In an ideal world, summer means lying poolside with a piña colada and a James Dean look–alike. In Penn world, summer means landing a prestigious internship that will make all your friends jealous. The grind doesn't stop when your last paper is written and your last exam is submitted. The grind continues with resume gains and the annual exodus from Penn to New York.
This time of year, walking into VP feels like descending into the abyss. Venture to ground floor between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m., and you may as well be on the set of a post–apocalyptic movie. Students half–walk, half–sleepwalk from GSR to GSR. Food is meager and morale is low. Students frantically click between Canvas and PennLink, obsessively refreshing their emails for internship offers. The only reprieve is Mark's coffee and a mildly cute mouse scuttling around VP basement.
In a school of overachievers, it's easy to feel like you aren't doing enough. It's easy to tie your self–worth not to the lines on your resume, but to the spaces between them—the internships you were rejected from, the awards you didn't win and the leadership positions you didn't get. It's easy to feel like you don't measure up.
Highbrow's here to tell you you are doing enough. It's okay to not know what you want to major in, where you see yourself in five years and how you want to spend the rest of your life. It's okay if you don't have an internship lined up in May. It's okay to waver. It's okay to not have all the answers. Most people don't—or they're doing one hell of a job pretending.
And anyway, New York's hot and humid in the summer. You don't want to be on the subway in that. Take it easy.
