Senior columnist Diya Choksey examines how, in a school where everyone is brilliant, status has become the real competition.
Credit: Jackson FordLet me guess: You graduated top of your high school class, right? You were valedictorian, gave a tear-jerking commencement speech, had an SAT score above 1550, and name dropped at least one nonprofit on your Common Application?
How do I know all this about you? I’m not Joe Goldberg. Nor am I psychic. I just go to Penn.
Take a glance at any class profile and you’ll see it — everyone here is smart. Insanely smart. The kind of smart that once made you special, but now, it just makes you another name on a Canvas roster.
So, this becomes an interesting “Hunger Games”-style experiment: What happens when you throw the “crème de la crème” of overachievers into a 300-acre pressure cooker?
Intelligence stops being impressive; it’s expected. It’s the baseline, the air we breathe. And when smart stops setting you apart, you scramble to find something that will.
It doesn’t take long to figure out the new currency. It’s not grades, but access: the right clubs, the right jackets, the right fraternities to be seen at. You apply to a “beginner-friendly” consulting club, only to find yourself solving Bain & Company-style case interviews. You scroll through Sidechat, where greek life is ranked like NFL draft picks, with attractiveness and wealth as the new statistics to beat.
Because when intelligence is assumed, status — how you dress, where you’ve summered, and even the genes you inherited — becomes the next game. So, we adapt, rebranding the superficiality we thought we left behind, wrapping it in Patagonia vests and Canada Goose jackets, and calling it ambition.
But here’s the catch: You can’t grind your way into “the scene.” It isn’t earned; it’s inherited. It belongs to the kids with generational legacy, who learned the top clubs and downtown parties alongside their ABCs. They crossed paths with the right people long before you started filling out college applications. It doesn’t matter how hard you work: It’s about social networks built before you were even born.
It feels unfair. And it is unfair. But then again, wasn’t it just as unfair when hundreds of other brilliant students got rejected from Penn and you didn’t?
That’s the uncomfortable truth: Penn isn’t some alternate universe. It’s just a hyper-concentrated microcosm of the real world. Nepotism doesn’t vanish after graduation. Social capital doesn’t disappear. There’s always the variability of luck. And even here, hierarchies form within hierarchies. The “finance bro” everyone admires secretly wishes he was in Castle instead. The girl in the “top” sorority feels like an outsider. The LinkedIn overachiever posting weekly updates is just trying to outrun his imposter syndrome.
In 2014, Madison Holleran, a Penn track star with a seemingly perfect Instagram life, tragically took her own life for reasons rooted in the very same dynamics. It’s a sobering reminder that this so-called metric we’re chasing isn’t as simple as a GPA calculation — it’s literally impossible to quantify.
So, what should you do now? Should you reject the game entirely, claim you’re above it all? I wish I could tie this up neatly, telling you to be yourself and leave it at that. But even I can’t. That’s just not how human nature works.
The only thing we can do is acknowledge that the game exists. The hierarchy is real. But you get to decide how much you want to play into it. Rankings only hold power if we give them power. Exclusivity only works if people care to buy in.
So, before you chase a seat at the table, ask yourself: Which table are you running toward? And do you even like the people sitting at it?
Maybe you go full finance core — not for the clout, but because you genuinely love it. Maybe you rush greek life for the quality of friendships, not Sidechat rankings. Maybe you land the club that everyone’s dying to join — and then drop it because you realized it wasn’t for you.
The point isn’t to reject the game. It’s to stop letting it play you.
And in a place where everyone is scrambling to prove themselves, knowing what actually matters to you might be the rarest flex of all.
DIYA CHOKSEY is a College first year studying cognitive science from Mumbai, India. Her email is dchoksey@sas.upenn.edu.
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