<p>I just have this impression (and its probably wrong) of Penn being very pre-professional and not very traditional in the Ivy sense. It just seems a bit different than HYP or Brown, Dartmouth. I see it slightly similar to Columbia, yet even Columbia has more of that traditional look to it. </p>
<p>I really don't know since I dont attend but maybe someone can shed some light onto this.</p>
<p>You could be more specific with what you mean by that “traditional” feel, but I think Penn definitely has it. Visit the campus. It’s not pre-professional in the sense that there isn’t stimulating intellectual debate going on.</p>
<p>Penn doesn’t have a single dominant architecture style like Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth. It has beautiful Frank Furness buildings, a little collegiate Gothic, an early Louis Kahn, some awful stuff from the 60s and 70s, and some pretty nice stuff from the past two decades. They’re all jumbled up next to one another. And it’s not an enclosed, set-apart campus like Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell. It’s pretty integrated with the city; there are lovely, quiet nooks and crannies, but there are also big streets with lots of traffic, and nice stores, and restaurants fancy and cheap. Great public transportation – bus lines, trolley lines, a subway, a huge Amtrak station a couple of blocks away. Yale is a little like that, and Harvard, too, but Philadelphia is a lot bigger than New Haven or Cambridge, and there aren’t as many little side streets like you have around Harvard, and Yale and Harvard’s residential colleges/houses, and the Old Campus/'Yard, create much bigger sheltered spaces away from the street than Penn has anywhere. But Penn has some of those, and it has several really nice walks that are closed to cars. Lots of people live off campus (but right next to the campus), so student traffic isn’t concentrated right in the middle – people are going back and forth all over the campus all the time. (It also has Drexel to the north, and two giant hospitals to the south, so it feels a bit like the campus is endless.)</p>
<p>It really isn’t anything like Columbia at all, except that some of the buildings were built around the same time. Columbia is very geographically compact, and all above street level, and there are only a limited number of places where people can enter the campus area. None of that is true about Penn. At the same time, it’s nowhere near as purely urban as, say, Boston University.</p>
<p>There’s nothing to be disappointed at in the Penn campus, though. It has beautiful things and ugly things, just like all of them. Like Yale and Brown, it’s pretty close to the city’s main business area (except as noted the city in question is 10x the size of New Haven and 4x the size of Providence). It’s maybe a little greener than Yale, Harvard, Columbia, but a little less than Brown, and a lot less than Cornell, Princeton, Dartmouth (which are not in cities at all).</p>
<p>^^ That is really an excellent description of Penn. I’ll use that again!</p>