The Student Activities Fair crowds College Green every fall like a choose–your–own–adventure game. For a newly minted first–year student, each club is a different path down a unique Penn experience—and at the club fair, they’re all trying to get your attention. Handmade poster boards, innovative merch, and sometimes a glossy magazine grace nearly every single table, marketing consulting clubs, pre–professional organizations, and fun social groups. Like open doors, they provide a peek into what life might look like for the next four years. And for first years, those possibilities spark all kinds of new questions, with scenarios they never even thought could become a reality—“Should I rush a business frat?” or “Is pre–law in the cards for me? Do law schools like service clubs?” or “What if I joined a club sport?”
And just like that, new students become infected with the networking bug.
Most Penn students are no stranger to looking towards the future. After all, it’s that drive that got us here in the first place. Now that we’re here, the goalposts have shifted to the job market, and the picture that’s painted for us isn’t pretty—unsustainable living costs, stagnant entry–level wages, and layoffs soon after we land a gig. The pressing need to network as much as possible and as early as we can is imbued into Penn’s culture, so much so that we sometimes value our pre–professional pursuits over our academic ones.
While some students, like myself, like to think that we’ve successfully avoided the hypnotic appeal of finance and consulting culture—which is a real feat, given that 50% of recent grads land in those jobs after Penn—there’s no way we could escape the networking bug.
“Get out there and network!” It’s the advice given to every student and heralded as the silver bullet—you can be the world’s most qualified applicant but still not get the internship of your dreams because you didn’t have the right person to vouch for you. The appeal of any Ivy League or elite institution, for many, isn’t necessarily the quality of education: It’s the network that accompanies it. And the moment New Student Orientation begins—or even before then, on Instagram—the rat race of trying to develop that network begins.
But then there are the roadblocks. Being cut from Greek life, or not getting a callback from an a cappella group—that’s par for the course. But as it turns out, it feels like everything at Penn is selective. Getting into the Global Research and Consulting club or the Medical Emergency Response Team (MERT) is not as easy as it seemed on the Penn Clubs website. Like clockwork every fall, first–year students find out just how hard it is to build that precious network.
In a school where “work hard, play harder” is practically our official motto, it’s unsurprising that the lines between personal and professional are almost entirely erased. When half of our friends and classmates want the same “Big Three” consulting internships as us, our relationships take on a different dimension. The concept of networking transcends a recruiting event or nervous cold–emails. Networking is sending a LinkedIn request to someone we spoke with for three minutes in our psych class, asking our friend to put in a good word for us when we’re rushing a business frat, or desperately texting an acquaintance so we can get into a Homecoming darty. Our experiences at Penn—and what feels like the entire trajectory of our lives and careers—seem to be shaped by who we know where.
It’s hard not to have a doomer mindset about knowing just the right people in college. After all, Mark Zuckerberg famously founded Facebook with his Harvard University classmates, and well–known companies such as Warby Parker and Thrillist were created by people who had met during their time at Penn. It stems from the competitive, perfectionist mindset that feels intrinsic to Penn’s culture—the constant need to be one step ahead of the game. For many first–year students who are entering a foreign environment when they step foot onto Locust Walk, the game could be anything. So knowing the right person, joining the right club, and being in just the right circle feels like it could be the domino that tips the other ones down the road to success, wherever that leads.
At Penn, we’re always saying that we yearn for real connections, true friends, and maybe even the loves of our lives. Of course, it stems from a place of truth, because we’re not disingenuous robots. But our dirty little secret is that we do want to be special—to have something to ourselves, to be part of an inner circle that other people don’t get to experience. In a pressure–cooker environment like Penn, that can seep into some of the relationships we establish. It’s why the second question out of our mouths when we meet someone for the first time is “What are you studying?” or “What’s your major?” We’ve attached people’s professional capital to them as individuals right off the bat, creating a culture where connecting with our friends on LinkedIn is funny but not out of the ordinary.
For better or for worse, I’ve been infected with the networking bug since coming to Penn, and I fear that a cure has yet to be found. But that doesn’t mean that it’s all bad. If utilized correctly, responsible networking can be a marginally healthier approach to blending business and pleasure, by centering true friendships with a side of professional connection. It’s just a matter of knowing which one should come first—or else the networking bug gets you sick.
