The air smelled faintly of chives and sesame oil as my grandma placed another dumpling in my bowl. My cousins were playing video games on the couch, and my relatives had formed an assembly line in the kitchen. Outside the window, the sounds of Beijing in the summer drifted through, and for the first time since Ivy Day, I wasn\u2019t thinking about Penn.<\/p>\n
Until my phone buzzed.<\/p>\n
And it didn\u2019t stop.<\/p>\n
When it got to the point where I could no longer ignore it, I unlocked my phone and found more than a hundred unread messages flooding my notifications.<\/p>\n
One group chat was warning everyone to register for classes the moment add\/drop\/swap<\/a> opened because it\u2019s first-come, first-served. Another was debating which courses were GPA tankers and which professors to avoid. A third had already moved on to club applications, networking, internships, and research.<\/p>\n Get the DP delivered straight to your inbox.<\/p>\n Sign Up<\/a><\/p>\n My stomach sank. I had spent the last few hours eating dinner with my relatives, but it seemed like everyone else had spent them getting ahead.<\/p>\n For the rest of the day, all I could think about was how late I was to registration, how I only got one of the classes I wanted, and how the possibility of a lower GPA would diminish my chances of getting into graduate school.<\/p>\n As I waved goodbye to my relatives at the airport the next day, I suddenly realized that I had let my anxiety about missing the start of course selection prevent me from fully enjoying the little time I had left with them.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s when it hit me.<\/p>\n I was treating Penn like the next college application.<\/p>\n In hindsight, having this \u201cadmissions\u201d mindset shouldn\u2019t surprise me. Many of us \u2014 myself included \u2014 have spent the last four years training ourselves for exactly that. We joined clubs because they showed leadership. We pursued research because it showed intellectual curiosity. We started nonprofits because it showed initiative. Even the hobbies we genuinely loved often came with an underlying thought: \u201cWill this help me stand out in college applications?\u201d<\/p>\n Eventually, optimizing our lives stopped being something we consciously did and instead became embedded in the way we think. That mindset has successfully brought us to one of the most ambitious, pre-professional universities in the country, but the danger lies in continuing to feed into it while we\u2019re here.<\/p>\n