@Cue7 - you’re second paragraph above is exactly how I see it and why I jumped into the thread earlier. Perhaps I didn’t communicate well, that’s on me. S1 does those things and more and there are many others that I’m familiar with who do most of those things too. I don’t know they do it sometimes.
Hey there! Current Penn freshman here procrastinating going to bed because her study playlist is too bangin’ to turn it off right now. Also I just finished peer reviewing some essays that made me lose all faith in humanity so I thought to dig around old CC threads and think back to last year.
I’m in the Biological Basis of Behavior program with the intention of eventually getting my Ph.D. in something (the actual name of my degree would vary based on school, but I would be studying neuroethology), and I’m also majoring in English. I won’t be taking English major requirements until next semester so I can’t speak to them, but my friend who has taken them says it’s a lot of work but generally a good time.
BBB is a pre-med major, which I didn’t realize until I got to my classes and 80% of those kids wanted to be doctors. I think from a mental health perspective it’s not the greatest environment for pre-med and pre-academic (which is what I’ve started calling myself as a jab at the pre-professional kids). If you want to become a professional doctor, lawyer, businessperson, etc. you’ll make yourself miserable by four years of competition. Med/law/professional schools tend to care a lot about grades.
Academics like me are in kind of a different boat. A few schools have GPA minimums, but overall they care about research. I went to my bio professor’s office hours and he told me that in bio 101 “the best doctors get A’s, the best scientists get C’s.” So you have to live with dealing with the pre-professional kids looking down on you for not having perfect grades, but you get over it.
I also have a fair share of pre-existing mental health issues that made the learning curve really bad. My experience is kind of unique in that I had undiagnosed ADHD and was able to get away with it in high school because I was gifted, but once school got hard and I had to pay attention it was rough. First midterms hit me hard and I ended up going to the school psychologists. Everyone trashes them but I’ve had positive experiences; I see a psychologist once a week and a psychiatrist once a month to get my ADHD medication refilled.
Here’s the best advice I can give about how to be happy at Penn:
- Don’t be pre-professional, or at least don’t tie yourself to it. Research is super cool, dude.
- Make friends who are outside of your grade and major who are really passionate about whatever they do.
- Go out when you want to, not when you don’t. This is super critical; I spent the early part of the semester going out three times a week because my friends wanted to, got super behind in my classes, stopped leaving my dorm at all to overcompensate, and got depressed from not allowing myself to have fun.
- Go to office hours and talk to your professors. It’s a great way to make you feel not alone. My BBB professor told me she got Ds in undergrad and still got into an Ivy League grad school, and my bio professor told me about how he took a year off of grad school to build shelves because he felt “stuck”. If they could succeed, you can get over one bad semester.
- Attend one meeting of everything and drop it if you hate it. I started out in 7 clubs and now all I do is band and a radio show because they have flexible time commitments and I enjoy both.
- You’re not going to be perfect at everything. Accept it now. Find the things you’re good at and rock it. I was joking with a couple of my friends last week and said “I’m only good at one thing and it’s writing” and they dropped the self-deprecating humor to tell me that it’s amazing that I can write because most people are awful at it.
I am, overall, really happy here. If I could redo the semester I would and make better choices, but that’s why I have 7 more.