<p>What is it like? </p>
<p>Is it very competitive? Do people help one another? </p>
<p>Is it a you-are-on-your-own kind of culture? Or very spoon fed?</p>
<p>Is there a large focus on being more practical/hands on or more theoretical(a la UofChicago)?</p>
<p>How liberal is the education?</p>
<p>It’s great.</p>
<p>Competitiveness varies from school to school. Wharton courses are graded on a curve an so more competitive (at the same time, they involve a lot of group work which makes you collaborative, even while competing), but SAS courses have lots of help and love to go around</p>
<p>You are on your own, but that isn’t a problem for most Penn students, for there is still support available and I also feel the sort of people who go to Penn are aggressive and energetic enough to seek out what they need.</p>
<p>Practicality was a founding mantra of Ben Franklin, and it is evident to this day. However this is clearly not an absolutist sort of thing or we wouldn’t bother having, say, philosophy or gender studies departments ;)</p>
<p>It’s center-left, like any ivy. with notable exceptions like Dr. Kors, Dr. McDougall, Dr. Waldron…</p>
<p>so, it’s more of a pre professional career training sort of school?</p>
<p>how are the professors and academic advisors?</p>
<p>Penn is more preprofessional than the other Ivies because a substantial number of the undergrads are in specific preprofessional majors. You have a good number in business, nursing, or engineering. Compare that to other Ivies like Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, and Brown where there is no nursing and business major and very few people major in engineering. The preprofessional level probably isn’t so bad compared to a state school with similar undergraduate majors offered. However, compared to the other Ivies, there are more preprofessional majors at Penn. It also wouldn’t surprise me if in CAS you have a higher concentration of premeds and prelaws compared to other Ivies. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t get a good liberal arts education at Penn. Most students graduate with a non professional degree. You can take classes to learn about the great philosophers, historians, etc.</p>
<p>The professors are like they are at any other research university. They are very smart and you’ll meet a lot of people who are at the top of their field. In terms of teaching, some are amazing, some mediocre, and others not too great.</p>
<p>My view:</p>
<p>Whenever you have a lot of smart people, the atmosphere will be almost inevitably competitive. However, it is not cutthroat, and people indeed help each other out.</p>
<p>Regarding you’re-on-you’re-own vs. spoon-fed, it definitely leans more towards the former, but there is also a lot of help available, and I’m not sure if you consider that spoon-feeding.</p>
<p>Regarding practical vs theoretical focus, as ilovebagels points out, there’s supposed to be this philosophy of “teaching everything that is practical and everything that is ornamental,” a quote by Benjamin Franklin. However, I would say that this depends much more on the subject/major than on anything else, including the focus of the academic culture. Penn is a top research university, and I’d say that any university of that kind always leans more towards fundamentals (theory). That’s what I’ve experienced in my education in computer science and economics. Of course, some subjects are pre-professional by nature, most notoriously business and nursing. My general point is that I would not think of Penn’s academic culture as preprofessional. If you’re a philosophy/math/econ major, I don’t see what in your education would count as pre-professional. I think Franklin’s mantra is better translated as a desire to blend theory and practice, to apply rigorous research to the betterment of society, more than a pre-professional atmosphere. </p>
<p>In this respect, I would respond to “it’s more of a pre professional career training sort of school” with a definite “No.”</p>
<p>Venkat: how do you determine which professors will be good. On the student course review, I checked for one course, and everybody gave it an average of a 3. But are the professor ratings generally reliable? Do you take Spanish?</p>
<p>Professor ratings are almost always EXTREMELY reliable and helpful. A rule of thumb for me, unless the class is mandatory for my major or something: take a professor if their rating is better than a 3. Don’t take him/her if they got below a 3.</p>
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<p>I second Rudess’s resounding “no.”</p>
<p>^ And I “third” it. This is a popular myth about Penn, most often repeated by detractors who are somewhat jealous of Penn’s success :rolleyes: (not meaning the OP, of course).</p>
<p>Do people store cases of water bottles in their rooms or do you just go to the cafeteria and fill up your thermos???</p>
<p>Bottled water is the biggest scam of the 21st century.</p>
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</p>
<p>No, that would be a tie between subprime mortgages, credit default swaps, and carbon offsets ;)</p>
<p>I stored cases of water bottles in my room, much to the dismay of jesus and baby seals. I always took the time to put them in recycle bins, but that’s as far as I was willing to go.</p>
<p>People keep bottled water in their rooms, but Britas are also popular.</p>
<p>Britas? You mean water filters around campus or…?</p>
<p>Britas in their dorm rooms/apartments/off campus houses, as the case may be.</p>
<p>@ilovebagels</p>
<p>Actually the biggest scam of the 21st century is using corn ethanol to power cars.</p>
<p>thanks(:</p>
<p>it’s good that help is available when you do need it. I’m terribly afraid of the accepted and left to die kind of schools where there IS office hours but profs are never around to answer questions.</p>
<p>What about the TAs? Are they helpful,understandable? My senior got some international grad student more than once(not at penn) and his accent was so thick they couldn’t understand him properly.</p>
<p>^ typo, it’s ARE</p>
<p>Profs are always around during office hours to answer questions and many will make extra time to talk to you if you cannot make their office hours.</p>
<p>About TAs, they are grad students, and sometimes undergrads, either holding recitation (small discussion section to supplement a large lecture) or just extra office hours (for upper level courses). For Wharton, econ, math, and science you wil have a large number of foreign TAs and some won’t be too good at English. Some of the best TAs have been from other countries and some of the worst TAs I’ve had were from the US. You also have foreign professors who no one can understand. As long as it’s a class where all of the info is in the book you’ll be fine though.</p>
<p>On the foreign TA issue, the following is an actual quote from a friend who recently received his PhD in math from an Ivy League university other than Penn:</p>
<p>“I hate teaching. The students are idiots, and all they care about is their grades. There’s only one thing I like about it – watching how their happiness at having a native English speaker as a TA slowly and predictably turns into the realization that they would be much better off with a TA who only spoke Chinese but who gave a crap about them.”</p>