<p>Well i am an international, Pakistani in fact! </p>
<p>Here is my issue i have to decide between two great colleges:
UPenn
Duke</p>
<p>I am an engineering major, the sort who doesnt really want to go into engineering after college. I probably want to get involved in Investment Banking and finances, however i chose engineering for its rigor and discipline. I dont mind the campuses and other things. Prestige matters though since asians are just all brand conscious. I got into the engineering departments at both. If i go to one of them i will probably do undeclared engineering and then switch to either Biomed or Systems? </p>
<p>Which one is better, which one has the prestige, and which one will help me out in scoring a good career! Thank You Very Much</p>
<p>If you are looking for a career back in Pakistan, you should find out which of those two schools is better known there... From the "American" point of view, you probably can't go wrong with either. Penn is famous for its business school, but I am not sure how hard or easy it would be to transfer between the schools there.</p>
<p>I think in the States they have about equal prestige. I don't know much about engineering at either school. They are both great universities in general, and excellent choices.</p>
<p>Penn is in the middle of a pretty big city, and only about an hour's train ride from New York City. It tends to attract students who value that. Philadelphia is nothing like New York, but it is not a bad cultural center: lots of art, all kinds of music, theater. Penn also has the Wharton School, which may be good news and bad news as far as you are concerned: good news, because it has a greater concentration of business-oriented undergraduates than any other school of equal prestige, bad news because half of them will be competing with you for investment banking jobs. Also, I'm not sure it's easy to take Wharton classes if you are in the Engineering School (and vice versa). But you would no doubt benefit from having a lot of like-minded students around you.</p>
<p>Duke is in the South. It may be the least Southern of the big universities in the South -- it certainly attracts much more of a national student body, especially people from New York and Pennsylvania, who are exactly the same people who predominate at Penn. But it still has a Southern character that Penn does not. The Raleigh-Durham area in North Carolina is very vibrant, but it's nowhere near the urban center that Philadelphia is, and it's a much longer drive if you want to go the the Met some time. Durham is not all that pleasant. But kids love Duke. It has a lot of spirit -- and a perennially great basketball team, of course -- and offers something closer to a "typical" college atmosphere than Penn. Both places are known for parties, and have lots of fraternities and sororities, although they are comparatively more important at Duke.</p>
<p>Duke doesn't have a world-famous undergraduate business school, but it has plenty of undergraduates planning careers in business. The daughter of a friend graduated a few years ago and is now working for Citicorp in New York, waiting to go to business school. The one kid I know who goes there right now is an economics major who wants to do something similar.</p>
<p>If you like basketball, there's no better place than that area of North Carolina, and no better rivalry than Duke-UNC. Basketball is pretty big at Penn, too -- and Philadelphia is a great basketball town -- but nothing like Duke, where camping out in tents to buy basketball tickets is a popular activity.</p>