In a school environment as competitive as Penn’s, it’s simple to often lose ourselves in the cutthroat vying for nearly everything at this university: club positions, grants, fellowships, and, of course, internships. Even as freshman, this pressure starts early and is an incredibly daunting thing when you’re hardly five months into college, while everyone around you seems like they already have a future position at Goldman Sachs or somewhere on Wall Street.
But it’s okay if you don’t, I promise. You’re not alone, you internship-less freshmen – and you should know you aren’t doing anything wrong, for many reasons:
1. You probably aren’t even definitely going to be studying what you’re studying right now for the next four years (if you’ve even tried to decide by now) – even if everyone around you seems dead-set on real estate or mechanical engineering, statistics show that the great majority of first-year university students change their majors at least twice in their time at school.
2. Enjoy one more summer with you friends from home – take as many roadtrips, late night pool dives, and revisits of ridiculuous high school memories while you still can!!
3. If you can be a camp counselor one more time, do it – face it: there aren’t many summers without responsibilities or non-lifeguarding jobs left.
4. Cut yourself some major slack – you just went through a series of probably some of the hardest adjustments you’ve gone through in your ilfe so far. A new home, entirely new friends, new heartbreaks, new failures, new interests: it’s time to give yourself those few needed months of respite from Econ 001, not months of hashing over principles you thought you left behind in the freshman Quad.
So take it easy, over-achiever – let yourself just, you know, averagely achieve for once.