The inferiority complex of non-wharton Penn

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Pennsylvania
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<p>The</a> Daily Pennsylvanian :: Questions raised about Penn's name</p>

<p>I honestly thought the article above was a parody when I first read it. Sadly, it's not. </p>

<p>I feel bad for non-wharton penn students for the following reasons: </p>

<ol>
<li>absolutely no prestige or respect. people assume you go to penn state. </li>
<li>people who do know penn will ask, "did you go to wharton?" and you have to say, "no, i was in the college"</li>
<li>Penn only cares about wharton and the med school. The bulk of their resources go to those two schools, and kids in arts&sciences are reminded every day that they are second-tier at their own university. </li>
<li>Staggering inferiority complex: virtually all the non-wharton penn kids were dinged at harvard/yale/princeton/stanford/MIT/columbia/brown, and they carry a chip on their shoulder as a result.</li>
</ol>

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<p>Arbitrageur: I think your assessment of “non-wharton Penn” is exceedingly harsh. It’s way too hard to generalize about an entire student body, and also false that Penn only “cares” about the med school and Wharton. </p>

<p>I’d imagine most students at Penn just don’t worry about this stuff much, and maybe some didn’t get into harvard or yale (I dispute that Penn competes that poorly with Columbia and Brown), but so what? Most students at most of the top 15 or 20 or so schools didn’t get into Harvard or Yale. </p>

<p>Now, the article in the Daily Pennsylvanian itself is another story. It’s kind of disappointing that an actual bid has begun to change the school’s name. These people need to focus on something else, but I’m pretty sure they represent the vast, vast minority of people affiliated with Penn.</p>

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<p>I have no connection to Penn, and no stake whatsoever in what Penn does about its name.</p>

<p>But my first reaction to this article in The Daily Pennsylvanian is, what hogwash! I guess if people are bound and determined to feel insecure about something, they’ll find a way.</p>

<p>Penn is a terrific university in a city with remarkable cultural and historical resources. If that’s not enough for you, maybe the problem doesn’t really rest with Penn or its name.</p>

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<p>Anyone who looks at Penn’s undergraduate enrollment numbers would see that the the School of Arts and Sciences enrolls the majority of students at Penn. </p>

<p>The College at Penn (School of Arts and Sciences): 6,417
School of Engineering and Applied Science: 1,616
School of Nursing: 578
The Wharton School: 2,085</p>

5

<p>hahahahahaha</p>

<p>to paraphrase Steely Dan:"Them biz schioiol kids makin’ movies of themselves and they don’t give a $#$# about anybody else . . . "</p>

<p>So fun to watch parvenus act out . . .</p>

6

<p>I got into Brown and Dartmouth, and I went to Penn (CAS, class of 2011! W00t!). Wait-listed at Harvard. That’s cool, I’ll go for grad school.</p>

<p>Oh, and I got a job at a certain top-3 consulting firm, beating out both Wharton and M&T kids for the position.</p>

<p>What now, Arbitrageur? Did you have any actual evidence before you opened your trap? As an actual alum, I can tell you that nearly all of the smartest kids are in the College. There were only 2 brilliant students I met who were also enrolled in Wharton - one was M&T, and the other was this crazy guy who started off in the College and ultimately enrolled in the degree programs in Engineering and Wharton, as well. Wharton has a smaller admit rate - but so does College of the Ozarks.</p>

<p>Ugh, I need to stop visiting this site. I hadn’t been back since I graduated.</p>

7

<p>I have to feel bad for Wharton Penn students. Most of them are perfectly nice people, but they clearly have to put up with some real tools among their classmates.</p>

<p>This is all pretty funny to me, as an old person. Back in the day, Wharton as an undergraduate program was second-rate, sort of a last-gasp chance to get into a good college for people who weren’t up to the intellectual challenge of real college. I understand that times have changed, 18-year-olds have gotten incredibly greedy, and Wharton now attracts very strong students. And Penn’s One University policy means they aren’t totally trapped in an impoverished idea of what education is. But I still have trouble respecting it as a choice. The really smart kids ARE at the College.</p>

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<p>As a wharton freshman, I have to say that there is really no distinction between the two groups (wharton and not-wharton), if anything, wharton kids get made fun of more than college kids do, the running jokes of course are that wharton kids are soul-less, they want their finance jobs upon graduation, etc. It is really completely overblown.</p>

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<p>IvyLeaguer11, congrats on your success. You obviously did very well to land a job at MBB consulting, and you will most likely get into harvard business or stanford business. But that does not take away from any of my points. Your statement that the most brilliant kids were in the college is way off base. Penn college is made up of smart kids who couldn’t get into the schools i mentioned above while wharton gets the absolute cream of the crop (roughly 7% acceptance rate). I know plenty of wharton kids who turned down the likes of princeton/yale/mit/stanford; a few even turned down harvard. And it’s the wharton kids who get the most coveted jobs in finance, especially at buyside firms.</p>

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<p>I would contest even your last point - there is massive selection bias towards pre-professionalism in Wharton that does not exist in the College - not for lack of talent, but lack of interest. Few people in the College, outside of a handful of math and econ majors, have the background to assess interest in working for buyside firms and investment banking houses - let alone get a job at one. Those who wished to cultivate their finance chops either transfered to Wharton after freshman year, or they simply took econ in the College (one of the best such departments in the country - I guess they don’t spend it all on Wharton, eh?).</p>

<p>As for the Wharton students who turned down Yale/Stanford/etc. - they exist (in the same proportion) in the College, as well. Not to toot my own horn, but based upon my SATs, high school standing, final College standing, job offers, and grad school prospects - I am definitely in the class of students who attend HYPS. That group extends downward into the top 10 schools and places like Brown and Dartmouth. If SAT scores are any indication, the overlap in quality and talent between Penn, Brown, MIT, Stanford and Harvard is enormous. The differences in prestige are, at this time of massively deflated admit rates and helicopter parenting, largely psychological. The middle 75% of the student bodies are essentially identical - it’s the upper and lower portions of talent that designate the primary differences (e.g., Harvard truly does have a top layer of unmatched talent - the international math olympiad medalists). But these few luminaries account for so little of the class. The vast proportion of students were “merely” extremely high performers at their respective high schools - laudable to be certain, but no different than the middle 75% of every Ivy League school (with possible exceptions at the state colleges of Cornell).</p>

<p>There will be those naive people, who have yet to enter the workforce or even take a higher level seminar, who cling to the intangible notion of prestige as it manifests not through actual academic output or intelligence, but through Harvard’s admissions committee saying, “Well, these 5 applicants are essentially identical, but we have to go with just one - I suppose the others can go to Penn, Columbia, Princeton, etc.”</p>

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<p>And if you really want to rudely disavow yourself of your illusions of comparable prestige, ability/talent/intelligence, etc., just go to visit Harvard for the weekend and speak to some students there. Shockingly, you’ll be surprised to discover that they’re mortals, just like us.</p>

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<p>Also, I think working personally with the “top” recruits from Stanford, Brown, Harvard, Chicago and Dartmouth (no Princeton or Yale) has established - for me - a very generalizable competency amongst those schools.</p>

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<p>Thinking about it, I realize that one can say with certainty that a majority of students at Penn were NOT rejected at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, or Brown. </p>

<p>That’s because half of every Penn class is accepted ED, SAS and Wharton, and therefore never gets a decision from any of those schools. And I know that some people apply to Penn RD without applying to any of the others. Not so many, granted, but enough to move the needle past 50%. (For example, nurses?) And then you have the people who actually got accepted to the others and choose Penn SAS or SEAS – my kids had a number of classmates who did that. (Not accepted to all of them, mind you, but who chose Penn vs. MIT, Brown, Columbia. Low-income city students often get meaningfully better financial aid at Penn vs. other schools.) Any way you look at it, only a minority of Penn students could have been rejected at those schools.</p>

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<p>JHS, I didn’t know a single person in Penn CAS who turned down HYPS. The only ones who did were in wharton, especially huntsman and M&T. </p>

<p>Look, Penn is a great school, but no one can deny that cas is second fiddle to wharton. I mean, look at Huntsman hall and compare it to the embarrassing buildings on campus that house the political science department, for example. </p>

<p>And of course, in professional and social settings, people are not impressed by penn unless it’s wharton. You get none of the prestige points of people from HYPS.</p>

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<p>Woah woah woah, okay ■■■■■, talk about the College all you want, but don’t diss Stiteler! It looks ugly on the outside, but if you have ever worked in the offices on the second floor, they are quite nice; the facilities on the first floor are also quite good (B21 has the most comfortable chairs on campus!).</p>

<p>I can absolutely deny that the College plays second fiddle to Wharton, after four years as an average student (was not a serious player for top multi-national consulting firms). Professors in most of my courses were (well, still are) on the cutting edge of research and theory in their chosen fields; I was given the opportunity to conduct primary source historical political research as an undergraduate (and get paid for it!). </p>

<p>As a CAS student, I never once felt some sense of inferiority compared to my peers in Wharton, and often my coursework was more challenging than theirs.</p>

<p>It’s common to make the mistake in thinking that because Wharton attracts top companies, it is superior to other schools at Penn. The reality is that businesses will always be attracted to business schools; that is a natural and proper fact of life. However, once they are there, your chances of getting interviews and offers are essentially unaffected by your undergraduate school. In fact, at my company now are people from CAS, Wharton and Engineering, and we’re not an enormous company, by any means.</p>

<p>The running joke on campus is that Wharton students can’t read. That exists for a reason… Wharton students are given a very practical education that ignores a lot of the theory behind business and economics, whereas CAS students are given a completely different, theoretical education. The skills that you graduate with are entirely different, and while the argument can be made either way, neither skillset is superior to the other.</p>

<p>At the end of the day, though, I have never met anyone who regretted enrolling in the College compared to Wharton, but I have met several people who completed internal transfers from Wharton to the College. I don’t think I’m an anomaly, either.</p>

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<p>@arbitrageur: In the professional world, people are just as impressed by Penn as they are by Wharton - but both are outshone by HYP. That said, people are far MORE impressed by individual credentials. A top worker who graduated summa cum laude from Columbia will turn more heads than a guy who squeezed through Harvard and produces ho-hum work. I’ve seen this happen, as in my working group, where the standout is a guy who went to Georgetown. He also happened to be a Marshall Scholar. The rest of us, including a Harvard econ major and myself, go to him for help.</p>

<p>What you may be speaking about is your experience at your high school…</p>

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<p>Of course people at elite firms like MBB consulting would know Penn. Those people are very well-educated. What the article was hinting at was the general perception of prestige and status among the population at large. People just don’t know Penn as a top school; they know harvard, yale, princeton, MIT, but in most cities, the flagship state school gets more respect than Penn. </p>

<p>Also, everyone knows that the reason why Penn has been ranked so high on US News rankings is due to wharton. If you take out wharton, Penn would be ranked around #15. Hence, Penn CAS gets destroyed in cross admits to not just HYPS but also columbia/dartmouth/brown.</p>

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<p>First of all, I was admitted to Stanford and Columbia, and currently attend Penn CAS. I know another guy who was admitted to Yale and turned it down. Another girl who was admitted to Princeton, but hated the atmosphere and chose to come here. And those are examples from just the few 2015 kids I know. Tons that have turned down Cornell, Brown, and Dartmouth. Almost seems as if every Penn CAS kid also got into those three as well. </p>

<p>That said, I agree with almost everything else you have said. This school gets little to no respect and no one even knows about it. The facilities apart form Huntsman are worse than at most state schools, and the administration really couldn’t care less about the students. Also, CAS students do terribly when it comes to jobs. That survey report is almost a lie. They combine Wharton dual-degreers without mentioning so to give the impression that students are doing well in placement. And, yes, the few people that do know Penn always follow up asking whether you’re in Wharton. And when you say no, it’s only just awkward.</p>

<p>Bottom line: DON’T COME TO PENN. Honestly, those who were deferred by Penn CAS today are the luckiest ones. You guys have a strong chance at Dartmouth, Duke, Columbia, and a decent chance at HYPS. Make the most out of the next 2 weeks to make your applications as strong as possible!!! :)</p>

<p>PS: I’m not a ■■■■■. If mods would like to confirm my status as a Penn student through email or whatever, they are more than welcome to. People really need to know how awful this school is.</p>

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<p>I have two friends at Penn. One is in Wharton, and loves it. The other is in CAS, and loves it. Apparently, (next year, pending acception) I should choose to not go to Penn because you are having a bad experience. My friends love it, with a few minor exceptions. The job market sucks right now for everyone - it’s no surprise that, if what you say is true, the survey report less than exceptional. My friends tell me that Penn is the perfect balance of work hard - party hard. That is extremely appealing to me as well. Not everything is about finding a job after college, the college experience is important too.</p>

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<p>Ignore PrincetonDreams. Not only is he a well-documented anti-Penn ■■■■■ (search out his numerous anti-Penn posts in the Penn forum to see for yourself), but he’s obviously also a LYING anti-Penn ■■■■■. He claims now to be a student at Penn, yet he started a thread this summer in the Columbia forum regarding his room assignment for this academic year AT COLUMBIA:</p>

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/columbia-university/1183470-switching-jj-single.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/columbia-university/1183470-switching-jj-single.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>He has numerous other posts on CC discussing his status as a Columbia student. Quite frankly, I don’t know WHAT to believe about this kid, except that he has absolutely no direct knowledge of Penn (and little, if any, indirect knowledge), yet he really has it in for Penn, for some reason (he probably was rejected from Penn).</p>