Don’t let pre-professional culture co-opt your college experience

Students heading into college in 2024 seem to have a greater sense of the post-graduate landscape than any generation before us. 

We can scour LinkedIn profiles to discern why that random acquaintance was accepted to Yale Law School. We can go to career fairs and hear what Goldman Sachs and McKinsey are looking to see on a résumé. We can meet with professors and alumni and hear them tell us exactly what we ought to be doing with our fleeting undergraduate years.

With this increased sense of perspective comes a feeling of obligation. Students rush to declare “practical” majors in business and computer sciences, swarm to pre-professional organizations that will bolster our future applications, and play fast-and-loose with the term “connection” for the sake of enhancing our LinkedIn pages.

UW-Madison saw a 55% increase in computer science students from 2018 to 2022. I’ll hazard a guess that not all of those undergraduates have a genuine passion for large language models.

My own academic extracurricular received over 120 applications this fall. I’m confident they don’t all feel an overwhelming urge to roleplay as attorneys and witnesses in their free time (although really, what’s not to love?). They just think competing in undergraduate mock trial is the only viable path to law school.

Best case scenario, you are able to find a balance between your obligations and the collegiate activities you actually want to spend time on. Worst case scenario, your obligations start to eat away at you.

The latter scenario is much more common. Approximately 43% of undergraduate students nationwide screened positive for symptoms of anxiety, depression or both, according to the 2022 Healthy Minds Survey. While several factors contribute to our nation’s mental health crisis, academic and pre-professional pressures consistently take top billing.

It’d be one thing if the pre-professional culture at universities truly proved to be a formulaic, surefire path to career stability after graduation. But as someone now in their fourth year at UW-Madison, I can confirm that the standards and advice we are given by our universities can change with the wind.

Take, for example, our own university’s reaction to the introduction of generative AI. I have attended two panels on AI in academia during my time at UW-Madison — one in my sophomore year, and one this fall. In the former, I was told fairly unequivocally to pursue a STEM or business degree to ensure I would have job prospects through the technological revolution.

Less than three years later, computer science students are far from guaranteed a prestigious tech job upon their graduation. Jobs in the financial sector are also becoming less viable. Despite students’ efforts, 58% of managers, directors and executives still call the current cohort of graduates unprepared for the workforce.

Cut to last week, at the second AI panel. Suddenly, I’m being told to pursue a degree in philosophy so that I can contribute to the budding field of tech ethics. Even in my short time as an undergraduate, I’ve witnessed a complete career advice 180.

Of course, it's valuable to hear expert takes on how to navigate through a tricky professional landscape. But you just can’t game a system that’s constantly changing, and that’s what pre-professional culture purports itself to be capable of doing.

While we all spend our time chasing the one degree, one internship and one recommendation that we’re convinced will lead us to the next, we miss out on what the college experience is really designed to offer: a transient window of time to find out what we enjoy and excel at.

Pre-professional campus culture or not, no career is a sure thing. You might as well try to pursue something you actually like.

---