During the summer of 2020, on a whim, Vicki de la Rosa (C '24) drove 20 hours with her friends from north New Jersey to Florida. Along the journey, they stopped in North Carolina and Savannah, Ga., eventually reaching her grandma’s house in Florida. They drove back after a few days.
According to Vicki, this was one of “those spontaneous things” that characterized so much of her college experience. Growing up in north Jersey close to New York, Vicki always knew that she wanted an urban college environment. Her decision eventually came down to a choice between Penn and Northwestern University—both universities with close access to a bustling downtown—and Penn just struck her as “the perfect in–between of everything [she] was looking for.” A mid–sized campus in a mid–sized city, with robust programs in lots of academic disciplines, Penn was an eclectic mix of everything she needed.
Like many Penn students, Vicki came in pre–med, but even before committing to Penn, she felt like she “wasn’t super set on the track.” Still, she followed the conventional rite of passage easing into Penn with general education classes like writing seminars and math, as well as biology courses for the pre–med track. But there just seemed to be something wrong—or maybe her college life hadn’t actually, really started.
And then COVID–19 hit. After her spring break of 2020, everyone was quickly moved off campus and online. After “only a taste of what college was supposed to be like,” Vicki knew that she would not want to spend her time and energy confined to a bedroom all day. While a gap year seems like a huge commitment to make, Vicki casually provided the perfect counterargument: “I knew that I have four years at school and I’m still going to have four years; but it’s just like, do I have to do my four years now or can I do it later?”
If there was one thing Vicki would not change about her college years, it would be the decision to take the gap year. Every opportunity she grabbed, trip she took, and friend she met stayed with her, and shaped her journey back to Penn. The gap year began a chain reaction; one spontaneous decision after another followed.
When she got back to campus in 2021, Vicki joined The WALK magazine, took more classes that interested her, switched from pre–med to cognitive science and a minor in consumer psychology, joined a sorority, met more people, and tried different internship opportunities—from marketing to product management to consulting. She’s the president of both Penn Dance and the Sigma Kappa sorority, and she’s in two different senior societies, the Carriage and the Order, just to “make new friends and meet new people you haven’t really been able to meet otherwise.”
While this all might sound like one of those typical pivots from paralysis to action, Vicki’s is far more complicated than that. Vicki’s change to cognitive science and consumer psychology was driven strongly by a desire to actually understand human behavior in general. Her favorite class at Penn was behavioral economics, where the students explore how consumers respond to real–life business situations. Vicki also found that her new major and minor really complement each other perfectly, with her major exploring human mind and brain from a more scientific standpoint, while the minor in consumer psychology delves into human psyche from economic and cultural perspectives.
Instead of viewing her present as a sharp turn away from her past, Vicki thinks of her life as opening up. She never walked away from the medical world, working as a physical therapist assistant during her gap year, and even did a whole online program on medical scribing. Vicki said that she still loves medicine, but she just found that there were so many things in life beyond school during her gap year, and she doesn’t feel like spending many more years in a medical school post–graduation. “I kind of just wanted to, like, get into life,” said Vicki.
If anything, life is spontaneous, unmediated, and full of all kinds of sparkles and pivots. Vicki quickly started bringing that mindset to Penn. Vicki went to the audition and joined Penn Dance simply because of a canceled dinner plan. While she was walking around campus in boredom, she saw the poster and decided to give it a shot. Now as president of the club, holds two classes on ballet and modern dance per week, puts on a show each semester, and says that “it was one of the best things that happened that I wouldn’t change.”
So, instead of a gap–year heel turn, Vicki’s stories abound with pivots, with a nonchalant attitude towards the spontaneity of life that shines. It may well be argued that instead of saying the gap year changed Vicki, it’s the gap year that convinced her that change is everywhere. In addition to her trip to Florida, Vicki also went to live in Aruba for five weeks with a group of students in her town that were also taking a gap year. They hung out, made friends with locals, worked remotely, and even learned snorkeling because one of their neighbors happened to be a snorkeling instructor. Why take this trip? She just happened to find a cheap flight and a place to live.
At one point during our interview, I asked her one of my favorite ice–breaking questions: Who would you cast in a film that portrays your college life? Vicki gave it a long, hard thought, seemingly parsed through multiple choices, and finally said that she just couldn’t decide. As much as I’d like to find out about the answer, I gradually realized the beauty of non–decision as I finished the interview and wrote this piece. A complex myriad of sparkling spontaneity, Vicki’s life is simply too fabulous to be reduced to one actress, essence, or pivot.
