Life Beyond LinkedIn
I used to have an unhealthy obsession with LinkedIn – not my own profile, but others’. I scrolled through the multiple employment and extracurricular highlights that friends, acquaintances, and even people whose names I came across on random Penn-related websites offered to the Internet. The people I passed on Locust knew to strategically arrange their accomplishments, so readily visible that they became convenient benchmarks I could use to measure my own worth. Their skills always looked more marketable than mine, their headshots more professional, their internships more likely to lead to future, stable jobs. These thumb-nail snapshots of my classmates seemed way more capable of navigating adulthood. How could I identify myself and my value, in relation to the expectations they unknowingly set?