Author: The Pennsylvania Post

Are you interested in public service? Politics? All things life in Washington, DC? Penn in Washington could be just the program for you. Here’s what you should know before applying.

As those who attended Penn last year would know, students found themselves in the midst of an incredibly competitive and polarizing election cycle. On Locust, then-freshmen such as myself were greeted by volunteers and activists seeking to register us to vote or campaigning on behalf of individual causes. While activists and campaigners from Planned Parenthood, the Harris Campaign, and Dave McCormick’s campaign held events here, I encountered little conversation about the war in Ukraine.

At a university where efficiency is a moral virtue, intimacy, too, has become streamlined. PMP mirrors the logic of contemporary dating apps: forms, filters, swipes, metrics. The slow unfolding of affection has been replaced by the calibrated precision of compatibility scores. In a world built on optimization, even love is expected to perform.

In the age of social media politics, Zohran Mamdani has emerged as Gen Z’s ideal candidate. His platform reads more like a child’s wish list than a serious plan to lead the nation’s largest city. However, that’s exactly what makes him appealing to a generation raised on instant gratification and online idealism.