Is there any type of tension/stigma between Wharton and the rest of Penn? What’s the feeling on campus about it? Any awkwardness or divide? Just trying to get a feel from students/recent alums!
Absolutely not! As a penn student you will live and take classes with students from all four of Penn’s undergraduate schools. You’ll all join the same clubs and go to the same parties. You’ll all get the same jobs and have accesses to identical resources throughout your time there and afterwards as an alum. in fact, not that long ago, the head of Wharton Women was a student from the College. Additionally, my best friends from Penn came from the College and Wharton and we’re still incredibly close. The one point of contention is that non-wharton students cannot book a study room in the Wharton building if they aren’t taking a class there. HOWEVER- it leads to a more playful back and forth between wharton and non-wharton students than actual tension because you can just ask your wharton friends to book you the room if you REALLY want it and there are rooms all across campus that all students can book for the same purposes. The policy also makes sense because most students don’t need to book those rooms but the Wharton MBA students REALLY need them and so if 10,000 undergrads were trying to book them every day, it would become really annoying. Despite the sensibility of the policy though, it remains a running joke. Outside of that, Penn students really are a cohesive bunch. I currently work with a handful of Wharton grads and I’m a CAS grad but we all graduated from Penn and share a common sense of community about it.
Definitely Agree with above. I graduated within the last 5 yrs and imo there isn’t any rift or divide. Penn people hang out together regardless of the school they are in and there are no tensions. Everyone has access to the same academic, research & recruiting resources as well as classes. Also student clubs are open to everyone regardless of what school they are in. It is not uncommon for CAS and SEAS students for example to have leadership positions in Wharton clubs and vice versa. There is a sense of cohesiveness within the Penn community. The administration has worked very hard on that for the last 2-3 decades and they have definitely succeeded imo.
During my time at Penn, I also didn’t notice any sense of superiority coming from Wharton students over the rest of Penn students, and no resentment coming from the rest of Penn students towards Wharton (apart from the occasional playful Slytherin joke at whartons expense). As a dual degree student in SEAS and Wharton, i got to experience both sides so i m pretty confident in my assessment. Of course it is true that Wharton admits practically never turn down Penn for any non-HYPSM school, whereas there is a decent number of people admitted to the rest of Penn who turn it down for other elite schools apart from just HYPSM ( places like Columbia, Brown, Duke, Chicago etc). Also it is true that Wharton is slightly harder to get in, but the difference is small (think of the difference between Harvard/Stanford vs Yale/Princeton for example). When it comes to this level of colleges, these differences do not translate into a meaningful difference in student quality that could lead to start divides and tensions (such as Stern vs rest of NYU for example).
The only real divide in my opinion was when it came to Wharton facilities, and specifically Huntsman, While any Penn undergrad can enter Huntsman and study there, non-wharton kids can only log into huntsman computers if they are taking a Wharton class during that semester, and even then they cannot book a group study room. On the other hand Wharton kids have access to computers in the engineering quad and any other buildings. You have to keep in mind however that huntsman serves also the MBAs so if the administration made everything open to all undergrads, the demand would be insane. This is because Huntsman is both very fancy-looking (most elite business school buildings tend to be…) and also at a very prime location on campus. However, I feel this issue will be solved with the construction of the fancy new Economics/Political science building at Penn, which will be very close to Huntsman.
Absolutely not.