<p>To address “Wharton-only facilities,” yes they are a thing, but it isn’t for some evil reason (well, aside from the fact that Wharton is evil)… it’s just a matter of logistics. The amount of collaboration in the Wharton curriculum makes dedicated resources a necessity for Wharton students. In my experience, I had two group projects in four years at Penn (political science), and one of them was a Wharton class. Meanwhile, my friends in Wharton had at least a few group projects every semester.</p>
<p>When so many classes involve collaboration, you need a lot of space for groups to get together - thus, the GSRs in Huntsman. Yes, only Wharton students can book GSRs, but anybody can “appropriate” a room if it is unused ten minutes past the hour, and any group can kick an individual out of a GSR since those rooms are dedicated explicitly for groups.</p>
<p>Wharton has two buildings - Hunstman and Steinberg-Dietrich. Why? Because it makes sense to have two buildings in close proximity when every Wharton student has a set of core courses that they must take to graduate… why teach the same exact course in five different places when you can keep it all centralized?</p>
<p>Wharton uses WebCafe (at least they did when I was there), a site similar to Blackboard, to manage most of its courses. Why be different? Because WebCafe allows for added collaboration (specifically, booking rooms), which Blackboard neither has nor needs.</p>
<p>As for course experience, every school is different. In the College, you may only count four non-college courses toward your graduation requirements; if you didn’t want to, you would never need to take a course outside of your school. Meanwhile, the other three schools have distribution requirements that require students to take courses in the College. Nursing students generally do their distribution requirements and stick to nursing after that; students in the other three schools (especially Wharton) often wind up getting a dual degree once they do their distribution requirements. Regardless, there is a ton of inter-school interaction academically, and outside of academic stuff, nobody cares what school you’re in.</p>
<p>As for people transferring to Wharton, I know of several people who transferred after freshman year (and many more who applied for dual degrees), and I know of several other people who dropped Wharton to do a College degree. The common thread among them that I noticed wasn’t for “prestige” … I mean, seriously, who really cares? Once you’re at Penn, nobody gives a damn what school you’re in, and that includes most employers. The common thread I noticed about those who wanted in to Wharton was that they wanted money - their thought was that Wharton would set them up for a good banking/consulting job, which it does (though the College does just as good a job!). And the common thread I noticed about those who wanted out of Wharton was that they wanted to explore an array of different disciplines, not focus on finance, statistics, management, operations, etc.</p>
There’s no denying that the Wharton name is incredibly prestigious and powerful in the business world, and perhaps only rivaled by Harvard in that regard at the undergraduate level. And that enormous prestige can sometimes overshadow the excellence–or even eminence, to use President Gutmann’s favorite word–of Penn’s other undergraduate offerings.</p>