Joe Tharakan | Reflections on a year at Penn

Cup O' Joe | Despite its faults, I'm very glad I came here

By Joe Tharakan 04/27/16 11:01pm

As a junior transfer student, I have the unique perspective of having gone to Vassar College, a small liberal arts school which is, in many ways, the polar opposite of Penn.

The joke I like to tell about Vassar is that “it’s a small liberal arts school, which is very small, very liberal and very artsy.” The entire Vassar student body is the size of one year at Penn. It is comically liberal, so much so that ABC News did a story mentioning Luka Ladan and his experience as one of the few (openly) conservative people on campus. Finally, Vassar is very artsy. Its reputation is built upon its strong theater and music departments, its excellent performance groups and an incredibly pervasive a capella culture.

Penn, on the other hand, is big, politically diverse, and although it has excellent arts programs and performers, its primary reputation is one of aggressive and excessive pre professionalism. I certainly noticed that from the very beginning, when I realized that the club fair contained extensive applications for industry interest groups.

I also noticed how unprepared I was when I strongly gunned for two clubs the beginning of fall semester, didn’t even get past the “Google Form application stage,” then overcompensated by applying to everything else (a classic Penn move), and was rejected from most of those clubs as well. At first I actually kept a list on my phone of all my acceptances and rejections, but I eventually stopped because the list of rejections got so long I couldn’t handle looking at it anymore.

I also went fratting — which I wasn’t great at — and I went to my first BYO — which I was disappointed by — and wandered my way into several parties. One observation that’s held true across every social niche I’ve seen at Penn is that if a party is boring, awkward or if there is any problem in any way, the solution is to drink more. Just got here? You need to drink. Not enjoying the music? Try drinking more. That guy was mean to you? Who cares, just drink more. If you stand still long enough someone will tell you to drink, if not hand you one outright. At Penn, I drank more and had less fun.

And that attitude carries on into the adult world. “Oh, we don’t have anything in common, well, let’s drink more!” One could argue that Penn prepares its students well for the real world in creating that mindset early, cynical as that statement might be.

Early in the fall semester I took pride in deriding OCR as a boring snoozefest for corporate drones desperate to be noticed. I made jokes with my less business-inclined friends, deriding the banking and consulting hopefuls as sellouts or walking suits. But come spring semester, I became that walking suit. I went to the consulting info sessions, schmoozed it up, followed up via email, submitted my cover letters through PennLink and got rejected from almost everything.

I received two interviews, bombed one and performed astonishingly well on the other, but eventually turned down further interviews as I realized the position was not really aligned with my long-term goals. I’m actually extremely grateful I OCRed and failed, as it helped me realize what I want to do with my career.

Despite my long list of rejections, I am incredibly glad I transferred, because a lot of my disappointing failures come from opportunities that would not have even existed at my old school. I never would have heard of the firms that rejected me if I didn’t come here. I never would have been able to be rejected from the “healthcare-business clubs” (WUHC and MedX) because there isn’t one at Vassar, let alone two.

Penn gets a lot of flak for being overly pre professional. But I think that it is both the best and worst thing about Penn. It is easy to see all the negatives: the high pressure culture, the OCR madness, the interviews for student run clubs. But in decrying the negatives, we forget that these problems are caused by the incredible amount and depth of opportunities we are afforded by going to such a great school. The pre professional atmosphere and the social culture of Penn both mimic what a professional career might consist of.

No matter where you go, there’s going to be problems with the school’s culture. But having seen the opposite end of the spectrum, I can say that we should be mindful of all the positives that Penn creates.

JOE THARAKAN is a College junior from the Bronx majoring in biological basis of behavior. His email address is jthara@sas.upenn.edu. “Cup o’Joe” usually appears every other Saturday. 

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