<p>Is the Grad body at Penn only 1,000 less than undergrad? That's what it says on Wikipedia and i was wondering if anyone who's currently there can say how the student body is. </p>
<p>Is graduate housing typically on campus or off?</p>
<p>As of last semester, the difference in headcount between undergrad and grad/professional students was a whopping 31. There were 10,337 undergrads and 10,306 graduate or professional students.</p>
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<p>There is some on-campus grad student housing – both the law school and the med school have some dorm space for first years, or at least they used to. It isn’t very popular – most grad students prefer to live off-campus, where it’s cheaper, or nicer, or often both. Off-campus, grad students tend to live in the same places undergrads do, except the grad students will usually go farther from campus in search of cheaper or nicer housing. Most undergrads won’t live farther than a few blocks west of 40th St., although some live east in Center City on the other side of the river, too. Grad students will often go out to 50th St., and further south, and will even live in fairly distant neighborhoods like South Philly or Fishtown, or even out in the burbs. Wharton MBA students, especially, often have some significant savings, and sometimes families.</p>
<p>Nice, thanks for that. I wonder if on-campus housing for grad gets booked quickly.</p>
<p>Trust me, you don’t want to live in a dorm on campus when you are in grad school. A few people coming straight from college do that, but they tend to get out as soon as they can. By the time you have finished college, you’re ready for a big-boy apartment.</p>
<p>There are exceptions. In Palo Alto, off campus housing nearer than 6-7 miles away is rare and incredibly expensive, so Stanford has built some apartment complexes for grad students on the edge of campus. (Not dorms, though.) At Penn, with tons of economical housing within walking distance of wherever you are going to school, there’s no reason to live in a dorm.</p>
<p>The campus still very much FEELS undergrad-dominated because the undergrads occupy the buildings at the core of the campus, and have their presence reinforced by the fact that they all live in the immediate campus area as well. The grad schools (law, medicine and vet in particular) are on the periphery of the campus.</p>
<p>Grad Dorms? I have never heard that…you mean it’s a dormitory filled with grads?
Graduate dorms…are they just separate buildings that only grad students can live in? How many of them typically live there; you said not much so is there always room? What’s the setting there like, and are there RA’s, etc?</p>
<p>Grad dorms I think can be great as they can establish closer relationships with other students. I definitely of course heard “graduate housing” but I thought it was typically university owned apartments where grads and undergrads can live together…but strict graduate housing I wasn’t too aware of. </p>
<p>Also, can law students mix with medical students in the dorms, same with b-school students, or are there 3 buildings that house only the certain school’s students (i.e., business, medicine, law)?</p>
<p>Well, it turns out that I was way behind the times. Both the law school and the med school have ditched their separate dorms, and now the only on-campus housing for grad students is a single dorm – Sansom Place – that houses about 700 grad students from all different schools in singles or one-bedroom apartments (and also 350 undergrads, separately from the grad students). Grad students can also serve as GAs in the undergraduate dorms, but that represents a trivial number of people.</p>
<p>Anyway, that gives you a good sense of how popular graduate student dorms are – less than 7% of grad students live on campus (and, as ilovebagels said, it’s not exactly in the middle of campus, either – more like the border between Penn and Drexel). The housing website as much as says that this is an attractive option only for first-year grad students who are completely unfamiliar with Philadelphia.</p>
<p>To answer some of baller’s other questions: Yes, the graduate dorm has RAs (to promote community, help orient people, etc.) I’m guessing that a large percentage of the residents are non-native English speakers who don’t have experience living in the U.S., and they probably need some help. I have never been aware of situations where undergraduates and grad students are housed in the same dorms, although I suppose that there are probably places where undergraduates can rent university apartments that are also open to grad students. But the two populations tend to have really different characteristics and needs, and would probably kill each other if they had to live cheek-by-jowl.</p>