There is this unwritten rule in college that if you are not aiming for a top-tier internship or a high-status firm, you are somehow falling behind. I see it all the time with my peers who are clearly miserable but keep pushing for these “gold star” roles in finance or consulting. We have become excellent at jumping through hoops, but we have forgotten to ask if we actually like the view on the other side of the fence. This prestige trap makes us treat our entire four-year education like a high-stakes game of LinkedIn Tetris.
We pick majors based on the starting salary and the brand name of the companies that recruit from those departments. We join clubs not because we care about the mission but because the “Executive Board” title looks good on a resume header. This creates a culture of “excellent sheep” where everyone is highly competent but nobody knows why they are doing what they are doing. If we spend our entire twenties chasing a brand name just to impress people we don’t even like, we might wake up in our thirties realizing we built a life for someone else.
The danger of the prestige trap is that it is addictive. Once you get into a “good” school, the goalposts immediately move to getting a “good” job. Once you get the job, the goal becomes the “senior” title. There is never a moment where the system tells you that you have done enough. It is a treadmill that never stops. We are so afraid of looking “average” that we sacrifice our actual interests and mental health to maintain an image of success that is defined by someone else’s spreadsheet.
Maybe it is time to redefine what a “successful” college experience looks like. What if success was measured by how many interesting books you read that had nothing to do with your major? What if it was measured by the depth of your friendships or the number of times you tried a new hobby and failed at it? We are more than our professional output. We are people with limited time, and spending that time chasing a “prestige” that doesn’t fulfill us is the biggest trap of all.
X. Xie
