the goal isn’t data, exactly, though i’ll collect it. it’s more that i have questions about people, about the way we move through the world on autopilot, about the gap between what we think we’re doing and what we’re actually doing. and i think the only honest way to answer those questions is to build little situations, watch what happens, observe carefully, and write it down.

cheers to february.

the setup:

i’ve been thinking about ambition a lot lately, specifically the way it operates at places like penn, where i go to school. not ambition as in drive or hunger or the desire to build something real. i mean the reflex version, the one that fires before you’ve thought about it.

we all got “here” because we were good at wanting things, or at least performing the wanting convincingly enough that someone in admissions believed it. and somewhere in the process of getting here, the application became its own kind of muscle memory. see something selective, apply. see the words limited cohort, reach for your phone. the behavior is so rehearsed from semesters of club rush and internship season that it basically runs without you.

i wanted to know: how far does that run? if you gave people absolutely nothing except the shape of an opportunity, no description, no organization, no explanation of what they were signing up for, just the skeleton of prestige, would they still apply?

on february 6th, kelly (shoutout kelly, who i had to initially convince via the form of a brodate1) and i spent an afternoon walking around campus with a stack of printed pages and a roll of tape. we went across locust, from hill to huntsman, which is roughly the densest strip of foot traffic at penn and we put up 27 posters.

they were plain white paper with no logo, no organization name, nothing that would tell you who made it. just:

SELECTIVE OPPORTUNITIES PROGRAM APPLICATION

a QR code. winter 2026. limited cohort. rolling admissions. kelly kept asking me if i thought anyone would actually scan it, half laughing, and i said i genuinely didn’t know, which was true.

the QR code linked to a google form. nine questions: the standard fields, name, email, school and major, class year, how you heard about it. and then the three that mattered:

1. why are you interested in applying?

2. what makes you a good fit?

3. upload your resume.

and that was it. a blinking cursor and a text box and nothing else, not because there was nothing else to give them, but because the program didn’t exist.

a fraction of the posters came down within the first 24 hours. i don’t know who took them. probably facilities, or maybe someone who clocked it, or maybe another organization that didn’t want competition on that particular wall. the removals definitely affected my sample.

i was in the middle of something else entirely when my phone buzzed with the first form response. i remember staring at it for a second, the name, the school, the major, all filled in neatly, a resume attached, two paragraphs in the text boxes. and i thought: okay. so yes.

by the end of three weeks, 11 people had submitted complete applications. they had written personal statements. uploaded resumes. answered the question ‘what makes you a good fit’ for a program they knew nothing about.

the results:

8 freshmen. 3 sophomores. zero juniors, zero seniors.

i keep coming back to that breakdown. upperclassmen have built something that freshmen haven’t yet, a kind of scar tissue from enough cycles of hope and “we regret to inform yous” that fires before the first click and asks is this actually worth my time. freshmen don’t have that yet. the reflex is still clean, still untouched by the specific embarrassment of having wanted things that turned out to be nothing.

there’s also a small chance the posters were simply near a lot of freshman and sophomore housing, and the distribution was pure coincidence. the sample is too small to rule that out.

the majors spread across wharton, engineering, college, and nursing. the pull of the word selective is, apparently, universal.

reading the applications themselves was a strange experience. i wasn’t reading about a program; they didn’t know what the program was. i was reading people’s first instinct about how to perform being worth selecting, and the patterns were consistent in a way that was almost eerie.

almost every response cycled through the same three notes: i am driven. i am a leader. i want to grow.

“I’m passionate about leveraging my skills to contribute to an impactful community. I’ve always been drawn to selective programs that challenge me to operate at a higher level.”

this applicant had no idea what the program did. but they already knew, with complete confidence, how to want it correctly.

“As someone who takes initiative and thrives in collaborative environments, I believe I bring both the energy and the execution mindset this program is looking for.”

execution mindset. for a program with no described deliverables. the phrase arrived fully formed, the way these phrases do, as if it had been sitting in a folder somewhere ready to be deployed whenever something called itself selective.

“I believe that this opportunity immediately aligned with my goals. I’m a freshman still figuring things out, but I work hard and I’m not afraid to put myself out there.”

this one landed differently. there’s a honesty in still figuring things out that the other applications had ironed out, and yet the logic underneath is the same: i heard about it, it aligned, i applied. the reasoning is circular. the application is the goal.

every single one of them albeit two2 submitted a standard, well formatted resume for a program called selective opportunities, which does not exist.

the conclusion:

i’ve been sitting with this and i think the thing that surprises me isn’t that people applied. it’s how they applied. with complete fluency. with the full vocabulary of ambition deployed correctly, aimed at nothing.

there’s something in behavioral psychology called auto-pilot behavior, which describes actions so deeply rehearsed that they bypass the part of the brain that evaluates them. the stimulus fires, the response follows, and the question that would slow everything down (“wait, what is this actually?”) never gets asked because nothing in the environment trained you to ask it. everything trained you to apply.

not one of the 11 people emailed to ask what the program was. not one of them wrote ‘i couldn’t find more information about this’ anywhere in their application. they filled in the blanks as if the blanks were self-explanatory. and in the system they’d been handed, they were.

i’ve done versions of this myself. i think about all the times i’ve applied to things because they sounded important before i knew what they were. i think about what it says that the question ‘what are you applying for’ is harder to answer than ‘why are you a good fit.’

i also think about what it means to exist inside the environment i’m studying. penn is a place that runs on momentum, and there’s something genuinely good about that, the way ambition here is contagious, the way being around people who never stop can pull you forward even when you’re not sure where you’re going. i’ve been this person. i am this person. but sometimes, when you actually pause for a second, you feel how much it costs. and yes, there’s real merit in choosing what’s worth your time, except the advice you get from everyone around you is that you have to try a thousand things to land one. the choice starts to feel less like discernment and more like a luxury you can’t afford. and then you stop asking whether you want something and just reach, because reaching is what’s rewarded, and at some point the reaching becomes who you are.

future considerations:

this was stage one. what i want to build toward is a multi-round process: the form, then a second round with harder questions, then a video response, then a zoom interview, fully staged, someone sitting on the other end asking about your vision for the program you still don’t know anything about.

i want to find the exact moment where it stops. where the autopilot finally disengages and the person on the other end thinks, “actually, wait a second”. most importantly, i want to reach a wider range of people, and definitely larger number.

based on the data, i’ll target freshmen specifically next time. there’s something about first year, the not-yet-knowing, the accumulation of credentials before you understand what you’re accumulating them for, that i want to understand better. i think they’re the most honest version of all of us.

i want to say clearly: this isn’t a gotcha. the people who applied aren’t naive. they’re shaped, the same way i’m shaped, by systems that spent years rewarding exactly this behavior. the reach is rational within the logic they were given. i’m not interested in pointing at them.

what i’m interested in is the logic itself. the architecture that produces people who are extraordinarily good at performing readiness for opportunities they haven’t examined. the way prestige functions as its own kind of proof that something is worth wanting.

all the posters are down and 11 applications sit in a spreadsheet, which is a strange artifact of something i don’t fully have words for yet.

but i keep thinking about the question none of them were asked: what are you actually applying for.

i wonder what they would have said.

sahiti

upenn, february 2026

note: applicant quotes are composites drawn from real response patterns, not exact words. individual identities are fully anonymized. this experiment was conducted independently as a social observation project.

the goal isn’t data, exactly, though i’ll collect it. it’s more that i have questions about people, about the gap between what we think we’re doing and what we’re actually doing. and i think the only honest way to answer those questions is to build little situations, watch what happens, and write it down.

january’s question: can you weaponize your own psychology against yourself to wake up in the morning?

i read nudge by thaler and sunstein over break. it’s a book about choice architecture — the way the structure of a decision shapes what we choose, usually more than our actual preferences do.

the part that stayed with me was a story about a graduate student who couldn’t finish his dissertation. he knew he needed to. the financial stakes of not finishing were enormous: another year of tuition, lost income, all of it. and still, every day, he procrastinated.

so he did something drastic. he wrote several $100 checks to his dissertation advisor and handed them over. the deal: if he missed his section deadlines, the advisor would cash them. and not just cash them. use the money to throw a massive party and invite everyone in the department, except him (oh, the horror).

it worked perfectly.

not because $100 outweighed the cost of an extra year of school (it didn’t, not even close). but because the $100 was immediate. the party was vivid. the abstract future consequence of failing your dissertation lives somewhere theoretical in your brain. the very specific image of your colleagues drinking wine you paid for, while you sit at home, does not.

that’s what thaler and sunstein call a commitment device. your rational self (the planner) sets up a trap for your impulsive self (the doer) before the doer gets a chance to make excuses.

i wanted to test if it could work for something simpler and more universal. i wanted to test it on waking up.

the setup:

here’s the thing about waking up that i think is genuinely interesting, and not just a productivity complaint.

every night, you make a promise to yourself1: “i’m waking up at 8. i have things to do. this time i mean it. and you believe yourself.” the planner in you is completely sincere. they have a whole vision of the morning: a Pret chai run, emails, maybe a gym run before class. they set three alarms just to be safe.

and then morning comes, and the doer shows up. and the doer is a different person entirely. they have no memory of what the planner wanted. they live only in the present tense, and the present tense says the bed is warm and the alarm is offensive, and fifteen more minutes won’t actually hurt anything.

thaler and sunstein call this the planner-doer problem. it’s not that you’re lazy or undisciplined. it’s that you’re two different agents sharing one body, with different goals and different time horizons, and the doer has home field advantage every morning because they’re the one who’s awake.

the insight is that willpower alone can’t fix this. you can’t out-decide your way out of a structural problem. what you need is to change the structure.

so in january, i ran an experiment and called it wake or pay. full instructions.

the premise: every night before bed, you set your target wake-up time and a margin, a fifteen-minute buffer for real life. then you send money to your accountability partner via venmo or zelle. real money and enough that it actually hurts, not a token amount you can rationalize away. something that, when you’re half-asleep and weighing your options tips the scales.

the next morning, you have two options:

1. wake up by your time (+margin): you get the money back immediately.

2. don’t wake up: your partner keeps your money. no questions asked and no getting it back.

the pairing system mattered too. everyone was arranged in a chain. person a sends to person b, person b sends to person c, person c sends back to person a. that way everyone has skin in the game in both directions. you’re not just accountable, you’re also holding someone else accountable. in other words, you’re a link not a passenger.

every night was a fresh commitment. new wake-up time, new amount, optional opt-out if you genuinely didn’t care about that particular morning. the idea was flexibility without escape hatches. you could opt out, but you had to do it consciously, the night before, not when the alarm was going off and your judgment was compromised.

one thing was clear from the start: this only works if you actually want it to. if someone else is pressuring you into it, or if you don’t genuinely care, the device fails. you’ll just lose money and feel resentful. the planner has to actually be invested.

what happened was mostly what i expected, and then some things i didn’t.

it worked. the chain held. people woke up. the threat of losing real money does something to your brain that no amount of good intentions the night before can replicate. the consequence was immediate, concrete, personal. exactly what the dissertation story predicted.

but the calibration was more personal than i expected. ten dollars wasn’t enough for everyone. some people needed fifteen before the alarm felt like an actual threat rather than a suggestion. the number isn’t objective. it has to hit your specific pain threshold. too low and your brain finds a way to rationalize it. at the right number, the rationalization fails. your doer does the math and gives up.

i woke up before my alarm the first morning. not because i was rested.

out of fear.

i’m still not entirely sure how i feel about that.

the results:

i personally opted2 in for 13 nights across january. here’s what actually happened:

9 out of 13 nights, i woke up on time.

the first eight were nearly perfect. the chain was intact, the stakes were real, the device was working exactly as designed.

then something shifted. the last five nights tell a different story, and the pattern in the data isn’t random.

i noticed two main things happened that broke the experiment in genuinely interesting ways.

the first: at some point, it was just me and my roommate in the chain that night. two people, with the same amount going back and forth.

and i looked over one morning and saw her still asleep3.

and i stayed in bed.

not because i forgot about the experiment but because when i did the math (surprisingly rational while still half asleep) we were a closed loop. whatever they sent me, i sent back. whatever i paid out, returned. net zero. the asymmetry was gone. without asymmetry, there are no real stakes. the accountability had structurally evaporated, not because we stopped caring, but because the architecture we were depending on had quietly collapsed.

the commitment device only works when the chain is real. when losing actually means losing. the moment it becomes theoretical, the doer runs the numbers and wins.

the second: house money.

at some point i’d made a net fifteen dollars from other people not waking up. which felt like a small victory. but once i had that buffer, the calculus shifted. losing ten didn’t feel like losing ten anymore. i had cushion. the fifteen i’d earned from other people’s snooze buttons made my own potential loss feel abstract again.

it’s a poker concept. house money is chips you’ve won at the table, and people consistently treat them differently than the chips they came in with. spend them faster. risk them easier. the money doesn’t feel as real because it was never really theirs to begin with.

my brain did the same thing with my sleep schedule. i had a fifteen dollar buffer, which meant losing ten felt like losing five of money that was barely mine anyway. and suddenly the bed was warm again and the math had changed.

i had given myself an escape hatch without realizing it.

the conclusion:

the commitment device works when it’s sharp. when the stakes are concrete and the chain is solid and there’s no psychological exit left open.

the moment you can tell yourself a story about why the loss doesn’t really count, because it’s house money, because the loop is closed, because it’s only ten dollars, you’ve already lost. the doer is a narrative animal. give them a story and they’ll run with it all the way back to sleep.

what i keep coming back to is how structural this all is. the experiment didn’t succeed or fail based on anyone’s willpower or character. it succeeded when the architecture was intact and failed when it wasn’t. we didn’t become different people. the situation changed and our behavior followed.

and i think that’s the part that’s hardest to sit with. we like to believe that if we just wanted something badly enough, we’d do it. that discipline is a character trait you either have or are building. but january made me think it’s less about wanting and more about engineering. the planner can want all they like. if they haven’t set up the right conditions the night before, the doer will undo the decisions by 8am.

i also think about how much of daily life runs on exactly this kind of unchecked autopilot. not just waking up. the things we say we care about, the habits we claim to be building, the person we’re pretty sure we’re becoming. how much of that holds up when the architecture isn’t there? when no one’s watching, when the stakes feel abstract, when there’s a story available that makes giving in feel reasonable?

the answer, i think, is less than we’d like.

the planner in me wants to end this with something clean. a lesson, a takeaway, a framework for next time. she’s already drafting it.

but the doer is waking up soon, and she doesn’t read essays.

sahiti

upenn, january 2026