot of things still stay the same. You feel anxious about taking the long flight from India to the US next semester. After plenty of those trips, I can tell you the anxiousness never fades. You are anxious about your first class at Penn tomorrow; I am anxious about my last class at Penn next week. You are anxious about what you will do next summer; I am anxious about what my first job will be like. I would tell us both that the worst case isn’t that bad. It is perfectly fine to spend the summer helping your sister out in the gym. Anxiety is weird. It is a combination of excitement and a fear of leaving something behind. Through your time at Penn, you will realize you never leave the present for the future: it always comes with you, for better or worse.

You will learn to be present during your time at Penn. I know you might have 20 club applications due right now and think it is perfectly appropriate to multitask in classes if you do well in their exams. Through Penn, you will realize that there is more to classes than just getting a good grade. You will find it harder to sit through an entire class without responding to a text or checking your email. You will eventually learn to focus on the present. I know you have a four-year plan for the classes you want to take and the clubs you want to apply to. Less than half of our plan ended up working out. While it gave you a structure and made you think about what you wanted from your Penn education earlier, I am glad you kept your options open for your changing interests. You learned what is important to you and devoted more time to it instead of trying everything out. When you like something, stick with it. You end up appreciating things you didn’t think of before. The things that could go right, go really right; and the things that may not work out, disappear. I have never been disappointed with a personal commitment that I made on instinct. The right brain is able to grasp the whole forest not just the trees. Don’t overthink it.

Even if I could change things, I am sure something else wouldn’t have worked as planned. The point of Penn is not to have a perfect four years. It is to look back and see yourself learn, change, and grow after every semester. Freshman fall, we learned to tackle our introversion and talk to people from different backgrounds. Freshman spring, we trusted new friends and moved on from the ones we lost. Freshman summer, we accepted the uncertainty that came with the pandemic and made the most of the present. Sophomore fall, we participated in class and switched career paths based on FNCE 100. Sophomore spring, we tackled our relationship with work and prioritized our interests. Sophomore summer, we appreciated exploring new experiences and tried to learn what we never knew we didn’t know. Junior fall, we focused on class and never opened our laptop during it. Junior spring, we learned to be vulnerable and transparent. Junior summer, we became comfortable and true to ourselves. Senior fall, we learned that sometimes what’s best for you has been in front of you all along. Senior spring, we became more present and, hopefully, will learn to say goodbye. I couldn’t have figured out where I would end up and place the dots ahead of time, but, looking back, it all makes sense.

You ended your letter to your graduating self with “I hope 4 years later, everything is exactly like it is today because I've never felt happier than I am today.” Everything has changed but I am glad that I still feel happier today than I have ever been before.

Enjoy the next four years and appreciate the things that don’t change.

Gratefully,

Arnav A.

Dear Freshman Giselle,

Hopefully by now, you’re done sobbing about spending fall semester at home. I know, I know… the flight to PHL was booked and everything! This must be the end of the world!

Truthfully, it wasn’t the end of the world. If anything, you were pretty lucky; I would give anything to wake up and see my family everyday. So while it may have seemed like the worst thing to ever happen to you – especially when you spent that entire semester waking up at 7am (PST) for math quizzes – I cannot tell you how many times I experienced the flip side: that is, sitting in my dorm as an underclassman, crying about wanting to go back home to LA. It’s funny how back then, I would spend time blubbering about wanting to be somewhere else. Now that I’m headed towards my last month at Penn, I couldn’t imagine being anywhere but here. And yes, much to our surprise, I actually love Philly a lot now. There’s definitely a big fat space in my heart reserved for this smelly city, and my love for it runs from 41st to 1st Street and all the way back again (on Bus Route 21, of course.) I’m sure you still pride yourself on loving LA and hating Philly even more, but I’ll tell you now – there are people and food and drinks and cafes to love here. Don’t miss them please!

So, while my frontal lobe is probably more developed now (whatever that means), and I definitely know where to send you for a Philly food crawl, I won’t lie to you – there aren’t enough words in the world I could say to prep you for the immense amount of love, hate, confusion, challenges, confusion again, and love (again and again and again) you’re about to experience for the next four years. Penn is intensely formative in ways you cannot understand right now, but don’t waste your time trying to understand. You’ll find your footing sometimes and then you’ll lose it all over again. It’s just part of the process.

So as far as the Penn experience goes, above anything and everything, all I can say is enjoy it – the time is VERY short, but there are sweet peaks and scary troughs. Tune into them all! And honestly, some things never change. You still update Jakob and Ava as much as you can (eao!) You still go on aimless walks and commit to brain-rotten bits with JT. You still cram for business fundamental exams with Michael (FYI – you never learn… the last-minute cramming becomes quintessential honestly.) You still immediately run to Michelle and Sami for advice, except now you’re running to a Megabus rather than to their houses on 40th Street. You still text Mae, Vivi, and Shirali about what’s going on in APhi, except you all live in different states and they have bigger things to worry about than date nights. You also still live with Megan (and Chloe now); you make time to catch up with Annie and Ruby; you have dinners with Sean; you see Addie, Sam, and Niamh whenever you visit home… it’s beautiful how the good things stay the same (in some capacity.) Find comfort in those little pockets of familiarity, but not too much; I recently learned that stagnation doesn’t quite mean stability. You’ll get there too.

On the flip side, SO MUCH HAS CHANGED it’s unbelievable. You live with Jasmine now (yes, SFCU Jasmine) and she’s one of your favorite people on this planet. You love going to workout classes as much as you can (thank Jhan for putting you on, and thank Peter for always motivating you.) You’re also planning to live with Haley next year (yes, Michael’s dim sum Haley) and she is also one of your bestest friends in this lifetime. You lived in SF for a few months with a girl you’ve probably talked to twice now (maybe you should start talking to Nafisa more?), you went on to be President of PPA, you somehow convinced Luke to choreograph a dance in the PPA show, you can bench more than the bar now, you ended up being the only SFCU employee left from your teller class, you would now do ANYTHING for your Filipino friends and your Tagalog teachers – the list goes on. This is an unequivocally beautiful time to hold the privilege of knowing and loving and caring for these people. Embrace it as intensely as you can, but don’t pressure yourself into holding on for too long.

In fact, at some point you’re going to wonder why you feel these things so intensely, but be grateful for how sentimental you are. How lucky are you to feel so much love from just being around people you met three years ago? How lucky are you to feel so much stress about a midterm? It’s a privilege to care about these things so deeply to the point of heartache and agonizing stress. Embrace it lots and lots!! Your family and friends are rooting for you in every way, shape, and form. It’s going to feel real rough when you realize time doesn’t just pause every time you leave home, especially when you realize your grandparents are getting a couple more wrinkles every time you visit, or your brothers are suddenly grown up and making plans without you. It’s rough and scary, and it honestly just really sucks, especially when you feel yourself getting trapped and confused within the Penn bubble.

In those little moments, the best piece of advice I could give you is to take time to recalibrate. Recalibrate, recalibrate, recalibrate. There were so many moments at Penn where I wasn’t sure where I stood amongst the expectations of myself, of my family, of my friends, of anybody. I would feel so much stress about all the things I needed to do, only for those things to pile up and bury me in the Huntsman computer lab (or worse, in the SFCU office.) But – in those moments, I wish I knew to recalibrate. That is, in moments where you feel yourself buried underneath one thousand things, remember where you are – you’ve risen above ten thousand things and counting. I mean, of course it’s hard to feel good about yourself when you’re comparing yourself to this almighty, untouchable version of you, where you have everything you’ve ever wanted. At the same time, it’s much easier (and better for you) to feel good about yourself when you call your lolo and all he says is, “I’m proud of you, baby.” Looking back, I definitely projected that “do better!” mindset onto those around me. I told myself that my mom would want me to do better in school, or that my friends would want me to do better in social settings, or that my aunt would want me to do better in my career – but ultimately, it was me telling myself those things, and pushing myself a little too much. That’s all to say – recalibrate. Let yourself come back to a playing field where you’re comfortable with comparison. It hurts to dwell on the “Penn things” – the perfect careers, the cushy club positions, the social points – but reel yourself back into the context of your high school bedroom in Glendale, or your business class/internship with Prissila. You are doing more than enough, and I’m sure your hundreds of family members back home, whether in the Philippines or wherever else, would agree. As long as you’re happy and pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, you’re doing perfectly fine.

So, no matter where you are, I’m rooting for you in ways you cannot even fathom right now. I’m studying in Menagerie Cafe thinking of you; I’m eating at East South Asian thinking of you; I’m daydreaming in my house on Sansom thinking of you.

I’m graduating now, and this is everything we ever wanted. Cheers to everything you are, everything you will be, and everything you won’t ever be. There’s so much to love about you, about Penn, and about this lifetime. I love you forever and ever and ever, more than you could ever possibly conceive nor consume. I even miss you just a bit.

Love (again and again and again),

Giselle, Coy, Coykee, Gis, Gissybelle, Gissy Bear, Gliz, Glizzy, Moosher, Giselle

Dear Freshman Elie,

It’s taken me a while to figure out what I wanted to tell you. There is so much to say, so much you’re going to experience over the next few, beautiful years of your life, so much I could warn you about, so much I could encourage you to do. But I don’t want to, by fear of changing anything of the beautiful mess you’re about to experience.

Right about now, you’re a freshman doing your first semester of college completely online. You’re sleeping at 9 am and waking up at 6 pm to catch your 8 pm freshman seminar with Dr. Sharkey (which you should absolutely take, btw). Life feels weird, almost unreal. In about a couple weeks, however, on December 12th 2020, you’re going to make the most courageous decision of our lives: you’re going to come out for the first time. I’m sure this sounds daunting right now, but you did it. You let us be ourselves and gave us the opportunity to let the world in, to live our lives unafraid. Elie, with only a few words, you set us free and allowed us to learn something that I’ve held onto since: people are so filled with love and compassion when you’re willing to let it in. Thank you for teaching me that. Take a deep breath and run the marathon that is going to be your life at Penn, but promise me that you’ll let yourself love and be loved. You’re going to get to know some of the most incredible people that life has to offer: love them and be there for them, give them a hug when they cry and let yourself be touched by their presence, because these people will change your life in ways you didn’t even think were possible.

I want you to do something for me right now. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, drop it and go give your mom a kiss. Give your dad a hug. Call your brother to check on how he’s doing and find your sisters to tell them how much you love them. Then look up at the sky and thank God for everything He gave you. You might not realize it yet, but God set you up for a life of incredible happiness the moment He gave you the privilege of being born in the place and family you were born in. Remember that, and make sure you pass it forward. Lean into the inherent kindness that people have and make sure you treat people with the same kindness and respect that your family taught you to.

There are a couple things I’ve been meaning to thank you for.

First, thank you for studying abroad. Similarly to many of our decisions, you made that decision on a whim. You wanted to live in a different country and experience the world from a different lens. And I am so thankful you chose to do that. You met some of your best friends in those little french streets and got the privilege of experiencing some of what this world has to offer. I promise you to keep that going.

Second, thank you for taking a leap of faith. It’s almost surreal that we ended up where we did. You filled out your Penn application on a whim, not expecting much when those decisions came around. After all, no one from your school ever went to the US for undergrad let alone to Penn. You packed your life in 2-23 kgs suitcases and a carry on and bid farewell to the experiences you had in Lebanon. And I am so thankful that you did. You didn’t have to go to AUB just because your friends stayed in Lebanon, you never did. Life is so incredibly beautiful in its uncertainties. You get to wake up tomorrow and choose to change majors, schools, careers. You get to move your life to a different continent because “Paris looks pretty in photos,” and you get to have lazy days because you don’t want to deal with your responsibilities today. You get to choose where you want life to take you. Take that leap of faith and trust that the same God who hasn’t failed you yet won’t fail you tomorrow.

Third, and most importantly, thank you for believing in me. You could have chosen the easy way out, stayed in Lebanon where you were coddled and followed the drawn out path. Instead, you fought for everything you wanted me to be. You gave me a chance to thrive when all you knew was the little life you had in Mansourieh. Thank you for thinking I was worth the fight. I promise you to hold onto your fire and keep your passions alive. I owe you and our future self that much.

I can’t believe I am saying this to you, but I really am crying writing you this letter. You know how much we don’t like to cry, so take this as a testimony of just how wonderful the journey you’re embarking on really is. I don’t want to spoil it for you, you deserve to relive the joys of being a college student. But please, I ask you to hold onto yourself and your beliefs even when things get hard. Keep wearing that smile, we both know how much you like smiling.

Enjoy the ride ya batal, it’s an amazing one.

P.S. For all the time we spent in the closet, we really have a bad fashion sense. Maybe one day.

Good luck habibi,

Your Senior Self

Elie EK

elieelkefraoui@gmail.com

Four Years in a Jar: An unorganized, curated collection of thoughts

Dear Freshman Mahisha,

I keep this little glass jar in my room, the very same one that was nearly empty when you first stepped foot on this campus. Now, it's brimming with letters and mementos that represent moments of joy throughout the last four years. It started as a sparse collection, and has now grown to not actually fit all the cards and trinkets that senior-year-you keeps stuffing into it.

It has a letter in it that your sisters wrote to you during your first semester on campus. It was Covid, and your extroverted self wasn’t doing too hot in isolation. And so you read the letter on Valentine's Day, which you spent alone, in your dorm room, in Lauder College House. The jar also holds a champagne sparkler from that one night, sophomore year, when you snuck into a club in Cancún because you didn’t want to pay their $40 cover. Good times.

This jar holds echoes of laughter, lessons learned at the oddest hours, and the sheer unpredictability that stitched together each day of college. You might not see it now, but as these four years unwind, you'll start to collect your own assortment of charmingly odd items. And you’re going to find yourself sifting through it senior year, sentimental as hell.

There will be moments as that final semester winds down where you'll randomly feel a bit of sadness—the kind that comes from saying goodbye to a chapter that's been so good. But woven through that will be an even stronger sense of gratitude. I’ve always said I am grateful to my hometown for shaping the most passionate parts of me. Now, as I prepare to leave Penn, I realize how much this place has built upon their foundation. You may not realize it yet, but you'll live these four years with the fulfillment of spending every day waking up and doing what you love. You will put your all into everything you're involved in, and it’ll be driven by your own passion, not the pressure to conform or perform. You’ll make friends that you’ll be excited to travel halfway around the world to see. And as you sit staring one day at this collection of tokens in your jar, maybe even decades in the future, you’ll always be reminded of the beautifully confusing and incoherent stories that perfectly described your Penn experience. Leaving these familiar corners that feel like home isn't easy, it never was, but that part hasn’t hit yet. It probably won’t hit until August when I realize I’m not returning for semester 9.

Now, to be honest, it won’t all be fairy tales and princesses. The four years are overwhelming as fuck too. You’re gonna change a lot. Some might feel really good, but you may also find yourself changing in ways you didn’t expect or may not even like. And being aware of that can be a bit daunting. But stay aware of it, and stay true to how you want to act. That’s an intentional choice you make every day, and it’s never too late to either change or revert. When I think of these four years in retrospect, you basically get the chance to mold yourself into who you want to be. Don’t waste that.

It’s overwhelming to think that I don’t want to leave this place, and it’s even more overwhelming to think that I’m going out into the real world now, costume and all. Four years here, and you’ll still find yourself realizing you aren’t all that much closer to figuring out how you want to spend the rest of your life. I haven't found that perfect career path; nothing's really screamed 'this is it' at me. And maybe that's okay. You wrote yourself a letter freshman year where you said, “You may still not have decided what exactly you want to do, but as long as you have challenged yourself... that can be your progress and success.” Don’t forget that. Maybe it's about making my own path, one that winds and takes detours, driven by a love for what I do, not just the need to do something that seems right.

Here's to beginnings that feel like discovering hidden layers of yourself, and to the beautifully unpredictable journey ahead.

With warmth and a hint of nostalgia,

Mahisha

Dear Freshman Arham,

When I got to campus, my priorities were ambiguous at best. In the absence of ground truth, I turned to the alleged wisdom of the crowd. As it turned out, equally-confused freshmen didn’t make the best role models. In emulating the norm, I stumbled into countless dead ends.

There’s a strange confluence of traits that many young students at Penn adopt. It’s fashionable to gradually abandon non-commercial passions and “sell out.” People brag about how little they try, then flex about how stressed out they are. Behind closed doors, many measure their self worth by the countless hours they spend grappling for the most competitive clubs, most prestigious internships, and top notches in our incredibly stratified social scene.

Later in my undergrad, I’d realized that these traits are the lowest common denominator of Penn. People will often discuss them because, superficially, they’re relatable. Unfortunately, they’re also impediments to growth. Your time here will be much more pleasant if you avoid these tar pits; below, I’ll talk about some of the ground truths that, eventually, got me unstuck.

1.) Think Long-Term

There’s always something going on at Penn: club recruiting, exams, internship recruiting, case competitions, etc. If you ask yourself the question “What can I do now that’ll make me look the most successful in the next few months?”, you’ll find yourself constantly flitting between tangentially-related side quests. That mad dash might feel “productive,” but such a disjoint approach will stifle deep understanding in any field.

Very few things worth knowing that can be learned without deep focus. If you’re constantly reprioritizing, you will not build any non-superficial knowledge. Plenty of people get decent jobs hopping around from task to task, but most of their skills will be superficial. Importing XGBoost doesn’t mean you understand machine learning, and walking through a paper LBO doesn’t mean you’re a private equity baron-to-be.

The alternative is sticking with a single domain for the long term, even if that doesn’t come with immediate validation. Many skillsets will take over a semester to even get proficient at. Working on something for the long-term is nerve-wracking: you might spend a lot of nights alone in a dorm room, your resume will feel like it’s stagnating, you might think you don’t have the raw intelligence to compete in this subject.

But, years down the line, the skills that are hard to build are the ones that matter. It is far more impressive to tackle a seemingly-impossible task than it is to solve 50 trivial ones.

2.) Don’t put artificial ceilings on yourself

How much can an undergraduate really know? It turns out, quite a lot.

Early in my undergrad, I decided that certain subjects were beyond my means. I came into college having never touched code. I was not competitive in math at the AIME level or beyond. I had been talented at debate, so I pigeonholed myself into a non-technical archetype. Those self-imposed limitations dramatically slowed my growth.

First, building any skill reflects effort more than any innate talent. I wish that more people approached math or engineering or physics the way we’re taught to approach foreign language or running or lifting weights. Even if you have natural aptitude for Spanish, the mile, or the bench press, progress is impossible without reps. Don’t shy away from the practice – you can’t expect to improve copying your friends’ problem sets. Approach not with the mindset that this is hard (progress is always hard!), but that any frontier will become accessible with effort. Celebrate your pain tolerance instead of your aptitude.

Second, comparing yourself to only other undergrads is an artificial limit on your own potential — being within 95th percentile of undergrads here might get you academic laurels, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s insignificant. Benchmark yourself to the most impressive people in the world at large. The right application of this mindset will put you far beyond the level of an undergrad, a talented PhD student, or even an industry expert.

In these four years, my immediate circle – the people I work out with, cook food with, and send Reels to – have cumulatively raised $10m to launch a new credit card, identified new drug-discovery algorithms, create industrial robotic arms, and pioneer bleeding-edge AI tools. Their one unifying thread was that from the onset of college, all of those people knew they would leave having done something incredible. Being delusional worked.

The biggest barrier to changing an industry as an undergrad is not natural aptitude – it’s the belief that you are capable of competing in the big leagues. Don’t let your self-esteem become your bottleneck.

3.) Prioritize truth over convenience

You’ll come into Penn trying not to rock the boat, especially with your friends. Gradually, you’ll notice some negative traits in these otherwise-wonderful people. Perhaps they can’t moderate their drinking. Perhaps they don’t apply their many talents. Perhaps they treat friends or partners poorly. Conversely, your friends will be all-too-conscious of your shortcomings.

At this point, every person involved has a choice. They can ignore these issues. They can actively validate those tendencies (an unfortunate adage during my time on campus was “I support women’s rights and women’s wrongs”). Or, they can push back on the shortcoming.

The first two paths are easy: you make a lot of friends by being willing to overlook people’s flaws, and you can even superficially deepen friendships by condoning negative qualities. It might feel like it costs you nothing to be comforting, to tell people that they’re doing enough, to tell them that they’re right and everyone else is wrong.

But, at the end of these four years, the people I’d trust with my life are the ones that called me out for those awful traits. Some of them challenged my moral compass for hours into the night until I recognized why what I was doing was wrong. Some of them refused to talk to me for months at a time because I was squandering my potential, and many encouraged me to dream bigger. Certain kinds of friendships will catalyze your growth; others will keep you stagnant.

Popularity isn’t proportional to how many people you dap up walking down Locust Walk. It’s better measured by how deeply the people around you trust you, and vice versa.

4.) Understand & stay true to your values

Many people come into college trying to reinvent themselves. To some extent, these four years are a valuable opportunity to course correct. At the same time, at least I found that I hurt myself trying to stray far from the values, beliefs, and interests that had anchored my childhood.

My freshman year, when I defaulted to the most visible interests of my peers, I lost parts of my own identity. Had I reflected instead of mimicked, I would have realized that a Muslim kid from the Bay Area wouldn’t enjoy swanky downtown events that cost a Benjamin a night, or that someone who disliked authority wouldn’t do well kissing up to miscellaneous analysts to get a banking job. I would have searched for people that meshed with my values; instead, I ended up pruning my values to match the first group of people I ran into.

A lot of “finding myself” in college has been returning to what excited me as a kid. It’s been accepting that I’m delighted by clever solutions to daily math problems, betting on basketball games, playing long games of poker, losing myself in nature.

You will naturally change in college – don’t forcibly overwrite your interest at the onset.

5.) Remember the bigger picture

When you come here, plenty of people will tell you to take a deep breath, to not be too hard on yourself, that just existing here is an accomplishment in itself. It will feel comforting to take this at face value.

I think that advice is given by people who want to cope with their own unremarkable undergrad experience. College will come easier if you keep a North Star goal in mind. This goal can (and should) change over time, but it’s extremely helpful to strive for something. To be blunt: doing nothing but staying afloat is not a real goal.

I also think that these North Stars should feel lofty and optimistic. These next four years, you will collect an education that the market values at hundreds of thousands of dollars. You will have access to more resources than almost any 18-22 year old. Countless people in the world could be accomplishing great things in your seat. I believe that comes with the obligation to at least try for something incredible.

In four years, you might find yourself sitting in a GSR with some people chirping (Penn students love chirping) about your most impressive peers. They’ll say that an entrepreneur was only successful because her dad runs a hedge fund; that someone who discovered a drug came from dual-degree program that predestined her success; that the student who created their own wealth management fund couldn’t have done it without his frat brothers’ families punting in millions of dollars.

I want you to know that these will be excuses. Those people will be where they are because they worked for it. The people chirping won’t be there because they spent that same time on frivolities, self-indulgences, and less lofty goals.

At the very least, don’t be the person around the table making the excuses. Even better, become someone worth chirping about.

Your time at Penn is the privilege of a lifetime – enjoy the ride.

Best,

Arham H.

Dear Freshman Pranavi,

I am so proud of you! Internalize this and remember who you are coming into Penn. It’s hard when you are constantly getting pulled in different directions, but hold onto the little things like the feeling of joy that you get about a perfectly not-too-hot sunny day. Life moves really fast, and before you know it, you will look around and things will be different—and that’s ok! Embrace the change and lean into it.

I look back at freshman year us, and I am so excited for her to grow and develop into her own. Coming into Penn is scary, but you will truly have the opportunity to understand your values and who you are. It sounds so cheesy to “discover yourself”, but I promise you will learn so much about what you want in this world. It’s a rollercoaster, and you might never feel like you have things under control but that’s ok. Let it happen.

There are a lot of highs and lows and spoiler alert, it’s not the perfectly tied-together happy ending that you want, but you will learn to be so grateful and secure in yourself. You will be frustrated with the world, but taking moments for gratitude will center you. For now, I’ll leave you with a few pieces of advice.

Making friends is hard. Leaving home is scary and saying bye to your best friends from home will be hard. When you first get to Penn, it might feel like social overload with so many new faces and names and it’s ok if you don’t click with everyone! Don’t feel like you have to force friendships just for the sake of it. I remember us crying in our room feeling so overwhelmed about finding friends. Friends come when you least expect them, and you might not even realize how close you are with someone until down the line. Keep your head up, I promise you will find your people. You will learn to let go of friendships that might not be right and learn to invest in friendships that you treasure. And don’t forget about your home best friends! Take the time to call and catch up to hear about their crazy lives—you all are closer than ever now.

Make decisions for yourself. You know yourself better than anyone, and you know what you can handle. Just because everyone else is doing something, it does NOT mean you need to do the same. Penn is your chance to start fresh. The rat race is overrated. In high school, you were striving for perfection to get where you are right now. Use this opportunity! Use it to explore yourself, your interests, and your values. Don’t chase an ideal that doesn’t fit who you are. Your Urban Studies minor finally helps you discover that. Pursuing community work in Philadelphia and thinking deeply about issues that are actually important to you will inspire you to think bigger.

Call home. Even when you feel too tired or too busy with the hustle of Penn, please call home. When you are at your lowest, you will remember how blessed you are when your family lifts you up. Writing this part actually brings me to tears because I wish I could protect you from future pain. Dad gets sick and you become so angry with the world that it will hurt. You will forever replay that last phone call with him from an early morning on your way to the gym, and you will always be grateful that you called that day. You will try to stay busy to numb the pain. It’ll be hard to call Mom, but please do it. Dad eventually passes, and you will feel broken. But hold onto the people who love you. Love the people you love so deeply and hold a little tighter at the end of your hugs. Family is more than blood, and you will learn who your family is. Whenever you want to call Dad to give him a life update, you’ll write him letters in the hope that his spirit gets the messages. You might feel like you have lost the pure energy and joy that you once embodied, but just give yourself some time and grace—I promise that you’ll find her again.

Go on a run. Philly has so much to offer and what I’ve loved most is the beautiful running trail by the Schuylkill River. After Dad couldn’t walk anymore, you wanted to find strength in your own body. It inspired you to run and running became everything! You might internalize a lot of negativity, but going on a run will help clear your head. Sign up for the race that you are worried about because you will feel so empowered and inspired by your own strength when you cross the finish line. Even the soft and happy days walking by the dog park or setting up a picnic by the Schuylkill River will bring you so much joy. It will remind you of why your life is so whole even amidst all the little things that might feel like they are going completely wrong. Prioritize self-care for your physical and mental health.

Be grateful for where you are. Don’t seek validation from club acceptances, class grades, or social circles. You are on the journey of life, and Penn is just a part of it. Find a few moments in your day to reflect and appreciate your life and where you are today. Don’t wait for a tragedy to be grateful for everything that you have and everything that you are. And don’t forget to express this gratitude! Tell your friends and family how much they mean to you and don’t let them forget it.

Respect yourself. You will experience love in your relationship, but it is ok to walk away. Life isn’t the perfect romantic comedy that you dreamed it would be, but in a way, it’s better. It’s a story of self-discovery. Don’t hold onto something that is hurting you and find the strength to accept heartbreak. A situation can seem good in the moment, but remember who you are! You are a person who cares deeply and don’t let anyone take advantage of that. You are strong, independent, and beautiful. Don’t let anyone take away your sparkle.

Ask for help. Junior fall will be hard. Every night behind closed doors, you might feel like you are falling apart. You might feel like you can’t share your feelings without being a burden. People don’t know how to help you unless you ask. Ask your professor for that extension, they are here to help you. Call your friend when you want to talk, they are here for you. Not everyone will understand exactly what you are going through, but the people in your life genuinely want to support you so please find the courage to ask for help.

A few quick ones before I go:

Be kind—people will always remember how you make them feel

Volunteer! Learn about the community you are in, it is so much more than you know

Learn how to use SEPTA. You can explore so much and save money

Wake up more than 15 minutes before class to eat a real breakfast

Ask your friends to spontaneously grab a late-night sweet treat from Kiwi. It will make their day and yours!

Explore Philly!!! There is so much more to life outside of the Penn bubble

Romanticize life. Take that stroll to the cute coffee shop and treat yourself to a latte

Cook with friends, it’s so much better

This is the path to you. It’s not perfect but you will find your purpose. I’m not the Pranavi that I thought we would be, but I think that we turned out pretty awesome. The high school version of us would be so surprised and excited to know who we have become. I still watch too much reality TV and need a little sweet treat every day, but I look at the world a little differently. I know we are going to keep changing in the many seasons of life, and I have learned to embrace it rather than fear it. No matter the change, please fight for your happiness even when it seems impossible. I can’t wait to see who you become.

I love you, and I am so proud of you.

Love,

Pranavi K.

pranavikarnati@gmail.com

Dear Freshmen Year Anj,

To bring it all back to the start, I’m going to re-write our common app recipe for life based on the past 4 years:

Anj’s Life-Altering Recipe For Success (v. 3.0)

Ingredients:

Risk-taking ( 1 —> 3 tablespoon)

Innovation (2 tablespoons)

Drive/Motivation (3 cups)

Discipline (1/2 cup)

Passion (1 —> 2 cup)

Kindness (2 cups)

Friendship (3 cups)

Positive Outlook (1 cup)

Directions

Relinquish preconceived notions.

Seek out unfamiliar opportunities.

Work hard and stay focused

Surround yourself with genuine people

Find joy in the small things

Enjoy the journey!

(bold = additions)

Notice any patterns? Finding friends was the scariest thing I remember about entering Penn during freshmen spring, so I am going to give you some advice about how to navigate your friendships. To alleviate your worries, I will emphasize that you definitely found some lifelong friends over the past four years, but you also had some of the most tumultuous friendships you have ever had. I wish I could sit beside you, put my arm around your shoulders, and tell you that everything you're experiencing now is just a stepping stone to where you're meant to be. However, since that's not possible, I hope these words find their way to you and provide some solace and guidance. Note that I hope to carry on this advice onto the next stage of my life too.

1.) Being taken for granted

You put 100% into everything including your friendships. It’s one of my favorite things about myself, but there may come a time when you feel taken for granted, when you realize that the effort you're putting in isn't being reciprocated. It will sting, and you'll question your own worth. But remember this – your value isn't determined by how others treat you. You are inherently worthy, deserving of love, respect, and kindness, simply because you're you. If someone doesn’t see that or value that even after you have told them, then maybe that is a friendship you consider letting go. It’s OK to let go but make sure to express how you feel first to give them a chance to acknowledge your perspective.

2.) Scene-yness

It’s awesome to be known around campus and feel like everyone is your friend or wants to be your friend. There is a desire to be accepted, to fit in, to be part of the 'cool' crowd. In college, especially in those early days, it can feel like everyone else has it all figured out, like they're living their best lives while you're still trying to find your place. You might catch yourself seeking validation from those you perceive as 'important' or 'popular.' It’s not worth it. Being ‘sceney’ (to use Penn lingo) is fleeting and ultimately unfulfilling, so search for authenticity in your friendships. Quality over quantity of friends is real, and I think it took a long time for you to realize that it’s ok to have fewer awesome friends over many surface-level ones.

3.) Lovebombing

Beware beware beware! Lovebombing, while it may initially feel flattering and fill you with happiness, can actually be quite harmful. It's like being showered with affection, attention, and praise, but it's not always genuine or sincere. While it might feel good at the moment, it's essential to question their intentions and whether the friendship is built on a solid foundation of mutual respect and understanding. More often than not, you’ll find it being used by people as a manipulation method or way of compensating for inconsiderate actions. Surround yourself with friends who appreciate you for who you are, not for what you can do for them or how you make them feel in the moment. Genuine friendships are built on trust, respect, and reciprocity, not on flashy displays of affection or empty promises.

4.) Common Values

In the fabric of friendships, common values serve as the threads that bind individuals together, creating a tapestry of understanding and connection. When you find friends who share your values, you discover a sense of belonging and camaraderie that transcends surface-level interactions and builds a real foundation. Through shared values, you'll navigate life's twists and turns with friends who understand your perspectives, support your endeavors, and celebrate your victories. These friendships become sanctuaries of authenticity, where you can be your truest self without fear of judgment or rejection.

5.) Selfishness

Selfishness is a human trait we all grapple with to some degree. It's the inclination to prioritize our own needs, desires, and interests above those of others, sometimes at the expense of their well-being. While it's essential to prioritize self-care and advocate for your own needs, it's equally important to consider the impact of your actions on those around you. Seek balance in your relationships, valuing both your own well-being and that of your friends. If you always feel deprioritized, especially when you ask for help or need your friends, then that is telling of whether the friendship will weather the passage of time and distance in the future.

6.) How They Treat Others

It is incredibly telling when you introduce your friends to one another and some do not make an effort to include them in the conversation. Pay close attention to how they interact with others – are they inclusive, welcoming, and respectful, or do they exhibit exclusivity, judgment, or disrespect? Never be a gatekeeper and always be welcoming to everyone - it’s the easiest way to make genuine friendships with new people and it’s a red flag when your friends are not automatically like this. True friends embrace diversity and celebrate differences. They're open-minded, compassionate, and inclusive, making an effort to make everyone feel valued and accepted.

7.) Boundaries

It's natural to want to be there for your friends, to support them through thick and thin. However, it's equally important to recognize your own limits and assert your needs when necessary. Establishing boundaries isn't about building walls or shutting others out; it's about fostering healthy relationships based on clear communication and respect for each other's boundaries. Part of that is knowing when to take on your friends’ problems and opinions as your own, and I caution you against doing this excessively.

8.) See the Red Flags

Recognizing and heeding red flags in friendships is a vital skill, one that can save you from heartache and disappointment down the road. Pay attention to inconsistencies in your friends' words and actions, as well as patterns of manipulation, disrespect, or disregard for your feelings. If you find yourself constantly making excuses for their behavior or feeling uneasy about certain aspects of the friendship, it may be time to take a step back and reassess. Trust your instincts, Freshman Me. If something feels off or doesn't align with your values, don't ignore it. Address your concerns openly and honestly with your friend, but also be prepared to set boundaries or distance yourself if necessary. The red flags in your friends’ other relationships are not ones to ignore

9.) Friends for Different Purposes

Not every one of your friends must be your ride or die. Some friends may be your partners in adventure, always up for spontaneous road trips and late-night escapades, while others may be your confidants, lending a listening ear and a shoulder to lean on during life's trials and tribulations. While each friend may fulfill a different role in your life, they're all valuable in their own way. Embrace the diversity of friendships, and make sure to appreciate your friends along the way.

There is so much advice in here and I feel like I’ve grown tremendously as a person and friend over the past four years. I promise the drive and discipline will remain with you despite making more time and space for the people in your life - never think for a second you can’t have it all. Cherish your next four years of memories and friendships Anj!

With love,

Senior Year Anj

Dear Freshman Annabelle,

If I could travel back in time, and give this letter to you, our freshman self, I don’t know if I would. I firmly believe that each and every trial and tribulation led you to exactly where you are supposed to be. But, nevertheless, I have some words to share with you and anyone else who may resonate with my message.

You know that puppy your brother snuck home the night before your high school graduation? That puppy got you through your first semester of college, which you spent on Zoom calls in mom’s basement. That puppy turned 4 years old today. And you, you are no longer an 18 year old teenager, but you are now a 22 year old woman ready for the next chapter.

Remember how you wrote about Wharton Women and Class Board in your Common App essays? You became pivotal parts of those organizations, and they became so much more than just a section on your LinkedIn and resume. They gave you purpose, and you poured your heart into them. You pulled consecutive all-nighters during Feb Club and ran countless initiatives for the class. You oversaw the Wharton Women Pro-Bono Consulting Committee that you were so nervous to coffee chat for during freshman year. You did it, kid. You did all the things you said you would.

Don’t get me wrong, kid, you sure messed up. At one point, Mom even sent us a keychain that says “stop doing stupid shit.” She loves you dearly, but you have also worried her. Call her more often, you’re still her baby. My point is, I am by no means saying you did everything right.

So with that being said, here is what you are going to learn the next 4 years.

I know this doesn’t surprise you, but you never once walked down Locust with earbuds in your ears. You stayed present, and said hi to people more times than you could count. You loved creating small talk in the elevators in the high rises. Maybe it was the Midwestern nice, but nevertheless, you always kept your head up and continued to be a smiling hello, even on the hardest of days. Never let anyone dull your light. People remember the people who are kind to them.

Control the things you can control. Almost always, you can control being on time, you can control preparing for a meeting, you can control responding to emails and texts, and so much more. When someone thinks you’re too Type A, don’t mind them, because you know you are taking the steps to get the job done. If someone sends you a gcal invite, show up and be consistent. Continue to be present and the person that always shows up, and I promise you that it will continue to open up doors for you. And academically, cramming for exams will not yield you the same result that it did when you were in high school. The professor published the practice exams weeks ago, so there is no one to blame but yourself when you’re struggling to cram the material the night before the exam. Control the controllable.

And on the other hand, let go of the things you CANNOT control. You spent months planning U-Night, and you were devastated that it was pouring rain that night and you had to have the event under a tent. The t-shirt manufacturer told you a week before Hey Day that the shirts were going to arrive late, and you had to make 60 phone calls to get the shirts here. You were devastated when the buses showed up for Atlantic City over 20 minutes late at 1:20am. You often let the things outside of your control eat you up inside, and it deteriorated you. Stop blaming yourself for external factors that you cannot control. U-Night was adorable, the Hey Day shirts came in full speed the night before the event, and people look back on Atlantic City so fondly. Don’t be so hard on yourself, because things are usually going to work out; even the uncontrollable.

Of course, how can I forget to talk about people. True friendship is a lot of work. It means texting them out of the blue and following through with plans. It means checking in on them when you know they are having a hard time. You will come across many acquaintances and friends who you love dearly, but remember that deep friendship is a lot of work. Luckily, you found your people, and they supported you through the past 4 years. On the other hand, you are going to lose some friendships – and spoiler alert: that’s okay! You also had your fair share of heartbreak the past 4 years. But another spoiler alert: that’s okay – you found someone who makes you feel whole.

You belong here. You will spend much of your time at Penn questioning whether you deserved a seat at this school. We come from a public school in the Midwest, so it was certainly a learning curve, both academically and socially. It’s going to be difficult, but I promise you that you’ll keep up with the pack. Just because you might not bring the most top-tier quantitative skills to the table does not mean you don’t offer a different, useful skill. Your ability to plan, organize, and lead will help you thrive at this university. Do not let imposter syndrome win. And remember, it is okay to feel as though you are not the smartest person in the room, because that gives you an incredible opportunity to learn from those around you.

Develop self-discipline. You struggled a lot with time management and indulgence during your first years at Penn. You would be mindlessly scrolling on Tik Tok the night before an exam that you knew you didn’t prepare enough for. It seems a little bit childish that I have to write to you about having self discipline, but it was a very valid struggle for you in college. My advice to you is to rewire what gives you dopamine. Rather than scrolling for 7 hours on TikTok on a Saturday, go to a Farmers’ Market or go on a hike. There are so many fruits out there that you have to try. If you have enough self discipline to improve your mindset and lifestyle, I promise you that studying for an exam or getting coffee with a friend will feel significantly less draining. There’s a whole world out there to explore, so get off your phone, kid.

Something you need to get comfortable with is rejection, but never let a prior rejection inhibit you during your next endeavor. With each heartbreak, love the next person even stronger. With each internship rejection, move even more confidently in your next interview. When you get a 3/10 on the first quiz in a class, knock it out of the ball park for the next quiz. Because eventually those no’s are going to be a yes, and you’ll be thankful for every “no” that brought you to an even better “yes.” Come on, our last name is quite literally “no - yes.”

One day, you’re moving to Philly alone with only 2 suitcases, a KN-95 mask, and a chest full of anxiety. Sophomore year, you were Googling how to transfer universities. Junior year was the hardest year of your life. And senior year wasn’t as easy as everyone said it was going to be. But, I’m here to tell you that you’re going to be okay, kid. I love you, and I am so proud of you.

In a few weeks, you will be presenting the Class of 2024 Ivy Stone at Baccalaureate, an opportunity you never thought would be afforded to someone like you. But what I think I found that no honor or resume builder can provide: I finally found peace with myself, and I couldn’t have done it without you, Freshman Annabelle. Each and every decision — both the good and bad — brought you to this point. You are EXACTLY where you need to be.

Your time at Penn isn’t going to be perfect. You are here to learn, grow, and transcend. Take a deep breath, and enjoy the journey. Embrace each mistake and every challenge, because before you know it, you’re going to be counting the days until Commencement with a very heavy heart. So, Freshman Annabelle, here is some advice from your more senior self, but you don’t need this. You’re going to figure it out without my help.

All my love,

Annabelle N.

Dear Penn Freshmen,

When you’re a senior, freshman year seems like it was so long ago, and yet so recent. I can recall everything being so fresh and new, endless experiences just waiting for me to reach them. The excitement, the nerves, the tension; they’re all a part of that newness. Every freshman before you felt these, and every freshman after you will, too. Throughout my four years here, I have learned a great deal about myself and the world around me. It brings me so much joy to share this knowledge and wisdom with you. Strap in!

I arrived at Penn knowing what I wanted to study, but I had also “known” what I wanted to study for 17 years before that and then switched my career path after an internship at Penn’s veterinary school (Check out the Penn Vet Working Dog Center!), so I learned early on to allow myself to remain open to the wealth of opportunities that I may know little to nothing about. That, to me, is key to growth as a person and as a professional. More specifically, my career path (so far) has looked like this:

Equine veterinarian (17 years/Until senior year of highschool) -> Nutritional psychologist/dietitian (~2 years/Until the end of freshman year) -> UX designer (~1 year/Sophomore year into junior year) -> UX researcher in video games (Junior year) -> UX researcher and localization/translation specialist in video games (Junior/Senior year-Present).

I majored in psychology with double minors in nutrition and linguistics, not computer science like many assumed when I mentioned my love for video games. I mention this because I need you to know that you never have to follow a traditional path, ever. You need to forge your own path, not one that others want to lay for you or expect you to follow, and it needs to be your authentic self. I wanted to pursue a double major in psychology and nutrition, but after completing 3 courses, I realized that this path was not what I was really looking for. On the other hand, 3 courses are halfway through the minor, so I figured I might as well finish it (it was worth it, I can now spot food fads and myths from a mile away). Picking up the linguistics minor was another way to explore a foreign area of study for me, and I loved it (extra love for the linguistics department, they’re a great community). All this to say, follow your interests, and don’t let pressure from any direction force you to set them aside.

In my sophomore year fall semester, I went way over my head with my course selections. DO NOT DO THIS. Do not think that you will just brute force your way through a tough semester. Seek guidance from multiple mentors and advisors, never stay silent, and be realistic with yourself. After that experience, I chose to limit my course load to 1 challenging course per semester with another semi-challenging course (with 1 “okay” course if necessary, and two enjoyable courses, for a total of 5 per semester). Know your limits, and set boundaries early. Know and trust yourself. Love and respect your time and energy, balance these with your passions and school work (and jobs, if applicable). You are you, not someone else. You cannot walk in someone else’s shoes, and they cannot walk in yours. Honor yourself. Side note: Take a cool graduate-level course in a field of your choice (and see if it somehow fits into your major requirements). It was such a rewarding experience for me, learning from students at a level above mine. Plus, it’s cool to be the only undergraduate student there (or one of few). Don’t hesitate to petition for a course to be counted as a course elective. Just try it! The worst answer you’ll get is a no. But please be polite and genuine when making all requests. Kindness really does go such a long way (not a cliché here, just do it).

Get out there!! Go to social, campus-sponsored events. Greek life was never my thing, but try it if you would like to (my friends have differing opinions here, but try what you might like, and do it safely). Meet people from across different majors and degree levels (the PhDs love eager undergraduates). Make many connections, make a few good friends. Not everyone is your friend, so protect your integrity, and listen to your gut. Even if your gut is telling you something that seems absurd, just follow it. It saved me way more than once. Make a few strong bonds, be real, and enjoy the fun that comes with making good friends and developing your own community. Join cool clubs and groups, don’t fall prey to peer pressure, and live your truth. If what you’re looking for doesn’t exist, create it. Penn can help you with that. All you need to do is ask the right people, and be kind and genuine. I mean it.

A few more things:

• Find a reason to have a strong, hearty laugh every day.

• Find an adventure in the smallest of life’s gifts.

• Explore campus! Find your favorite spots and soak it all in.

• When the hard times arrive, breathe in, lean on those closest to you.

• Be a rock for others while protecting your own wellbeing.

• Give back to the communities that gave to you.

• Create, create, create! Show yourself and the world the wonders that live in your mind.

• You are your greatest competition. Outcompete yourself, and beat your own personal records. It's more fun that way, and it helps you measure your growth (which you should be very, very proud of!).

• Keep it moving! Nothing can stand in your way unless you allow it to, so don’t allow it to!

• You need to sleep if you want to keep it moving, so establish a healthy sleep schedule early on.

• Take Grit Lab with Dr.Angela Duckworth. This course applies to everyone, regardless of major. It improved my life significantly because I applied its teachings. Do it!

• Have fun!!

I wish you all well, and we’ll all be here when you need guidance. We’re an alumni *network* for a reason. You’re not alone on this journey, and you never will be. You’ve made it this far. Now begins the rest of your life. This is your story, so go live it and savor every moment!

Best wishes always,

Dangela F.

Class of 2024

P.S.- I’m always happy to connect with other Quakers!

My personal email is dangelu05@gmail.com. Find me on LinkedIn, too!

Dear Freshmen,

If you are reading this, you have probably read a few letters from graduating seniors before mine. You probably will read a few after, too. What may be surprising is how similar they all are; you will probably find our writing overly cliche, obvious, sappy, nostalgic, sentimental, etc. Forgive us, because those are the feelings that naturally come up at this point in our lives, especially when prompted by an assignment like this.

Reading over other letters, I find that Seniors take their letters in two directions. Firstly (and most commonly), we use it as a way to bring closure to our time in school. Every day, there have been wins and losses, precious memories and cutting regrets, insights and mistakes, and bloomed and broken relationships that defined who we were (and who we became). Secondly, others labor to provide clear and actionable advice that they believe will make your college experience better.

However, 95% of us are caught in an interesting paradox. We have had an interesting, fulfilling, difficult, raw, and altogether “whole” experience that made us “who we are.” This makes us hesitant to provide advice to our younger selves — who knows where we would be without every single thing that happened throughout college? I think that is why we stick to general advice about “belonging” and “being true to yourself,” because, beyond words, these are habits that only show themselves over time and over many accumulated experiences. There is not one thing to change or look out for, but rather patterns of decision-making and habits that make us who we are.

Therefore, if you get anything out of this letter, be reassured that four years later you too will look backward and realize that there are few things, if any, that you are willing to change unconditionally. Soak in the highest highs and find comfort in the lowest lows — no matter what, life goes on and you become a little more you.

With that being said, I will try my best to help improve your college life through lessons I learned in my own.

Find solace in similarities and differences

I came from a place where there were not many people who looked, thought, and dreamed like me. Writing this, I realize that I now take for granted being surrounded by people who share my culture and value systems.

Interestingly, I came from a place where there were not many differences either. Writing this, I realize that I now take for granted being surrounded by an unbelievably diverse, colorful, and interesting group of people. It is likely that we will never again live in such a vibrant community. Cherish it and cast your net wide — you never know who you will meet next.

Leave

It is easy for a campus to be a casino. You wander our mazelike halls, eat at the conveniently placed food court, sleep at the company hotel, and lose track of time and progress.

The only cure is to get out. Deliberately incorporate novelty and discovery into your schedule. Philadelphia is a beautiful, deep city. Make a list of restaurants or parks or attractions to visit every weekend. Get an Indego bikeshare subscription. Walk the streets and learn about the place you live.

If you need some ideas for a bucket list, start here:

Clark Park Farmer’s Market, Reading Terminal Market, 1900-ICE-CREAM, Machine Shop Bakery at the Bok School, Cira Green, Copabanana $5 Burger Wednesdays, Mawn, John’s Water Ice, walk around Old City, Italian Market, Wissahickon Park, Hmart, Kim’s BBQ, JG Skyhigh, Double Knot Happy Hour (for the food), Schuylkill River Trail, Fishtown, Passyunk, South Street, Center City German Christmas Market, Franklin Park mini golf, intramural sports, New York trip, Poconos cabin, John Heinz Wildlife Preserve.

Join

You do not know what you want to do. Change is the only constant in life. Take classes that do not fit in your projected major requirements and don’t worry too much about double counting your gen ed. Looking back, I would much rather have taken two interesting classes than one boring double count. Talk to every tired upperclassmen tabling at SAC fair and do everything you want, and then ruthlessly cut down when the time is right.

I am sorry that the first thing you will witness after the brutal college application season are even more applications to clubs and classes and seminars and on and on… that is how life works at Penn. Get what you need out of our broke system but do not become it. Try to recognize when things are competitive for competition’s sake — only sometimes are things desirable due to intrinsic value.

Defend

College will be a constant war for your time, attention, and priorities. There will be meetings, practices, homeworks, office hours, parties, applications, and a million other things that beg for your eyeballs and cognitive space. There will be immense pressure to conform to the Penn box. No matter what people tell you, there are more than 4 career options once you graduate. No matter what people tell you, you can get good grades, good friends, and good sleep without having to sacrifice one. Find your balance and find your time. Find the academic and professional and social niches that are right for you, not the median freshman.

Weigh

There are costs and benefits to every decision you make. Some of my friends sacrificed entire semesters for recruiting / research / etc. Most of them got prestigious jobs and pristine grades. Some of them think it was worth it and some of them do not. Remember, we humans severely undervalue our time. Is a miserable sophomore and junior year worth a few jumps on the salary ladder? Like I said last week, we also significantly overvalue secrurity and overestimate consequences of failure or nonconformity — we are all irrationally risk averse.

To summarize: what do you sacrifice when you are “too busy” to grab dinner with your friend for the tenth time this month? There may not be an eleventh.

Capitalize

We go to a rich school. You may or may not pay a lot of money to be here. Regardless, it is in your best interest to squeeze every drop of opportunity from Penn as you can. Join the fellowships, meet the professor, get the free food, apply for funding, and go on the subsidized trip to the Galapagos. There are countless “once in a lifetimes” that will happen over the next four years — take advantage of them.

—

In the end, my letter is the same as any other. We all have ideas on how to live life at Penn, most of them pretty similar; we all have things we want to change, also mostly similar. None of us followed the advice we wrote in our letters; you probably won’t, either. That’s ok. Make the same mistakes we did and enjoy the process.

To wrap up: what would you like to write in your 2028 Dear Freshmen letter? What sort of college experience would you like to have?

Live with courage. Embrace discomfort. You were chosen because you are special. Do not lose your light during the next four years; rather, grow that flickering spark into a roaring flame.

Joey

joeyj123@outlook.com

Dear Alex,

At my high school graduation party, one of my longtime family friends, who happened to be my youth travel soccer coach, came to me and said:

“When I sent my oldest off to college, I gave him three rules, and I’ll give you the same ones: 1) go to class; 2) stick to beer; 3) never get in a fight with a wrestler.”

After attending college, if I had to pick three rules to give as advice, I wouldn’t give these three, but I’ll give you my thoughts on them. 1) In regards to going to class, I’d say that in general, you should err on the side of going—and you should certainly go at the beginning of each course to get a feel for it—but I’d say that roughly half of the class time of any given Penn career is a waste. Figure out quickly which class sessions you should attend and which you shouldn’t, and you will be able to dedicate many more hours to things more useful and meaningful than class. 2) In regards to sticking to beer, this is generally useful advice, but some people don’t like beer and it can be too much liquid to imbibe with the goal of becoming inebriated for others. It’s definitely a good starting point, and I’ve seen many students choose something stronger than beer only to pay a dear price for that choice (myself included). 3) “Never get in a fight with a wrestler” is very, very, very good advice. They’ll rip you limb from limb.

My three rules: 1) get really good at something useful; 2) get really good at something useless; 3) call your mom (and/or other beloved family member(s)).

1) Get really good at something useful.

Apologies, but we have to begin pragmatically. You’re going to spend a shitload of money and around 5% of your life in this Penn ecosystem, and I think it’d suit you well to develop one or two skills that will be valuable to society–valuable meaning that you can financially support yourself with said skill(s). While the general principle here may be obvious, I think there are two misconceptions that people hold when it comes to developing ‘useful’ skills during their college years. The first is that you need to decide what skill you want to develop within the first half of college, that it should not change, and that you need to become world class at this skill. There will certainly be people around you who pick their ‘thing’ early on, and there will be those for whom that ‘thing’ is unchanging, and there will be those who you watch become world class at something. It will be the majority of what you see broadcast to the world, because those things are easy and sensical to broadcast, but it is the minority of what is happening amongst the population. I started off college wanting to become a rocket scientist; then a management consultant; now I’m what you might call a retail technology entrepreneur. I might well change my mind again soon. And I’ll be just fine. And you will too.

The second misconception here is that there are a relatively limited number of things that you can become useful in. It will seem like the options are limited to: discounted cash flow modeling, strategic consulting frameworks, software engineering, pre-med coursework, and academia. I am here to tell you that there are so, so many more useful skills that you can develop with your time and talents. To discover those most interesting to you, join some clubs (and actually participate, please) and do lots and lots of reading (and podcast listening). There’s a whole weird and wild world of industries and jobs out there.

2) Get really good at something useless.

This is the more noble and enlightening version of what some refer to as “having the college experience.” “Useless” things are those that someone is not going to pay you good money for once you leave college, unless you are executing them at a truly world class level, and there happens to be a market for it. These can include athletics, making music, dancing, cooking, running a club (this can bridge useful and useless), reading, social media influencing, blogging, and many more things.

My advice is to find something you thoroughly enjoy and just hammer away at it, no matter how “useless” it seems. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that by choosing something you know you will enjoy, you are going to naturally spend time and effort on said thing, and this will make your pursuit of excellence much easier. Second, doing shit well is just plain cool. The coolest and most memorable things I’ve seen at Penn are not sublime feats of “useful” things like scientific research, but watching my peers’ outstanding performances in the “useless” arenas of athletics and dance (which is often an athletic feat in its own right). Finally, practicing the act of honing a craft or skill with consistency and rigor, no matter how “useless” the craft/skill, is more important at this point in your life than basically anything else. When you ultimately find that “useful” thing to pursue, you will already be equipped with the toolkit and experience needed to become great at it.

When you graduate from college, having experienced the hardship and process that is required to be really good at things–no matter what they are–will be far more valuable than having gotten only a little bit good at any number of “useful” things. You will likely pivot in your career, relationships, and hobbies throughout your life, and being world-class at becoming really good will likely prove invaluable.

3) Call your mom (or other beloved family member/friend).

In my experience, your family members will never be mad when you make the time to talk to them. Especially with older family members, you have a fleeting amount of time in your life left with them. Yes, you only have 4 years of college, and you should make everything you can out of your time here; that being said, those outside of the Penn bubble can offer welcome and refreshing new perspectives that will make your time here even better spent. Don’t forget about your parents, grandparents, and siblings.

Additionally, if you have friends who will be graduating before you, make sure that you let them know you’d like to spend time with them before they graduate. I took a gap year after my freshman year, so many of my friends from freshman year graduated a year before me. I made a very conscious effort to spend time with them before they left Penn. I’m very glad that I did; finding time together after graduation, when you’re likely in different cities and on different schedules, is never an easy task.

So those are my three rules of advice. I’m twenty-three, so take this all with a hunky grain of salt–but I figured it’d be a waste not to put it out there.

Best of luck with your time at Penn. If you’re kind to people and work really hard, serendipity is a very real thing.

Alex B.

Dear Penn Freshmen,

Penn is full of quirky people. I have genuinely loved these last 4 years at Penn, and I believe the quicker you conceptualize people in terms of their quirks, the quicker you will begin to thrive at Penn.

Every person you meet at Penn will have their quirks. Some will laugh at everything that you say. Others will rarely chuckle unless what you say is genuinely funny.

Some are super detail-oriented and Type A. Others seem like they don’t wash their hands after using the restroom.

Some will only talk about how stressed they are about academics. Others will only talk about how much they love alcohol and partying.

Some enjoy being sceney. Some are secretly the voice actor of Boots in Dora. Some fly every weekend to Guatemala to go hiking with friends. Some will make club recruiting a personality trait. Some live, laugh, love Greek life. Some will say “traveling the world” is their most fun fact. Some will dap you up on Locust even though you secretly forgot their name over a year ago. Some will believe the median salary of a US citizen is $200k and upwards. Some are the most charismatic people in the world. And some will give you the vibe that they will become a world leader in the future.

The aforementioned are just randomly sampled examples from the quirks of my friends, tangential acquaintances, and myself (pause, I do wash my hands). When you begin viewing Penn through quirk-filled glasses, you can begin to discern what quirks truly matter to you and what quirks are red flags to avoid.

To thrive at Penn means making meaningful friendships. But the question that I began to struggle with was, “How do I make meaningful friendships when there are thousands of quirky kids that fill Penn’s campus?”

As one of my summer roommates and close friends said best, the trait of genuinity is the most important thing someone can have. It is inevitable that the people you meet will have quirks beyond your wildest imaginations (maybe those are the same quirks they wrote about to get into this school to begin with). But behind it all, remember to invest time into people who are searching for the same genuine connections like yourself. Someone who genuinely loves you for you – not your accolades, status, wealth, or any external title.

Thinking the median salary of a US citizen is $200k and upwards is a really wack quirk. But my hot take is that if that same person will run to cook you Maggi noodles on a day that you are sick, cheer you on during your successes, and offer a shoulder to cry on through your lows, that is a genuine friend. And genuine friends are hard to come by, especially at Penn. Recognize and hold onto genuinity. Living life with authenticity and surrounding yourself with genuine friends will make these next 4 years the best ones yet.

Hey, Penn Freshman, get excited. Navigate this campus full of quirks with an optimistic attitude. Never lose sight of living life with genuine compassion for others.

Stay Quirky,

Nicholas K.

Hey Lucas,

I know things kinda suck right now. You’ll be getting this letter on the first day of virtual classes freshman fall. I'm not gonna harp on Covid too much, but this next semester is gonna be rough. But I promise things get a lot better. Like unbelievably better. You have no clue.

I don't have a lot of advice for you. Honestly, I'm really happy with how things turned out and a lot of that is because of who you are and who you will become, and I wouldn't want to say anything that might mess that up. There are a couple things though. Hang out with your sisters more while you’re still in Philly. Treat your friends better sophomore year, they don’t deserve to be kept in the dark like that. Start your relationship with Amanda on a better note; it’s always possible to be kinder. Get more involved with activism on campus. If you really want to do something, just make it happen. Don’t get so swallowed up by Wig and a thesis your senior fall. But I’ll stop there. You don’t even know what a lot of those words mean yet or who those people are. My god, you have so much left to learn dude. The last piece of advice I’ll leave you with is twofold. First off, be willing to say yes to anything. As in, don’t be afraid of any new experiences, whether it’s scary roofs with friends or driving to the beach with a girl you don’t know you have a crush on. But don’t take that to mean that you should say yes to everything. In fact, a lot of your best experiences will come from saying no to things you don’t really want to do. The most important thing with saying no is you need to have no regrets; embrace whatever you’re actually doing, whether it’s a chill movie night instead of a frat party or going skinny dipping while most of your friends are out clubbing. You’ll never enjoy something if you’re thinking about what you could’ve been doing instead. Alright. That’s all the advice I’ve got.

As I said earlier, it’ll be a hard fall semester that you have coming up. I know it’s been a hard year so far, so that’s probably not very encouraging. But I want to give you something to look forward to, so here’s a sneak peek: You’re gonna get to school in January and you’ll find the two best friends anyone could ask for, right on your hall. I know. It’s awesome. You’ll lead adventures and come up with crazy ideas. The words “chair-lympics” and “quadacombs” mean nothing to you yet, but soon they’ll mean friendship and exhilaration and fear and pride all at once. You’ll make a great group of friends. Sophomore year will hit, and you’ll find your “thing” in the stage crew section of a theater group. I know. Who would’ve guessed. You’ll have your first college relationship. Your friendships will change and evolve through &pizza deals and a giant stuffed teddy bear. Then it’ll all start speeding up. You have no clue. You’ll start dating one of the friends you met freshman year. She’s amazing and you’re gonna love her so much. You’ll meet a class of new theater group members who will fill you with so much pride and you’ll win a raffle for a painting made by a goat named Clementine and you’ll plan a mixer called EveryFling Everywhere All At Once and I can’t believe that these things mean nothing to you. You are so damn naïve, it’s insane. If you met me, the version of yourself that’s sitting on my bedroom floor writing this letter right now, you wouldn’t recognize me. You wouldn’t recognize my walls, every inch of them full of memories. The battle axe and the wooden birthday cake. Mya’s Stop Sign. Yoni’s Adventure book. The poster Amanda made for your show last year. The McDonalds’ ‘O’ and the New York Subway map. You’d question the giant Google logo because the party where you and Joelye will dress as Google Chrome and Garden Gnome is still three years away. You have no clue how amazing it will be, this college experience that you’re about to have. Soak it all in. Walk your friends home and give them hugs before they go inside. Laugh as much as you can. Embrace every little moment that you can. It’ll be ending before you know it.

Love you dude.

-Lucas

ljaeger2001@gmail.com

Dear Penn Freshmen,

I write letters quite often. Almost everyone I know has received a handwritten card from me, and two issues of Penn’s fashion magazine contain my own Letter from the Editor. I am also a frequent visitor to the site FutureMe, where I write letters to my future self and detail my current predicaments so I can hopefully look back and laugh, as well as my aspirations for good measure. (I should be expecting one from my freshman self any day now.) Somehow, despite all of my accumulated experience, writing this specific letter has proven to be much more of a challenge; I have so much to say, and it seems impossible to include it all. As I contemplated several different ways to frame my advice to you, I ultimately settled on a reflection of the many meanings of a seemingly simple word: “down.”

Being Down

My roommate’s and my favorite thing about each other is that we are “always down” to frolic together. Stay out until 1:00am traipsing around Center City for Feb Club Bar Crawl? Down. Dinner reservation on a Tuesday night immediately after class? Down. Weekend trip to New York to see the opera, even if we have to crash on a friend’s couch at Columbia? Down. I have always been hell-bent on getting the right grades and going the extra mile for my extracurriculars, but when all is said and done, those late nights and spontaneous decisions make up the majority of my highlight reel.

The idea of “being down” extends far beyond social life. It also means choosing to walk through the doors that are open for you, and, in some cases, busting the door down yourself. If you told my freshman self that I would eventually become the Editor-in-Chief of Penn’s fashion magazine, I would never have believed you; I had never worked with publication before, and being from the Bay Area, the land of Allbirds and tech company t-shirts, I certainly didn’t know much about fashion. It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you see upperclassmen clad with roles and accomplishments, but we were all freshmen once—and in just a few short years, you will be passing down your nuggets of wisdom to incoming freshmen too.

Feeling Down

When I first got accepted to Penn, I earnestly believed that the next four years would play out like the epilogue of a romantic comedy. The naivete did not last long; while some parts of college did feel like an early 2000s coming-of-age movie, most of it felt like Riverdale: chaotic, nonsensical, and only narrowly making the cut for next-season renewal.

I am loath to be the bearer of this news, but no matter how gingerly you step into this world, you will eventually face challenges that feel insurmountable—academically, professionally, and personally. Nothing prepared me to lose my grandmother to colon cancer at the beginning of junior fall, while I was still wandering the abyss of recruiting. Nothing prepared me to muscle through a 104 degree fever in order to take an exam, and proceed to cough so violently that I would lose my voice the following week. And nothing will prepare you for many of the obstacles that land at your feet, or the ones that send you flying backwards. Fortunately, all storms come to an end; trust that though you may feel down in the moment, the sun will inevitably come out, and even when you fall, you will get back up.

Slowing Down

One of the mindsets that governs much of the quintessential Penn experience is “work hard, play hard.” Particularly in your earlier years, there will be no shortage of competition to see who got the least sleep, or whose calendar looks the most like the end of a game of Tetris. But as a veteran of many all-nighters and cold brews at unspeakable hours, let my embarrassingly frequent bouts of sickness be a lesson in the importance of taking time for yourself and prioritizing your health. You might feel invincible for the first two years (the next-day adrenaline from lack of sleep is a real thing), but your body will ultimately want to collect on that debt.

Of course, only so much of the chaos that comes with attending Penn can be mitigated. But even when you are in the thick of it, I encourage you to stop and smell the roses, to bask in the warmth of the memories as you make them. Midway through sophomore year, I took up scrapbooking; several GSR study sessions, cooking nights with my roommates, and long walks (beverages in hand) with my best friend are immortalized in printed photos and handwritten love. And even then, there is nothing I wouldn’t do to hear my friends’ melodic laughter, watch the leaves fall on Locust, or sing my heart out at karaoke all over again.

Doubling Down

My last piece of advice is to trust your gut. It will be tempting to follow hordes of people down a road that you are unsure about. My sophomore summer, most of my peers were working finance jobs in New York City; I opted to take a summer internship with a startup in Taiwan, which entailed temporarily working from 6:00pm to 2:00am in California due to the time zone difference, followed by six weeks of attempting to produce quality work in Taipei despite my semi-broken Mandarin. I questioned that decision a lot, but it turned out to be one of the best summers of my life. No one knows you better than you do, so be honest with yourself, and don’t be afraid to sprint down the path that you choose to forge.

–

Though it may seem daunting now, the next four years are ripe with possibilities and potential. Throughout your time at Penn, you will experience each of these meanings of “down”—and surely discover your own.

With love,

Adelyn C

addiechen9@gmail.com

Dear Chérie from 2021,

Hello!!! I can’t believe I am writing to you as we are living our last week of college, last week of classes, last week of hanging out with friends, last week of everything,... This is crazy, I have been feeling so many emotions and there is so much going on right now, I want to tell you about it but you’ll get to live all of that eventually so let me talk about, in no particular order, what you most need at this point:

You’re about to embark on a new journey and trust me it’s gonna be hard because I know that you do not want to be there, you do not see the point of doing all of this, of being at university, this path does not make sense to you. My beauty, what you’re experiencing right now and has been experiencing for the past year is a symptom of burn-out. You gave so much of yourself in high school, too much of yourself, you thought that running on less than five hours of sleep and waking up at 4 am every day, working on over 200 past exam papers per class, heavy lifting plus running 10 kilometers every single day and constantly dieting we're not gonna get to you. Trust me, it did, even though you're not consciously aware of it.

This might affect how you feel about school and your disinterest in doing anything at the beginning. And, I understand, I feel your pain and I see you. I understand what you’re going through. And, I want to tell you that it’s okay to take a break - even if it’s at a time where it seems everybody is maximizing the beginning of this new journey. Your journey is your own and it’s okay if you no longer have the energy to run and want to slow down and walk. It’s okay to be the one walking even if everybody else is running.

Also, you’re not eating enough. Yes, I know, you are already disagreeing with me. No, I am telling you to stop being a know-it-all and to please consult a nutritionist. Just because we stopped dieting after high school and allow ourselves to eat whatever we want now does not mean we healed our relationship with food and our body. TWO TO FOUR BITES OF FOOD PER MEAL IS NOT ENOUGH. It's not sexy nor does it make you more amazing if you’re the one who eats the least amount of food in a group setting. I wish we realized earlier this was why we were on the brim of exhaustion and passing out every day after class. Trust me, consult a nutritionist, you’ll feel so much better and happier. I care about you :)).

The long-distance connection you’re obsessing over is not worth it - Do learn from it but I keep it short because as much as we will cry about it, it will fortunately be insignificant to our journey for this part of our life.

I know you really, really want to get a boyfriend and I know, you feel stupid, awkward and clueless about dating and guys. On this, I want to say, please be patient and understanding with yourself and most importantly, PLEASE STOP COMPARING YOURSELF. Chérie, you went to an all-girls high school, did not date, you did not even talk to a single guy or have close guy friends. Your experience of high school back home was completely different to the American experience. So, please do not compare yourself to other girls here. Please understand and accept that even though you are a young adult for other areas of your life, you’re still a “teenager” somehow when it comes to dating. Your timing might be different, and it might take longer than what you want to. I think that feeling lonely and wanting a relationship is perfectly normal but if you overly focus on that loneliness, you’ll miss out on the joy and happiness other areas of your life are providing.

You’ll realize how much more important and precious friendships become when you’re far away from home. I can say that in terms of friendships we hit the jackpot. You’ll meet some of your closest friends this sophomore year, your first year on campus. Those four friends who will form part of your closest friend group are some of the kindest and most loving souls you’ll meet. They’ll show up for you for EVERYTHING and specially when you’ll most need them. Cherish them. You’ll create so many beautiful memories with them.

I also know that right now, you’re really scared about a lot of things. You’re scared of attending and participating in certain classes, you’re scared of joining clubs, you’re scared of talking to new people. This fear paralyzes you and on that, I want to say two things:

1.) There are safe places and communities for you to join at Penn. You have the impression that every club and every opportunity has to be competitive and stressful but trust me, there are safe and welcoming places where you will feel safe and free to be yourself. LOOK FOR APO, JOIN, SAY YES TO HANNAH WHEN SHE TELLS YOU TO COME TO THEIR MEET-AND-GREET, it’s one of the best decisions you’ll make throughout your time at Penn.

You do not have to be ashamed of being unable to conquer all of your fears all at once. You will feel bad about yourself for hanging up on zoom calls when you are cold-called in class or for that one mistake you’ll make on a slide deck at an “important” group presentation. Being scared is normal but even if you are scared, you need to have that willingness to move forward and to do it no matter what. Even if you present the most scared and the most anxious version of yourself, showing up is moving forward in the right direction. Choose to move forward.

2.) When I look back at all the reasons we succeeded in the past, self-belief was the most important element. Napoleon Hill, Bob, Earl Nightingale and all those people we were crazy into in high school were right. (We won’t be as crazy into personal development and self-help but they were right) So, please, continue to have unwavering faith in yourself and in your capacity in achieving ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING you set your mind to. (I weirdly feel that my present, senior-self needs this more than you do.)

Other random pieces of thoughts/advice that could help you:

• What has helped us the most in moments we were highly anxious and stressed was praying - God has never let us down.

• It will be HARD (and not just once) but WE WILL GET THROUGH IT.

• You don’t have to be dressed up every day haha, wear the hoodie and the sweatpants when you want to be comfy

• Take care of your sleep, eat proper, nutritious meals, supplement with magnesium, complete your weekly two to three workout sessions, go on long walks and make sure you see/talk to a friend every day.

• Ask for help when you need it - whether through a therapist, your professors, your friends, people in class, … There might be a lot of things you are unaware of and you don’t know how to do, ask for help, you don’t have to do it all alone.

• Mom will text us back at 4 am if we text her so please be kind to her and try not to text her until she wakes up.

• You’ll love your little island even more after you leave, you’ll feel homesick a lot and it’s okay if you go back home more often than expected.

• You’ll be chaotic at cooking at the start but trust me, you’ll get good.

• Try to chill a little, cut off the noise caused by stress and enjoy where you are right now. Enjoy every single bit of this experience.

You have such a crazy journey ahead of you. You don’t need the letter, you’ll learn as you go. Prends courage. Je crois en toi. Tu peux le faire. Comme dirait maman, “tu es la meilleure.”

Et aussi, je suis fière de nous, pour tout ce qu’on a été, pour tout ce qu’on est aujourd’hui et pour tout ce qu’on sera demain.

Je t’aime,

Chérie de 2024.

How’s it going, younger me?

You’ve just graduated from a high school where everyone was taking the same path, more or less. Receive top marks, immerse yourself in a handful of extracurriculars that you like, and write some essays about the brilliant, lofty goals that you have. Get accepted and attend a “better” university than many of your peers, and you’ve got it made.

These days, “better” is my least favorite word in the dictionary. I hate comparisons — especially the vague, hand-wavy comparisons that come from thinking about being “better” than somebody, or somebody being “better” than you. It’s dangerously imprecise for your self-esteem, and unproductive for your ambitions.

Let’s make this clear right now, to you and to any first-year reading this: there is no best way to attend Penn, and no path is better than any other. Your path is just that — your own: don’t let anybody else tell you what you should be doing, or make you feel bad about the decisions you’re making.

College is so often romanticized as a continuous string of whirlwind events, where you’re constantly getting whisked off from one activity to another. You’re drinking yourself silly with your friends one day, and landing your dream job the next. Then you’re hitting four countries over ten days for spring break, and getting invitations to conferences and competitions as soon as you get back.

All of that happens to you, and lots more! It’s great. But it would also be perfectly okay if it didn’t — at the end of the day, those moments aren’t what made your college experience.

You see, if you only focus on those exciting, mile-a-minute moments, you’re setting yourself up for unhappiness. A lot of the lead-up to them is something that I like to call “grayspace.” You’re sitting at your desk in your dorm waiting for your code to compile at three in the morning, rolling your eyes as you get the same error over and over again, no matter what you change. You’re reading the same sentence in your study guide for the fifth time, close to falling asleep in the VIPER lounge. You’re zoning out in lecture, playing New York Times crosswords, because it’s a gut course and no one else is paying attention either. Why am I doing these things? What will they be good for?

If you let this grayspace get to you too much, you’ll burn yourself out so fast that you won’t get to reward yourself for your achievements. It’s not your wit or workaholicism that get you through the slog, but the ability to keep calm and have confidence in your abilities.

You will learn how to persevere through a challenging assignment, but also how to take a break and ground yourself. You will make your life more colorful and banish that grayspace, and that’s what ends up making your college experience.

You’ll grab coffee with your friends a little too close to midnight and start writing a report, and then you’ll collectively decide, “To hell with this, let’s go to the Biopond and go watch some frogs acting goofy.”

You’ll be struggling to stay awake in Russian Lit and open up Discord (yeah, you use Discord now! Nerd.) and spend the rest of class trying to stifle laughter behind your mask as a slew of messages and memes are flooding your feed.

You’ll start dancing and singing at random to Billy Joel ballads in your bedroom, and obsess over painting a color-by-numbers of a ship at sunset with your best friend. You’ll read a fascinating article in the Atlantic, share it with your friends, and spend an hour debating it through text messages that increase exponentially in length the more you delve into the topic matter.

You’ll cat-sit Yumi for your ex-suitemate and watch her climb your artificial Christmas tree approximately three dozen times, and it’s funny every time. You’ll walk twenty-five miles with that same suitemate around Manhattan, just because you both feel like it. You’ll volunteer for the Class of 2023 College graduation ceremony and listen to thousands of names be read over the course of three hours, but you won’t care how boring it is because you’re chatting it up with wonderful people, and grateful that it’s not you graduating… yet.

All of this to say: if you try too hard to craft a narrative, or cherrypick the parts of your life that are showstopping and meaningful, you will close yourself off to so much that’s out there. So many of the stupid little moments, that emerge from what otherwise feels like grayspace, have become what you cherish most.

I’ll stop there for now — I can’t spoil too much, where’s the fun in that? Give lots of love for others; you’re going to be in awe at how much you receive. Stay healthy, and be kind to yourself, too. You’ve got a great journey ahead of you.

Cheers,

Caroline M.

carolinemagdolen@gmail.com

Hey Freshman Julianna,

I know that this feels like the most overwhelming day ever, but I assure you it will all be okay. First, I want to thank you for writing me a letter at the end of freshman year (look at that foreshadowing, you’re already doing so well). You will soon be nostalgic for that Lauder dorm room you wrote that letter in, surrounded by 10 trash bags of your belongings waiting for Mom to pick you up. Newsflash, you still pack things in trash bags (we haven’t really fixed the procrastination problem haha).

To answer your question about if I went into finance. Funny joke, I did not. I know you’re insecure about this considering you have no idea what you want to do with your life. Your fall from grace in the Math major is way in the past and no longer a day-to-day concern to yourself (or Dad). Be confident in yourself and your own choices when it comes to a career or what major you decide to pursue or what you want to do during your free time. You’re actually going to change your major 4 times, but don’t worry you’re still graduating. You have time. Allow yourself to explore. Make your own path and I guarantee it will be more fruitful than going into investment banking or consulting because it feels like everyone is doing it. Your dreams and wants are so worthwhile! Pursue them! You got this!

I know you’re reeling about not going to music school. But you will join PSO and it will be one of the best communities you find at Penn! You play in a chamber group! Re-joining the orchestra will be one of the best decisions you make in the next four years. Performing has been such an outlet for you, continue to revel in the beauty of each piece and of playing with such close friends. Also, you play Mahler 2 and it is the best day of your life.

Knowing you, you’re probably reading this in fear of how different life is going to be. Looking back at the comfort of high school I know you’re scared. Don’t be. I’ll be candid. Penn is going to be hard at times, but more often than not, it will be a place that feels like home as much as AHS did a few months ago.

You’ll get stressed out, it’ll be okay. Journaling helps. Walks down Locust help. You don’t discover Metro’s coffee until junior year, but an egg and cheese and iced latte from there also helps.

Hug your friends! You will find your people and they will love you and you will love them! I know you’re scared about doing this in the midst of COVID but it will happen, just be patient. You actually meet one of your best friends doing a play about James and the Giant Peach. You can’t predict your life and you will learn that this is one of the most important and fun parts of Penn.

There is so much about yourself that you don’t know yet. I can’t wait for you to find out all of it.

I miss you. I’m proud of you. They’re all proud of you too.

Love,

Jules C.

juliannacimillo@gmail.com

Dear Penn Freshmen,

Congratulations on getting into Penn! Before I say anything else, I want to remind you that you deserve to be here. You worked hard. You matter.

Penn can be a challenging place if you constantly compare yourself to others. Let me tell you an open secret - no one has every aspect of their life completely figured out. Don’t take everything people put out or online at face value. You. Just. Don’t. Know.

Don’t feel like you need to follow someone else’s path. Everyone is different. Not getting into a club or securing an internship may actually be a huge blessing in disguise (Did you really want to be with those snobs? Was that internship really a unique experience that could teach you something about yourself you didn’t already know?). Every failure, every roadblock is just another way for you to get to the place where you were meant to be. Be brave. Don’t lose heart. Don’t look back.

I completely recognize that it is easy for me to say these things and it is hard for you to internalize them. At times, it is still hard for me to internalize them. But I truly believe that your path at Penn will be full of exciting surprises and more joy, friendship, and fulfillment than you can imagine if you give yourself permission to step off the beaten path and out of your comfort zone. When I started Penn, I wanted to go to law school. Now, I’m moving to China! Give yourself the latitude to take risks and follow your interests. Seek out opportunities for your goals. Throw things at the wall and see what sticks. Just remember to consider whether something is worth your time and mental energy. Feeling obligated to do something rather than feeling excited is the first sign that you should reconsider your priorities.

Don’t be afraid to talk to new people. Even as a senior, I have still made new close friendships in my last semester. It is never too late to try something new. Don’t be afraid to engage with people with different perspectives - they are valuable to your personal growth.

Make sure you ask for help when you need it. Trust me, no one is getting through Penn alone and without support. Most of the time, when you ask for help other people are glad you spoke out.

Communicate. Communicate. Communicate. People are not mind readers. Don’t send a cryptic text, make a phone call. Meet face-to-face when you have a problem. Withholding communication about your needs, feelings, and expectations only hurts you.

You’ll be great. I’m so excited for what you have in store.

Anonymous

College of Arts and Sciences, Class of 2024

Dear Freshman Era,

During the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reflecting on my time at Penn. I’ve tortured myself by thinking about what I could’ve, should’ve, would’ve done, but then I remind myself about the 17 year old Era who zoomed into Penn. She was burnt out and jaded from high school, but also ambitious and excited to be one step closer to becoming the rich man she always told her parents she would be. She would’ve been proud of how far I’ve come. Rather than fixating on what I did or didn't do, I've come to understand that the true measure of my experience lies in the deltas – the change and development that has occurred within me from then until now.

At the end of freshman spring, my friend would find black bananas in the fridge while helping me move out. Turns out seasonal depression does exist. I was shackled to my coursework. I felt overworked and drained, and I didn’t take care of myself. I am proud to say that I now have some semblance of a skincare routine, I finally got myself to go to the gym, and my GCal has a healthy amount of whitespace for personal projects.

I often found myself fixating on the negative, echoing "I hate Penn" and "Penn sucks" without fully appreciating it all. My junior year, I left Penn behind and spent a semester in Switzerland but by the end, I missed Penn. I daydreamed of walking down Locust, the morning after debriefs with my roommates, and going on boba walks with friends. I thought of my life at Penn and what a privilege it was to live it.

And many more deltas: learning how to do makeup, meeting technology and business leaders and nobel laureates, winning and losing competitions, meeting and dealing with different types of people, solo traveling multiple countries, …

Aside from the deltas, I also thought about the constants. The people who were with me throughout these 4 years and witnessed all this. My roommates, Raka, Gaby, Amanda, and Beth, for making Rodin 2003 and A502 my home away from home. Claire, the only one who showed up to grading, for helping me plan my days. Kavya, who “accidentally” snapchatted me twice, for finding a way to laugh at everything. Palitha, whose turquoise wall I commented on in Zoom DM’s, for keeping me humble. And to many other Penn friends, both past and present, for being there and making memories with me.

It’s all about recognizing the delta and appreciating the constants.

Sincerely,

Era

Dear Penn Freshmen,

I’d tell you about my past in this intro but that lore is longwinded and there’s a lot of advice to cover. So you’ll get to know some things about me along the way. I didn’t set out to write one of these but I was nominated and so writing one both eliminates the possibility of me looking like an asshole and also could help out whoever’s reading this (I think).

My chief goal here is to a) calm you down because I swear to you it's not that serious b) give you something to look forward to and c) prevent you from making the same mistakes I did. This intro is getting a bit like how when you wanna make cookies and the online article author proceeds to tell you their life story and all the little idiosyncrasies that led them to making the cookie instead of just giving you the f*cking ingredients, so lets get to the ingredients, there are ten.

1.) Make down-to-earth friends: can’t stress this enough. The first year is full of starter friends, people that feel important or cool or make you feel bigger than you are. People who have amazing stats and achievements, people that seem to know everything already. People that own entire empires. Make friends with people that are honest with themselves, people who talk about their mistakes, people who voice their insecurities. People you feel comfortable with, safe with, truthful with. People who laugh at jokes, who don’t care what others think, who have a growing and vulnerable sense of self. These people will be life-changing, long-term, and help protect you from the sinister atmospheric poison of Penn Face that inevitably seeps in. And be good to them too.

2.) Research Early and Ask Questions: For job prospects, unfortunately a lot of this shit starts early. They are competitive and complex but you’re not alone. There are tons of resources and everyone is just as lost as you at first. I regret not knowing about consulting tracks, industry tips, internship recruiting cycles. As a first-generation student, all of that was foreign to me until my junior year. Take some time, do some research and don’t let it overwhelm you. You have a life to create not just a career. You are a person not just an employee or resume. This should be done with an earnest curiosity and a LAID-BACK attitude. You don’t have to be anything at 18. Chill out, do the research so you don’t have to wish you had done it.

3.} LEARN: I know class sucks, but the privilege of this limitless knowledge will grow you up so much. Learn about yourself. Learn how to be a better friend, student, lover, adult, kid, all of it. Soak up knowledge. Show up as an idiot with a fresh slate, you won’t be disappointed at all. READ PLEASE READ BOOKS. Learning your own boundaries, insecurities, strengths and passions is a genuine and extremely necessary endeavor.

4.) Experiment! Oh my god, try things. Parties. Clubs. Things that seem lame, things that seem scary, all of it. Every single thing you do will either be one of your best memories (it went well) or one of the funniest stories (it went horribly wrong). Please stop caring about your self-image, you are no one right now. These are the years to decide who you are and change it multiple times, lose yourself and reinvent yourself and restart as many times as you need to.

5.) Take breaks. Some behaviors you do are just behaviors. Not every action is integral to your character, sometimes you fuck up or you just need a day to skip all of your classes. Take that time. Breathe bro. The world will keep spinning without you. Forgive yourself. Be kind.

6.) Keep in mind your strengths. There are gonna be times when you feel low, measly, stupid, tiny, like every single person knows what they are doing and that you came to this school to end up a bartender in Nashville. You got in for a reason. Because you give a f*ck about yourself. And if all your other strengths fail you, remember that one. That you care about your life, and you cared so hard that you got into an elite university.

7. ) Call your mom. Often. I used to hate my mom, but that anchor tethers you to your roots. Call your mom.

8.) This one’s not really advice but I swear you’ll be okay. You’re already so great you’ll only become a more beautiful and well-rounded person while you’re here. I’ll be rooting for you.

-Zsazsa

Dear Penn Freshmen,

Your little world of high school has ended. High school funnels you from class to class and extracurricular to extracurricular like a fish in an unstoppable current of standardized test prep and college admissions anxiety. You tried to decipher what it means to go to Penn, as if it’s possible to extract Penn student reality from bland Ben Franklin biographies (they always leave out the erotica and orgies), and influencer vlogs (walking down Locust with friends gets more screen time than lectures, everyone has time for Pottruck, and studying in Van Pelt is somehow romantic).

Now you’re here. Welcome to this new little world of Penn.

ACADEMICS

To come to Penn, we threaded our educational and extracurricular experiences into a coherent narrative about who we are and what we want to accomplish. Your personal essays screamed, “Pick me! I know exactly how I’m going to change the world with my Penn education!”

And you must’ve tapped into a grain of truth because you succeeded. You got in.

Now comes the hard, bitter reality: the world is complicated, job opportunities are somehow both overwhelmingly vast and frustratingly inaccessible, and your undergraduate degree is not going to make you an expert in any field. An internship is an internship, a job is a job, and neither will likely be what makes your life meaningful five, ten years after you graduate.

With that in mind, go wild. Embrace the hysterical, delusional feeling of being a student with too many assignments and too little time. (Here’s a revolutionary study tip, only one word: SLEEP.) Prioritize school, but not to the point where it makes you say “no” to every social engagement and new opportunity. Everyone has a different approach to schoolwork that works for them; find what works for you. Pick classes with good professors, the kind who inspire you to put in effort and do your best work. Do your best work.

RELATIONSHIPS

Coming out of a school with a smaller and more limited population, you crave a stronger sense of identity and belonging. Penn will be a fantastic opportunity to practice reaching out and meeting people with whom you feel like you unlock deeper mutual understanding.

You’ll talk to people of every background, interest, and course of study, and through those conversations, you will slowly discover who you are in relation to the thousands of other students at Penn.

So, my advice: talk to as many different people as possible, giving each of them attention, openness, and intention. It’s temptingly easy to stay in communities where you already know what you have in common, and you already know that you belong. Seek out the challenge of people who might seem very different to you–it’s worth it.

Don’t assume all the Wharton kids have easy classes that they fly through to find a cushy finance position–ask them about their classes, their favorite professors, what they actually want to do in the future. Don’t assume Engineering students are all computer science whizkids who devote every waking hour to the lab–learn what bioengineers, system engineers, and mechanical engineers do. Figure out the difference between a pre-med and a Nursing student and ask the Nursing students what it’s like to engage with patients on the front line of a psych ward or ob-gyn clinic. Chat with the lovely folks in Penn’s different ethnic studies programs–and learn from them critical American histories that your secondary schools never taught. For my U.S. friends, try to wrap your head around what it’s like to be an international or exchange student, choosing to leave the comforts of home and create a life in Philadelphia. For my international friends, give Philadelphia and the U.S. (in all its entirety–not just the grand cosmopolitan cities, but the wilderness, the diversity, the craziness) a chance; enjoy this place for more than what it does for your career. Chat with the Master’s and Law students; get coffee with the MBAs; ask a PhD about their research–I could go on.

Everyone says that the best part of college is the people. I want to expand that statement to say: the best part of people is how everyone overflows with experiences, interests, and contradictions that are different from yours. You don’t need to share his passion for environmental law, nor her fascination with astrophysics; but keep your ears open and your heart curious, and the world will become richer and brighter with every new person you meet.

YOU AND PENN

Your Google Calendar is filling up with little blocks in every color–lectures and recitations, lunches and dinners, general body meetings and downtowns. Your phone is a never-ending bowl of popcorn kernels, and you can’t resist grabbing a salty bite every time a notification chimes. (Emails from newsletters you don’t remember signing up for, GroupMe and Facebook messages from groups you barely participate in, Instagram and BeReal offering tempting peeks into other people’s perfect lives…) Your to-do list is a ten-minute piece of slam poetry, everything from “do laundry” to “text Amy back” to “finish my problem set.” How are you going to handle it all?

Against the rush of stimuli that is the Penn experience, fight for your life to stay grounded. Call your family and your friends–the ones who don’t go to Penn and can give you a precious outside perspective. Walk past 40th street into West Philadelphia, walk past 34th street to Drexel and into Rittenhouse (it’s not nearly as hard as it might seem once you start and have momentum). Breathe in and observe the city. Make journal entries. Hell, make use of that free Headspace access and teach yourself to meditate.

The method doesn’t matter. What matters is that you build up the skill to check in with yourself, emotionally and physically. And please, understand this: it’s okay if you’re not okay. Your well-being is a priority, and if you realize you’re not okay, that is a call for action: take a break, ask for help, be easy on yourself.

Finally, managing your own life is already a full-time job with overtime hours, but if you do have a moment to lift your head, check in with your friends and your communities. Ground yourself, be a grounding force for others. Make this little world of Penn your own.

- Angela S.

Dear Penn Freshmen,

Advice can sometimes feel fruitless, more a reflection of personal experiences than universally applicable truths. It's shaped by our unique journeys and may not resonate with everyone in the same way—and that's perfectly fine.

My aim in this letter is to share insights I’ve formulated during my time at Penn that can help you navigate the complexities of life during college and beyond. I hope you find validation in my thoughts or perhaps your different life experiences will lead you to different conclusions.

Ultimately, the value in advice lies not so much in its prescriptive power but in how it encourages us to engage, reflect, and grow. The journey of self-discovery and how it shapes us is far more significant than any definitive list of dos and don’ts.

So, while I hope that you find this list useful, I care more about the thoughts and feelings it evokes than the behavior it recommends.

Simple Advice:

1.) Explore the Unfamiliar

Engaging with the unfamiliar can profoundly enrich your life and perspective. Whether it’s taking a new route to class or sampling a new dish, novelty introduces fresh stimuli that can invigorate and inspire your daily routine. Another way to encounter novelty is to read science fiction, which lets you venture into wholly unfamiliar ways of being and can cause you to reevaluate your assumptions and identity. Furthermore, venturing into the unknown helps you to challenge and overcome an inherent bias towards familiarity.

2.) Ask Questions

Cultivating the habit of asking questions not only demonstrates your enthusiasm and intelligence but also makes others feel valued. In a business setting, asking questions helps you stand out and can be a superpower when used effectively. Personally, it not only enriches your conversations but also deepens your understanding and connections with others. A key factor in being able to compose great questions lies in having genuine curiosity about the answer.

Sometimes, we’re afraid to ask questions due to feeling that we should know the answer or that our question is poor. In my case, I tackled this by normalizing question-asking for myself (start in a small group setting), reframing my perspective (asking questions is a sign of engagement and a desire to learn, not weakness), and practicing active listening (reduces the chances of asking substandard questions). Also, remember that while we’re all intelligent and curious people, we’re still young. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to expect us to have the same knowledge base as professors or experts.

3.) Identify What You Dislike

Understanding what you don’t like is crucial for personal growth. It helps you steer clear of activities and paths that do not fulfill you, saving time and energy for those that do. This self-awareness is vital because personal experiences, not second-hand opinions, provide the clearest guidance in shaping your preferences and decisions. Recognizing your dislikes is a step towards a more focused and satisfying life. Sometimes, the only way to identify a dislike is to experience it first-hand; be pleased that you now know to account for it.

4.) Ask for Help

Seeking assistance when needed is a sign of strength and self-awareness, not a weakness. It demonstrates humility and the courage to acknowledge your limitations, which can significantly reduce mistakes and accelerate learning. Moreover, asking for help can strengthen social bonds and foster a sense of community. One of the easiest ways to strike up a conversation in the classroom is to ask a peer for help, such as requesting information about an exam or advice on how to complete an assignment. In fact, people tend to like you more if you ask them for help, particularly if the favor is easy to do or appealing.

5.) Find Your Zen Activities

Identify activities that absorb your complete attention and put aside stress and worries. Then carve out time to engage in them. This is a concept in positive psychology called “flow,” and it’s a topic worth exploring. For me, engaging deeply in activities like ice skating, painting, swimming, or skateboarding can provide a mental break and rejuvenate my spirit. Remember that the times you’re convinced there’s no room for “zen activities” are sometimes the ones in which you most need a break. These experiences not only refresh you but also prepare you to tackle other responsibilities with renewed vigor. They are worth the investment of time, even if they’re merely for recreation.

Less Simple Advice:

1.) Think About What You Do

Consider how your daily activities shape your future self in terms of character, body, mind, and soul. Each action or experience is a form of training – we are what we do. Ask yourself if your current actions align with who you aspire to be. Remember that in a short amount of time (say, 4 years), you can be a completely different person.

There is no inherently right or wrong way to live your life. Rather, there are only outcomes from the choices you make. Accordingly, do what you want, but think about the consequences of your decisions and practice intentionality. Too often, by taking a day-to-day perspective in our lives, we overlook the long-term impacts of our actions. Being mindful helps bridge the gap between our aspirations and our actions.

2.) Question Social Media

Social media is ubiquitous, and it is important to recognize that each social media platform constructs a reality based on certain assumptions. For example, Instagram emphasizes transient approval, Snapchat focuses on superficial interactions, and Twitter revolves around compressing complexity.

This doesn’t make any of these platforms inherently bad, but we should engage with these platforms critically, understanding that using them very much shapes our perceptions and behaviors. One technique I use is to think about what the creator of a certain feature was trying to accomplish by designing it that way. This helps me be aware of the forces affecting me.

Think for yourself and find your perspective on what matters. Don’t let some social media site that monetizes your attention dictate the way you see friendship, happiness, intellect, or other things you care about. This is especially important in the face of the negative effects of social media, such as thought bubbles, fear-of-missing-out, or comparison to others.

The right amount of social media consumption depends on your personal goals and values, but being aware of both the advantages and consequences of your engagement helps you to stay in control. Besides being cognizant of the realities of these platforms, other tools include intentionally limiting the time you spend on social media or how you use it (establish what you will do on the app and stick to it), talking openly with friends about how your feed makes you feel, and prioritizing other ways of engaging with people.

3.) Progress Begins With You

Despite an increasingly complex world with massive systems and structures, individual actions can still shape society.

Every individual action influences others and contributes to societal change, perhaps more than we’ll ever know. This makes personal responsibility hugely important. To change the world, we can start by changing ourselves. We may be just individuals in a confusing and worrying society, but what we have power over is how we respond to our reality. Remember that the light is even harder to ignore in the dark.

Imagine the world you desire, considering the values and behaviors that define this ideal society. Then, start being a citizen of that society. Be accountable if you value accountability; be generous if you value generosity; be empathetic if you value empathy. Let your deeds follow your beliefs.

If you can create meaningful change at scale, go ahead. If not, you can still contribute to cultural evolution by living according to your values and influencing those around you. Sure, at Penn it doesn’t always seem that way. Our school is notoriously good at crushing dreams and ambition to create change. But please do not give up hope. You can make a difference, as impossible as it may seem. Starting with yourself is an empowering and accessible step forward, and you might be surprised by the larger opportunities that present themselves along the way.

That’s the end of the list. There’s so much more advice I could give, but those were the standouts as I thought about the last four years. I’m sure that at the end of college, you’ll have your own unique list, the product of so many triumphs and tribulations.

In closing, I would recommend that you live passionately, think cosmically, aim for fulfillment (not happiness), and know thyself. And take a breather when you need it.

– Nicholas R.

nsgwr8@gmail.com

Dear Freshman Chapin,

There's a message hidden within this letter that should point you to some very useful secrets. It shouldn't be particularly difficult for you to find. Now we'll get to the main message of this letter.

You applied to several closed-membership clubs as an underclassman. Unsurprisingly, this proved to be a waste of time. Really, it would have been helpful if someone had told you not to apply to clubs that exclude people. Long applications only to be either rejected or admitted to a group that values its prestige above bringing people into its activity are a royal waste of time.

Despite being good advice, that actually isn't the most important part of your story here. Out of the several clubs you applied to, the one with the most memorable story was some-or-other club that built drones. They sent my rejection email and I responded by asking for the emails of the other people they had rejected so I could offer to form another drone-building club with them, open to everyone. Conveniently, they had a reason they couldn't honor my request, namely the privacy of applicants. Of course, though that was a legitimate reason, it turned out to just be an excuse. Magically, when I sent emails asking them to instead forward a message to the rejected applicants, which would have addressed the privacy concern, I got no reply.

So I realized that they simply didn't enjoy the thought of losing their power to turn people away. Losing the fight, I decided to give up and drop the matter, which was a big mistake.

As is now clear, I should have worked to make an open-membership drone club happen back then, whether I eventually got an email sent to the rejects or not. Senior me now runs an open-membership drone club, along with a couple others, but they were only created long after this incident. Having had an extra couple years would've been an invaluable resource for Drone Club. As it stands, the club has built some excellent stuff, including getting one drone with a frame of chopsticks, cardboard, and hot glue to fly, but we could've done so much more with more time. At least as importantly, had I started a year or two earlier, I could've left the club with much more secure footing, out of its current relative infancy.

The more general lesson here is to not waste time. I know you don't need to hear this, but, for your classmates who do, spending your time stuffing your resume with meaningless titles falls firmly into the wasting time column. Do things that are fulfilling and leave Penn a better place than you found it, even if they don't pad a resume.

I got four years. The lockdowns stole one of them. With the three years I had left, I managed to fill each unforgiving minute with maybe forty seconds worth of distance run. I've never worried that I wasted my time here, but I could have done more. Don't waste time.

Chapin L.

chapinalc@gmail.com

P.S. The message is only in the article body.

Dear Freshman Louisa,

I wish I could give you a hug. You are going to experience so much in the next, spoiler alert, five years. Your path to the other side was not straightforward, but you’ll emerge a completely different person in more ways than you can dream of. You’ve always feared changes. However, you will come to learn that a raised heart rate and adrenaline rush can be good things. Great, even. This letter is to give you some perspectives on Classes, Clubs, and Careers, the “Three C Problems” of freshman year.

You’ve always been ambitious. You are going to cry about classes because of the heavy course load you planned for graduating from the Nursing and Wharton dual-degree program in four instead of five years as designed. When you beat yourself up for academic challenges, think of how feeling inept just means you are learning new things. Don’t doubt your capability from a bad grade as it doesn’t reflect all the things you were doing or the person you are. The lessons that stuck with you at the end are neither anatomy nor interest rates, but the presentation skills you learned from Intro to Acting and systemic problem-solving skills from the emergency department clinical. It was not the end of the world when you ended up graduating in five years because you took a gap semester during COVID. In fact, gapping was one of the best decisions you’ve ever made, and it opened doors that you didn’t know existed. What other times could you have tried being a model?

You are going to want to be involved with a million clubs on campus, and you kind of did. In hindsight, joining seven clubs, pledging one business fraternity, and starting two clubs in the first two years weren’t the best decisions. I was burnt out from over-commitment and wasn’t as deeply involved with each organization as I’d hoped. Despite all the organizations I joined offering great experiences and shaping who I was, I wish I asked myself: Why am I doing this? What do I want to get out of this? Do I realistically see myself being a long-term, active member? Clubs are just a way to explore a passion and find a community. While stressful, my favorite part of Penn was founding Violet Quaker, a Penn and NYU investment club, as well as In Transcription, an international community for students, researchers, and entrepreneurs. It was an unbelievable experience to build something meaningful from scratch with my best friends and see them flourish with the next generations of smart and genuine people.

You are going to pine for an internship without even knowing what consulting or investment banking is. Maybe it’s peer pressure, prestige, or just the air you breathe at Penn, but these internships seemed like the coolest thing. However, there are other options, and you won’t know if you like them until you try. Recruiting for a job seems scary, and it is, but it is nothing but a numbers game and a self-discovery process. You may not get every job you want, but you will eventually learn to figure out what matters to you in life and plan a career around it. To be completely honest, I’m still not entirely sure what I want to do with my life. I didn’t know I would fall in love with so many different things, but I’m excited for the possibilities.

The Three Cs are only problems if you view them as such. If I had a do-over, I’d view them as opportunities and enjoy the process more. College is what you make of it. This is a cliché but the best part of these years is the people. Make efforts and time to hang out with your friends who will become your family in the years to come. Shared experience is the best way to build friendships, so be open to trying new things, including but not limited to running half-marathons and backpacking in Patagonia. Everyone around you is so smart, special, and kind, but you are too. Stop focusing on your insecurities, go out, and have fun!

You will be ok.

Love,

Louisa Q.

Dear Vaishnavi four years ago,

Four years from now, your biggest fears will come true. Living alone, not part of any clubs, and having nothing planned post-graduation. You’d think you had failed college, not having anything built up on this perceived notion of a Penn resume you have just gotten a glimpse of. I am happy to tell you: you’re wrong. There is no perfect college experience. You may read about it on Reddit, hear of it through the upperclassmen you’ve been frantically reaching out to, or see it through your older sister; but it’s all just an illusion. The more you chase this need to fit in, to be something, to make your mark; the less likely it will happen. I know that’s hard to believe, especially being the hyper-planned person you are, but everything you know of yourself right now is going to change. Think of it as a major life upgrade – just let go and enjoy the wild ride!

Four years from now, you will miss those times in India when you confidently turned your camera on at 2 AM for your ‘afternoon’ writing seminar, hanging onto every word your professor said even if it wasn’t anything remarkable. You will be in awe of how many direct messages you sent to people who seemed cool to put yourself out there, even if most of them fizzled out of your life or left you on read after you raved about your food combinations. You will have become invincible from those very bad comedy & dance auditions for the promise of finding community at this strange foreign institution. Knowing so little about college, you’ve already achieved so much, except for mastering all these new acronyms, idioms, and sayings (American text slang should be a course, seriously). That one will remain a work in progress. One piece of advice: don’t be in such a rush to move to Philadelphia. You won’t get those days back with you and your mom in Hyderabad. India, though just a plane ride away, has been missing you for over 3 years now.

Four years from now, you will have many stories to tell. Both good and bad. You would be in disbelief that you were once in TEN clubs, took 5.5 CUs of STEM courses, and always had a three day weekend – within the same semester! You’ll wish you could go back to the late nights goofing off at the biopond, improvising on the rooftop lounge pianos, and struggling together with now some of your closest friends during CIS121 & CIS460 office hours. Everything seems so fast, but it’s so exhilarating, and you’re definitely getting your money’s worth now that you’re thriving on this stunning campus. Seasons change, leaves fall, and it SNOWS!!! How cool is that – a natural phenomenon that transforms you from an Ivy League college student into a little girl prancing around the streets. You also wouldn’t believe that taking spontaneous walks through Philly with a friend from the Quad would turn into founding a humble club called Penn DiscoverMates, where you’d share your love for this new home. Philadelphia, a quirky escape, unique in its antics, and with a bubbly personality of its own, is full of people you’re about to meet who will change your life forever. And take this, many of them won’t be Penn students; they’ll be proud citizens of this city who do life the Philly way.

Four years from now, you will experience the greatest challenges of your life. You will soon realize that behind all the fun of being involved on campus is a monster in a suit and tie, called Preprofessionalism. You’ll see Preprofessionalism everywhere: lurking in the lengthy club applications more selective than most universities, consumed in the ‘life-altering’ chatter about what you’re doing next summer, and embodied in Penn faces hiding their misery of having it all and never feeling good enough at the same time. Thankfully, Preprofessionalism did not hit you this hard, but it sure gave you a run for your money. Chasing after those flashy tech jobs or consulting gigs, you’ll realize that’s not what you came to college for, and you’ll thank yourself for learning that long before graduating. It will be hard to pave your path into finally, after never knowing what you want to do, figuring out your dream career of Product Management.

While tackling that monster was a challenge, life thought you needed more. You turned into the wench in many friendships, you felt lonely for months on end, and worst of all, you hated being at Penn. Fighting every day to follow your dreams had absorbed all the energy in you. Once a free spirit, now a soul devoid of fulfillment, the odds continued to stack against you as you experienced poverty, betrayal, estrangement, injury, and failure amongst other things. You could have given up, you could have walked away, but you fought those beasts with all the might in you, and emerged stronger on the other side. In those most unexpected ways possible, you will meet people who will help you forgive yourself and overcome these formidable hurdles. You will become so grateful for all the stars to have aligned for you to meet the best people on Earth right on this campus, not the perfectly cohesive college friend group you had envisioned, but a handful of deep friendships that are worth way more than college cliches.

Four years from now, you will ponder about life, looking back at all those deep conversations in between the craziness that was your Penn experience, and wish you could do it all over again. Now when you tell your story, people both old and young look up to you as if you have experienced it all. I am super proud of this new person you’ve become, but please pinch yourself and remember, you’re just a college kid. There’s so much more to learn.

Four years from now, you wouldn’t want your college experience any other way.

With love four years from now,

Vaishnavi P.

vaishart3@gmail.com