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While the OP was focused on Penn (I'm a Penn grad '04, fwiw), I'm sure this is pretty common at a lot of other selective colleges. I wrestled with a lot of the same exact feelings the OP did, although it never quite got so bad for me. Ultimately I just remember struggling so much with... "identity," if that's the right word for it. Penn basically ended up disproving everything I thought I knew about myself when I was 18. I thought I was a "high achieving" individual, then I was suddenly very average. I thought I was someone that made friends easily, then I found myself on a campus with 11,000 undergrads yet basically felt like I had no friends. I thought my ethnicity was irrelevant because I we now lived in a post-racial America (hah!), but it seemed like so many organizations there defined themselves by socioeconomic or racial lines. I thought I was good at programming, yet I felt so completely lost in my comp sci classes. It was pretty harrowing feeling like everything I thought I knew about myself was false, and I couldn't figure out what was true, and I was still expected to achieve at a very high level while I was figuring it out. The OP's anecdote about going to Wawa really hit home, because I remember almost literally the same thing happening to me, and that's all it would take to feel like nothing made sense anymore. Am I really the kind of person who doesn't have a single fucking friend out of 11,000 undergrads that would take a 10 minute break to grab a sandwich? The OP seemed to blame Penn as an institution, and I do think these selective universities could do more to recognize that some of their students will basically feel like they've been abruptly thrown into a crucible, and it's not always painless to adjust. The OP advocates things like publishing suicide rates, but I think that's just another way of advocating, "please tell everyone they don't need to pretend everything is great, because I've felt fucking miserable sometimes and I don't think I'm the only one." There was a guy in my freshman dorm that basically did "crack" and abruptly withdrew for the semester, and I just remember everyone just kind of smirking about it. "Yeah, Sean went nuts or something. Was spazzing out over a midterm and then next thing I know, all his stuff's packed and he's gone. Guess he couldn't hack it." I didn't smirk. I just remember feeling sad and wishing Sean had said something to me. Feeling overwhelmed apparently meant "going nuts." Was that fair? That didn't seem fair. I don't think Sean would have thought it was fair either. Maybe we could have gotten a sandwich at Wawa and talked about that. |