Pre-professional clubs on campus are constantly advertised as stepping stones for careers in finance, consulting, law and medicine. These organizations promise students networking opportunities, career advancement and a competitive edge in the job market. Each semester, a familiar scene unfolds: students run around in business professional attire to back-to-back coffee chats and multiple rounds of recruitment interviews in the slightest hope of acceptance into one of these clubs. But beneath the polished LinkedIn profiles and business casual facade is a toxic culture that perpetuates cutthroat competition, elitism and exclusion. Rather than fostering genuine learning and mentorship, these clubs often prioritize prestige and resume padding, reinforcing success as determined by connections and status rather than intellectual curiosity or ethical leadership.
At a competitive institution like Cornell, these clubs target and appeal to students who had an early start to industry involvement in high school, had multiple internships or have ambitions for graduate degrees. But the recruitment process itself is often designed to be exclusionary. It leaves little room for those without prior exposure or connections. The result is a system that perpetuates inequality and stifles the diversity of thought, experience and background that should be celebrated in an academic environment.
One of the most problematic aspects of these pre-professional clubs is the rigid application process. Membership is determined by a highly competitive selection process, including resume assessment, technical skill evaluation, interviews and personal connections. While merit-based evaluation is expected in competitive fields, these clubs often introduce factors that reward those already positioned with privilege — whether through financial resources, or access to opportunities outside the university. Students who lack these advantages are often left feeling like unworthy outsiders when, in reality, the students recruiting for these clubs have only slightly more professional experience. For example, the typical pre-professional club in finance or consulting requires students to have completed internships or similar industry experience before applying for membership. For students from underrepresented or low-income backgrounds, this perpetuates a vicious cycle: Without access to internships or networking opportunities, they are disqualified from joining the very organizations that could provide them with the resources they need to enter the field.
Even more troubling is how these clubs shape campus culture’s focus on status rather than genuine intellectual growth. For many students, joining a pre-professional club is less about developing a deep understanding of the field and more about adding a prestigious name to their resume. The focus on securing a job or internship becomes the primary goal, often overshadowing the pursuit of knowledge and ethical development. It’s easy to be surrounded by this mindset and forget the core values of a Cornell experience. Academic excellence is not our sole purpose here; being a Cornellian is also about developing integrity, curiosity and global engagement. What should be spaces for learning, exploration of academic interests and mentorship often become bubbles of ambition, anxiety and burnout. The toxic culture these clubs perpetuate is not just harmful to individual students but also contributes to a broader atmosphere of exclusivity on campus, something that has been discussed across campus in general. Going through this recruitment process as a new student can be particularly stressful and diminishing, especially after already fighting tooth and nail to get into this university and almost definitely feeling a sense of imposter syndrome. These clubs that are supposed to be the elite of the elite do very little to create a welcoming sense of community and give students the wrongful impression that success is completely dependent on competition and connections. The atmosphere within these clubs reinforces the idea that success is measured by how well one can market oneself rather than how deeply one understands a subject or contributes to a field. As a result, the pressure to constantly perform, impress and outdo peers becomes overwhelming, particularly for students who may already be balancing heavy academic loads and extracurricular commitments. These feelings and beliefs have been perpetuated for so long that it is easy as students to take them as the only option and continue to maintain this behavior, but I do believe that community engagement and a shift in mindset across campus, promoted and taught by professors, advisors and leadership, can result in an environment where student run clubs exist to support each other rather than pin us against each other.
To build a more inclusive and intellectually vibrant environment, Cornell needs to reframe what it means to succeed. Success should not solely be defined by securing a high-paying job or a prestigious internship, but also by the depth of one’s intellectual engagement and their societal contributions. It is not all or nothing; pre-professional clubs shouldn’t necessarily be abolished, but rather be reformed to be seen as spaces for personal growth, collaboration and ethical leadership, not as exclusive networks for career advancement. Jan Burzlaff writes about how slowing down and paying attention to our emotions and the ones of those around us is essential to understand each other in the classroom, and I’d like to continue this point to say that humility in the classroom is the starting point to extending humility to each other in the extracurricular and pre-professional world. When we are taught to be kind and understanding in one aspect of campus culture, it only takes a few students to spread these attitudes around other aspects of career development. Until then, the toxic culture they promote will continue to damage students' well-being and reinforce an unhealthy campus atmosphere driven by prestige rather than substance.
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Zara Cheek is a first year student in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Her fortnightly column, Big Red, White and You, focuses on the intersection of campus issues, diversity, and American politics. She can be reached at zcheek@cornellsun.com.
