<p>Could someone describe it to me? Do you feel like you're in a college campus? Is it more like NYU feel, where it's really integrated into the city, like Harvard, which is a mix of city and campus, or like WashU or BC?</p>
<p>It’s more like Columbia, kind of like Harvard, but definitely not NYU. When you’re on campus, you absolutely feel like you’re on a (beautiful) college campus and not in the middle of a city. Once outside campus, the feel immediately becomes more urban and city like, but west philadelphia is much more residential than center city, so even walking outside of Penn is not like being on 5th ave. </p>
<p>It’s the best of both worlds - campus when you want it, city when you want it</p>
<p>you kind of have your own bubble seperate from legit philadelphia. i think it has more of a campus than harvard though, since harvard’s campus is pretty open (the Yard) and there are a lot of tourists.</p>
<p>Apart from the Quad, I think Penn’s campus is among the ugliest I’ve had the chance to see. I think Princeton and Cornell are very pretty. But some parts of the campus do make it feel like a traditional, non-urban college.</p>
<p>Locust Walk is nice. Gives Penn a very small college feel, imo. Another nice area is in front of Van Pelt - a very ugly building but the area in front of it is a great place to relax and hang out.</p>
<p>I thought Penn was gorgeous. Similar to Princeton, minus the surrounding rich suburban area. There is a unified feel, but the city is right there (I think it’s 15 minutes walking, and there’s SEPTA too, of course).</p>
<p>Penn has its own particular mix of urban and cloistered. There are parts of campus – the Quads, Locust Walk, the central area by Van Pelt – that feel very separate from the city itself. But there are some big streets with a lot of traffic that run right through the campus, and you can’t walk far at Penn without being aware that you are in a city. </p>
<p>Columbia is very, very different. It is a very closed-off, cloistered campus designed to turn its back on the surrounding community. Some people love it; others (I included) find it almost offensive, and also claustrophobic. Penn is much more open to the city. Except for the Quads, it doesn’t have lots of closed-off spaces like Harvard and Yale do. </p>
<p>Penn is more like Brown, except that Philadelphia is a bigger city than Providence, and the Penn neighborhood has more noise and traffic than Brown’s. Penn’s buildings are a lot bigger, too, and there are more people. Brown doesn’t have anything like Wharton, not to mention two giant academic medical centers (and one other smaller hospital) on or next to its main campus. Counting students, there are over 40,000 people working on the Penn main campus every day, and that doesn’t even include Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia or all the retail and restaurant workers who aren’t Penn employees. What’s more, there are two other universities adjacent to Penn – Drexel and University of the Sciences in Philadelphia – plus the University City Science Center urban research park, which technically isn’t part of the campus but might just as well be. The total area devoted to university campuses and university-related housing, businesses, sports, and services is just enormous.</p>
<p>Here’s a little datum: Harvard and Columbia are essentially served by one subway stop apiece. The only subway you’ll get at Yale or Brown is a $5 footlong. Penn has six subway stops on three different lines (actually, technically, it’s five different lines, but that only matters if you are headed away from the city center and well past Penn) either on campus or within a block of it. And the city’s main train station is an easy walk from campus. (The city’s main business district is walkable from campus if the weather is OK and you don’t have a lot to carry, or it’s a five-minute or less subway ride.)</p>
<p>I agree with everything iamanapp said. I visited UPenn two weeks ago and thought that everything except the Quad and Locust Walk was so ugly…</p>
<p>If what you think a university should look like is Princeton, Stanford, or Cornell, then Penn is always going to look “ugly” to some extent. It’s not some beautifully manicured, cloistered environment. It doesn’t have a lot of fake Gothic, fake Spanish Mission, fake anything. It’s a jumble of urban buildings in different styles from different eras, some of which are nicer than others. Some are indeed quite beautiful and others, to be honest, were flat-out mistakes. </p>
<p>To appreciate Penn, you have to adopt a slightly different mindset: Embrace the chaos, appreciate the jumble and the spirit of experimentation and innovation that produced it. Appreciate that Penn never sought to withdraw itself from the surrounding community and the city as a whole. This is what a university that ISN’T an ivory tower looks like.</p>
<p>Also, Princeton and Cornell practically assault you with their beauty. You don’t have to look for it; it’s in your face all the time. Penn has lots of real beauty, but it’s tucked away in nooks and crannies, on a smaller scale. You have to search it out and savor it when you find it.</p>
<p>Bottom line: Penn is a lot more like the real world than some other famous universities. That may make it somewhat less pretty; that doesn’t make it ugly, though, or bad.</p>
<p>I don’t think that Penn is less beautiful at all. It’s just different. It all depends on the person. It also depends on how closely you look. </p>
<p>At first glance, Penn is a very urban school in an ugly part of town. The more time you spend there, the better it looks and the more you feel the energy of the place gets into you.</p>
<p>The beauty of Princeton is the first thing you notice along with the quaintness of the town. However, the town gets pretty ugly within a few blocks in one direction and very residential and boring a few blocks in other directions. It’s a boring campus. It’s beautifully landscaped with old buildings that look like they are from a different time, built by dead men.</p>
<p>I see the beauty in both but accept them for what they are. Yale is beautiful and fenced off from the town, which is a nice looking town. Columbia is a fortress and refuge from the hectic world of NYC on the outside. Two worlds that don’t border each other but do not blend. Cornell and Dartmouth - are nature lovers’ paradises and Brown gets mixed reviews. Brown has a nice looking campus but Providence can go either way.</p>