<p>Hi, I just wanted to ask about raising the course load limit. Does an adviser look at a particular semester’s GPA or does he look at it cumulatively? Is there a chance to appeal if the former is above 3.3 but the cumulative is just a bit short?</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure it’s kind of subjective, but if you do well in the most recent semester, your adviser (at least in Wharton–not sure how it works in other schools) should raise your credit limit.
The only reason you have a credit limit is because they don’t want to see you do poorly because you’re spread too thin over your classes…so if you do poorly one semester, unless you have some really good, outside reason, they won’t raise your credit limit because they don’t want you to do even worse (and with good reason, because an extra class does make things harder).
I mean, I did really terribly freshman year and then soph fall I got amazing grades, so I got my credit limit raised without a problem.</p>
<p>It’s also different for coordinated dual degree programs…like, I think they automatically give you a higher limit (like 6), but if you go under, say, a 3.0 for a semester (or cumulatively? I can’t remember what it was for my friend in M&T) they put it back to 5.</p>
<p>What advice do you have for students still in high school aiming to go to Wharton? What can I do to maximize my chance of getting in?</p>
<p>Also, I slacked off on my freshman and sophomore year, and my grades took some dives… Is that going to hurt me really bad?</p>
<p>thank you so much for starting this thread! it’s been a great help. </p>
<p>I’m an international student, and I’m currently trying to fill out my I-20 form, and I don’t know what to put down for these 2 questions:</p>
<p>Please find your Penn major or field of study in this list, then enter
its alphabetic code here (example: AAMW)</p>
<p>Please enter the numeric CIP code for your major here (example: 01.2345</p>
<p>In my acceptance letter, it just says that I got into Undergrad U Penn
Wharton School of Business 2015; it didn’t describe any particular
majors. </p>
<p>This is their reply:
If you have not selected a major yet you should apply for a general one or contact the admission department at Wharton.</p>
<hr>
<p>I don’t understand their reply. Do they mean that I’m supposed to apply for a major already my freshman year??? Don’t I just declare a major at the end of my sophomore year???</p>
<p>Please help. I really want to fill out the I-20 form and start the visa process asap.
Thanks a lot in advance!!!</p>
<p>Hello! I’m going to be a Freshman at Penn this fall and started thinking about what classes I want to take. Hoping for some thoughts on whether it’s balanced/how the classes are(uber-competitive, fun, terrible curve,etc)…(Pre-Med & Major: BBB)</p>
<p>-Math 103 or 104, I’m not sure which. I got a 4 on Calc AB but my school doesn’t offer BC so it’s starting to drift from my mind…though I want to review over summer.
-Chem101
-Bbb 109
-Writing Seminar?
~Maybe Bio124, what out-of-class work is done for labs at Penn? The college labs I’ve taken at a local school usually only had mini lab reports. I expect there to be more?</p>
<p>Side note: I want to test out of the Foreign Lang req, anyone here taken one? (Maybe Russian? =D)</p>
<p>Also I’ll probably apply to BFS…</p>
<p>Mucho thanks in advance :)</p>
<p>Is Penn a good choice to pre-med? Are there better options in the Northeast - if so, can you name possible options? Does Penn have a strong science program, in other words are Penn’s biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics program one of the best in the country?</p>
<p>@mail2jenna I’m not in Wharton and I’m a '15 so I don’t know how accurate my information will be but as far as I know, all Wharton graduates earn an Economics degree with a specific concentration that they choose like Finance, Marketing, etc.</p>
<p>Final comments to anyone still on the fence…</p>
<p>The dirty little secret of college admissions that as long as you are going to a relatively strong school (~top 25 or so), you will be quite fine. How much you succeed in college and beyond will be determined much more by motivated and hard-working you are, rather than whether you went to Penn or Duke or WashU. Likewise, if you are a happy person, you will be happy at any of the schools you are deciding between. So you can try to make it a rational decision, and you can try to pick the school that is strongest in your area of interest. But it is highly likely that you will end up switching majors at least once, so it feels silly picking the strongest school in biology if you are going to end up majoring in Spanish. My advice is to pick the school with the happiest students, or the nicest professors, or the best weather, or the prettiest campus. Or flip a coin.</p>
<p>But I will also say that I think Penn is one of the greatest places on earth. There are seemingly infinite opportunities here, and I truly have fallen in love with the city of Philadelphia. I can tell you where the best Thai food is, where to get the best cheesesteak, what my favorite part of the Constitution Center is, and what my favorite concert venue is. And that’s something you just won’t get in Princeton, New Jersey or Palo Alto, California.</p>
<p>On a slightly more relevant topic, I don’t really think you should worry about finding a “good” pre-med school. Admission to med school only takes ten courses: two English, two biology, two general chemistry, two organic chemistry, and two physics. You can take these courses at many community colleges. Other than that, med schools will want to see good grades, a high MCAT, that you were involved in extracurriculars, that you pursued something you were passionate about, and you showed some interest in medicine. This probably involves volunteering at a hospital of some kind and getting some interaction with patients, and Penn has CHOP (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia) and HUP (Hospital of the University of Pennyslvania), two of the greatest hospitals in the world. Undergrad universities love to brag about their placement rates of students into med schools, but this is usually much more a reflection of the quality of the students than the power of a particular undergrad university to get students into med school.</p>
<p>^^^Great post by sunkist there.</p>
<p>Earnestlywilde-
For math, if you sign up for 104, they give you a sort of test thing (ungraded) during your first recitation, and depending on how well you do (aka how much you remember from ab calc?) they either recommend you move down to 103 or stay in 104.
I went to a school with a great math program and really liked math before I got to Penn, and I found 104 to be very difficult (the exams, not the quizzes…really unfair how that works out), along with a lot of other students (you may have heard this). I also hadn’t taken math since junior year, though (I’d done part of BC) and math is the sort of thing I forget immediately if I’m not using it.
I do know people who were fine in 104, and if you’re planning on reviewing, well, I definitely recommend that. I also recommend looking into BC calc material as well, and if you’re the type of person who is really driven without a class, I would <em>really</em> recommend just learning 104 on your own and attempting to test out of it. But you may not be one of those people–I for sure am not.</p>
<p>For biol124, I vaguely remember my friends having a decent amount of work doing lab write-ups. From Penn Course Review for Spring 2010: “Students reported spending varying amounts of time for this class, but many students found the amount of work to be disproportionate with the designation of only 0.5 cu.”</p>
<p>Definitely take your writing seminar first semester, if you can get into a good one. You’ll be happy to get it over with, and when other people are finishing it in the spring, you will be free :)</p>
<p>Also, check penn course review…I guess it doesn’t matter as much for prereq courses like chem101, but it’s still important.</p>
<p>thank u lovellify =D</p>
<p>I already started a thread but then saw this so going to put it here
To current students at penn, I am applying as a transfer and I have a question. I work very hard, but I am the first person to admit I am not that smart…I worked very hard in highschool and I do get good grades, but it was simply because in highschool… if you work and study the material hard you sure to do well…because a third of the class simply didnt care and so doing well wasnt hard… but coming to standardized tests… i failed epically…2’s on all my ap’s…low 600s on sat 2’s… although A’s in all of the classes… it wasnt grade inflation i knew the material cold… I just am terrible with standardized tests… so my question is… if i am accepted to penn-hypothetically… i would study sociology or anthropology…how hard would it be to maintain a 3.7 gpa there… with working my butt off… is it if i more or less study hard il do well… or are the tests more standardized… GPA is very impt for me for law school… i just dont want to go there… screw up my gpa… and then screw myself over for no reason… thanks guys</p>
<p>I’ve personally found that studying and working hard is really important, but I don’t know how much sociology or anthropology rely on tests over papers…I imagine papers are a big part of the curriculum? But don’t take my word on that.
As for being bad at standardized testing…you realize the LSAT is probably more important (or equally important, I haven’t applied yet so I guess I don’t know for sure) than your GPA for getting into law school? I guess you only mentioned 600s on the SAT 2’s, though, so maybe you did well on the SAT I, which is probably more similar to the LSAT.</p>
<p>Assuming you do end up getting in, there is also Weingarten Learning Center, where you could probably go to for help on learning how to take standardized tests better.</p>
<p>How are the dorms at Penn? I heard there were rats, cockroaches, and stuff like that - is that true? Are there single dorms? Are most dorms comfortable?</p>
<p>Hi, I am going to be a freshman at Cornell University this upcoming year. I applied to UPenn Early Decision and got deferred, then rejected. I was wondering what I should/have to do during my freshman year at Cornell in order to transfer to Penn (either College of Arts and Science or Wharton)? I will currently be going to the Hotel Management School at Cornell. I know the necessary requirements, I need to fulfill like classes, so i’m asking about general grades, extracurriculars, etc? </p>
<p>-Also is it possible to transfer to Penn’s CAS, then to Wharton?</p>
<p>Can a student do multiple majors in wharton including finance, management, and marketing? If one does that, can he/she still do dual degree? How about JW scholars program, would it hinder pursuing multiple majors in wharton or dual degree? I’m asking whether these plans contradict each other? Thank you.</p>
<p>I have heard that you can do three concentrations, without too much extra effort, two is easily done within the curriculum itself. Doing two or three concentrations, and a dual degree is probably impossible in 4 years, but maybe possible. I don’t know anything about JWS</p>
<p>why’d you choose penn?
also, how many internships have you had/been offered? and overall what is the job prospect like? if your willing to share</p>
<p>Hey jimmy, I’m not sure what type of internships you’re interested in, so I’ll try to give a broad answer… The job market is definitely bouncing back from where it was a few years ago, and more firms are coming to campus to recruit. And I think that it will only continue to get better. </p>
<p>If you are interested in the classical Wharton internships, consulting, banking, etc. most of the top firms are primarily interested in juniors. During spring of junior year this is this intense period called “on-campus recruiting” in which students submit their resume and a cover letter applying for an internship at a firm. The firm then interviews candidates that it is interested in hiring, and ultimately offers internships to a few candidates of their choosing. At the end of what is usually a ~10 week internship, if the firm likes you, they will typically offer you a job. This is great because you go into your senior year with a job offer from a firm, and this makes your senior year grades largely irrelevant. For freshmen and sophomores, there are internships in these industries, but they are definitely harder to come by.</p>
<p>If your interests are broader than Wharton stuff, you have to hunt a little bit harder but there is a lot of great stuff out there. I did three different internships at science research labs around the country; the pay was good, I got great recommendation letters, I learned a ton, and I had a blast. My friends have done stuff ranging from working for senators’ offices in DC to running summer camps to taking classes to studying abroad in Mongolia. </p>
<p>So there are a ton of great internship opportunities available at Penn, and these internships will help you take the next step in your career (getting a job, getting admitted to med/law/grad school, etc.)</p>
<p>sunkist what you explained sounds great. However, I will be an econ major in the College, not in Wharton. Are those “classical” internships much harder to come by? How feasible is getting a good consulting or banking internship junior year and going into senior year with a job offeR?</p>
<p>Econ majors are generally viewed the same as Wharton students in the eyes of the recruiting firms. On Penn’s job recruiting website, firms can list what majors they are interested in hiring. The really picky finance firms will usually list: “Wharton finance, Wharton accounting, and College econ” as the three majors they are interested in hiring. Sometimes you do see firms that list only finance and accounting and don’t list econ, but I would encourage you to disregard that and apply anyway.</p>
<p>One final point: there’s a big difference between banking and consulting in terms of what majors they will accept. Consulting firms are very flexible, and will accept students from almost any discipline. They usually say “we want to hire really smart people, regardless of their major.” Although I would say that a quantitative discipline is preferred (math, computer science, econ, physics, etc.). So consulting firms usually put a big emphasis on GPA, and they even ask you to list your SAT scores on your resume (strange, eh?). Banking tends to be much more exclusive. Usually in the job description, under characteristics they want, there is something along the lines of “a sustained, passionate commitment to the financial industry.” So if you didn’t major in finance, accounting, or economics, it’s hard to argue that you are passionate about it.</p>
<p>I would argue that the market is bouncing back quite nicely. Get a solid GPA, maybe 3.7 or above, and you should have no problem getting a job with a great firm.</p>