Just Say Yes

As a senior, I’m now the presenter who takes the “Life After Penn” slide in our College Cognoscenti Presentation. Wild. So what does my life look like after Penn? Something along the lines of living in New York and doing the reverse commute to Greenwich, Connecticut to work at an investment management firm. If you told me that 4 years ago, I would have laughed. Stocks, what? 

My time at Penn has been full of opportunities I had absolutely zero idea about before coming here. I came in thinking I would study Linguistics to be a speech pathologist or English to be a news reporter. Freshman fall, I took BIBB109, an introductory lecture for Penn’s interdisciplinary neuroscience major and found the human brain to be fascinating; naturally, I then decided that I would be pre-med. To say that path was short lived would be an understatement,  and so I continued to explore different fields. I joined a consulting group on campus and got to work with some of the largest corporations and present to their senior members. I wrote for our daily newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian. I attended a student-run female empowerment conference that I am now a co-chair for. I spent my freshman year summer marketing ergonomic chairs and custom cigars. Then, my sophomore summer, I worked at an investment management firm. The list continues. 

My main point here is that there are so many opportunities at Penn, as long as you are open minded and willing to take them. I’ve never been exposed to so many different things in such a short amount of time, and I’m in disbelief that that my 4 years here is coming to an end. A lot of my friends and I are approaching the rest of senior year with a similar mindset to freshman year: Just say yes. It’s easy to get lost in the day to day of Penn, and forget what a special place it is until you don’t have much time left. So take advantage of being here, and remember to enjoy it. 

- Lucia K.