Brown vs. Penn

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Pennsylvania
1

<p>I feel pretty amazed to have gotten into two of my favorite schools. The problem is, now I can't decide which one I should go to...</p>

<p>Points:</p>

<p>-I plan on studying medicine, or failing that, probably something still in the sciences
-Penn is ranked no. 5, whereas Brown ranks no. 16. Doesn't matter to me too much, but still.
-Penn is closer to my family, which is a plus.
-I really loved the freedom of Brown, esp. the pass/fail option.
-I wanted an urban campus ideally, which Penn has.</p>

<p>If anyone has any advice, any points I should also consider, or any relevant information, I'd be really thankful!</p>

2

<p>I loved Brown too for its amazing freedom. I think of all the schools that I turned down, Brown was the hardest for me to turn down. Anyway, Penn, you’ll find, through it’s opportunities, has even more freedom. Plus the requirements at Penn can usually be fulfilled by taking courses within your major or minor. I wouldn’t even call the requirements because unlike schools that want you to take requirements that you cannot apply to your field of interest, but that they think you should know about, at Penn all the requirements can be applied to any field. I’ve actually really enjoyed them.</p>

<p>(Penn is #4, with Stanford and MIT).</p>

<p>Hope to see you soon!</p>

3

<p>Brown all the way!
(visit both, the cultures are very different at both places - brown is more selective, tends to have more creative/unique students, penn tends to be more pre-professional)</p>

4

<p>I’m going to have to disagree with SusieBra on the freedom. As far as access to a wide variety of academic areas is concerned, yes, there is quite a bit of freedom. No matter what school you are in (presumably CAS), you can take classes at the three other undergrad schools and even some from graduate schools. The distribution requirements are very poorly designed in my opinion, though. While there are no core classes all students are required to take, there are only a limited number of classes that fulfill each distributional requirement ((some requirements have more possibilities, others less–specifically science requirements). It’s terribly counterproductive–if the point is to have students broaden their academic horizons, why limit which courses counts Why can’t any English class be counted for the Arts & Letters sector? Why not any history class for the History sector? I’ll never know. That’s my biggest beef with the curriculum. Otherwise, you’ll still likely have plenty of opportunities to take free electives (again, essentially any class you want). Brown is still going to give you way more freedom since there are no requirements whatsoever. The question is, do you think you’ll utilize that freedom to really expand your boundaries, or end up within the confines of your interests because you don’t need to take a class in a subject you ordinarily don’t find interesting?</p>

5

<p>Penn and Brown were also the schools that I came down to in the college admissions process. I’m currently at Penn and can easily say that I’ve never looked back. As you are a pre-med, Penn offers numerous opportunities for research and involvement in a medical school much more renowned than Brown’s. Also, the urban setting provides greater access to volunteering in health clinics or even just opportunities to get involved within the vibrant West Philadelphia community. I’d also like to advise you not to buy into the whole pre-professional stereotypes about Penn. Sure, you’ll find your share of pre-professionals at Penn, but that does not mean that Penn lacks a strong academic culture. Nor does it mean that Penn students are not as creative/unique as those at Brown. Also, I definitely agree with SusieBra about the academic freedom here. So far, I’ve taken all of my sector requirements to fulfill a minor that I really wanted to pursue. Aside from that, many students here have access to taking classes across all of Penn’s undergraduate schools and even to takeing some graduate level courses. I’d say one of the best things about Penn is the great diversity in classes you can take here. One of the advantages of having such a large student body is that there is an enormous variety of classes to take in departments which are often quite smaller at other schools. Take, for example, Penn’s South Asian Studies department, which offers many more classes/opportunities than the corresponding departments at Brown or even Yale. Anyways, I encourage you to visit both and hope that you pick Penn!</p>

6

<p>Umm…for premed your prbly gonna want Brown. The school is just so darn grade inflated tht I bet I could send a monkey into one of its classes and it would pull of atleast a C. I’m not trying to bash Brown…its a great school but you’ll likely get mostly As (just pass/fail any classes you dont get As in), so its prbly a great school for medicine too.</p>

7

<p>Based on you points, Penn is favored on 3 and Brown on 1. I would say Penn, unless you reallllllly want to take a lot of Pass Fail Classes.</p>

8

<p>Penn’s medical school is outstanding and is regarded among Johns Hopkins and Harvard. It is also right next to the Quad, which could hardly be more convenient. Brown’s medical school is not that highly regarded, at least according to the doctors in my family. Of course Brown has many other strengths, but in medicine, Penn is at the top. I’m sure that pre-med at Penn is very challenging, but I’m sure it’s worth it to be well prepared since medical school and residency will probably not be any easier.</p>

9

<p>To be honest, I can never quite understand what the draw of Brown is for science-minded people. Their medical school is not especially research oriented, and so by definition your research options will be more limited. The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (+ Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia) is also one of the best regarded in the country, if not the world, and the clinical experiences available to you there even as an undergraduate cannot be surpassed. For example, even as an undergraduate I was able to watch at least five surgeries, and two of them were in the OR only with the scrub nurses and two surgeons–no residents, just the surgeons explaining to me what they were doing as I hovered six inches above an open abdominal cavity. And this is the norm at Penn–it’s all there for you if you’re willing to seize it. Another popular opportunity at Penn is to do Clinical Research in Emergency Medicine, a senior elective in the BBB department, in which you literally work in the ER to help admit patients, assess vital signs, and perform research for real, ongoing clinical studies. It’s an intensive semester, but from what I know (I didn’t take it) it’s well worth it, and makes for amazing med school application fodder.</p>

<p>If you want to be an English major, it would be hard to turn Brown down, but for anything pre-professional or scientific, it has to be Penn.</p>

10

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<p>med schools (along with employers, other grad schools, etc) are well-aware of Brown’s lax grade policy and take that into consideration. At my own employer, we had a “brown handicap” of knocking 0.2 points off a Brown applicant’s GPA.</p>

<p>One aspect of Penn’s academic freedom that I found particularly appealing vis-a-vis smaller schools like Brown is that Penn’s 12 schools open up tremendous opportunities to undergrads. As a pre-med you may or may not care, but Penn lets you take law school courses as an undergrad, which Brown of course cannot do, what with its not even having a law school…same goes for schools of business, education, communications, etc…</p>

11

<p>hey paperlilies!
I have the same issue. I have to choose between Brown PLME and UPenn.
A lot of people are saying that UPenn for Med School is better than Brown Med, but going to UPenn undergrad does not guarantee a spot in UPenn Med. You still have to apply and everything.</p>

<p>Waterlilies, if you don’t mind, can I bring up another discussion point?
How’s the greek life/party scene/drinking and drug use in the two schools? I am not really that kind of person, so if I don’t participate, will I be shunned? Which school would fit me better in these respects?</p>

12

<p>almostcrimes, no one said that going to Penn undergrad guarantees a spot in Penn Med. Everyone said that going to Penn undergrad offers access to volunteering and research at a more renowned medical school and its affiliated hospitals.</p>

13

<p>On another note, no matter what school you choose, you will see the other at homecoming (for penn) :)</p>

14

<p>there seem to be a few folks here with chips on their shoulders-why is it necessary to bash Brown rather than promote Penn on its own merits?
per capita, brown is better represented than penn at prestigious employers (McKinsey, Goldman Sachs), prestigious grad schools (Harvard Med and Law), and prestigious fellowships (Rhodes Scholars, Fullbrights, etc.) - none of these folks have any problems with Brown’s grading system.
Penn is a great school and has a lot of strengths, particularly at the graduate level, but contrary to popular belief the reputation of Penn med school has little to do with being a pre-med at Penn undergrad
(in full disclosure, I was a Brown undergrad, now training as an academic surgeon at MIT & Harvard Med School where I act as a pre-med advisor for both MIT and Harvard undergrads)</p>

15

<p>I think you may be painting the Penn-Brown dichotomy with a bit too broad a brush. It is true that, per capita and in absolute terms, Brown has had more Rhodes Scholars over the past, say, 10 years than did Penn (7 vs. 4, respectively). But, the Rhodes is not the only metric of success in terms of prestigious international fellowships. Take, for example, the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which 20 Penn undergrads have won over the past 10 years, versus 7 from Brown–even normalized for Penn’s 1.7x greater undergraduate enrollment, that’s not consistent with being “better represented at…prestigious fellowships” overall. Likewise, I’m currently a student at another top 10 medical school, and there are twice as many people from Penn as from Brown in my class, pretty much consistent with an even representation from both on a per capita basis (which, I will admit, is not entirely consistent with the logic in my above post :stuck_out_tongue: ). Moreover, I don’t know how you managed to gain access to the personnel files of the top financial firms, but I would find it very surprising a priori if Brown were better represented than Wharton even on a per capita basis. What are the actual numbers?</p>

16

<p>While you have two excellent choices, I would choose Penn.</p>

<p>Penn has not only the better reputation for medicine, but also an exceptional medical facility - right on the campus. More facilities are being built, so it is expanding. And the city of Philadelphia has an amazing network of medical professionals. Children’s hospital - Exceptional. Oncology floor in the UPenn hospital. Specialties in so many areas. And the school offers many options for electives and is an excellent, well-rounded university.</p>

<p>Good luck to you in your decision. You can’t go wrong either way, but Penn would get my vote.</p>

17

<p>dcircle is quoting a Wall Street Journal “study” (not remotely scientific) that looked at a handful of top grad schools and counted the number of undergrads from each college, then ranked colleges accordingly. It only surveyed 5 schools from each area (as opposed to the entire top-10), and often included schools that aren’t really elite graduates (for example, it used Yale and Columbia over UCSF, Stanford, WashU or Penn for medicine, when those were all ranked MUCH higher (and had many more Penn grads, for that matter)). A truly informative study would have surveyed all top-10 schools in a field, as opposed to a hodge-podge of the top-15.
This helps account for Penn’s ranking below Brown, Wellesley, etc. It would have done far better with a full counting.</p>

<p>However, if dcircle REALLY wants to play this game, here goes:</p>

<p>For law schools, Penn is the winner. It is the 4th most represented undergrad at Harvard law school, ahead of even Princeton, and it got 9/68 students accepted to Yale Law last year (more than Brown). It is heavily represented at all top-10 law schools.</p>

<p>For medical schools, the situation is similar, although this may be skewed by the fact that Penn Medical School is top-3 and accepts a high percentage of Penn students. Still, they have terrific placement at other top-10 schools: Hopkins, Harvard, WashU, UW, Stanford, etc.</p>

<p>The business front is different - relatively few Wharton undergrads ever decide to get MBAs (I think fewer than 30%), so it’s hard to gauge. But they are by and large EXTREMELY successful in being recruited to top firms. As are students in the college. Still, Brown may tie Penn, at least CAS, in this regard.</p>

<p>Final caveats: Brown and Penn are both excellent schools, and in terms of student quality they are largely identical. They have the same average LSAT (163, same as Columbia and Dartmouth, as well), the same medical school acceptance rate (hovering around 80% on any given year), and the same average SATs for entering freshman (both around 2180). Brown has recently become explosively popular, making its acceptance rate 4.5% lower than Penn’s, but these numbers testify only to the size of its applicant pool; and SELECTIVITY is more than a simple function of those who apply vs. those accepted. It includes things like class rank, SAT scores, and so forth. In those areas, I think Brown and Penn are completely parable.</p>

18

<p>So, to answer the OP’s question:</p>

<p>You need to choose based on fit. Study the cultures of each school, visit both, and decide on that alone. Academics and selectivity should not play into your decision.</p>