<p>Hi guys,</p>
<p>I was fortunate enough to be accepted to Tufts and the University of Pennsylvania. Tufts has always been my number one, but getting into Penn was a pleasant surprise. I plan on majoring in biochemistry and doing pre-med. Any insight into which school would be better? </p>
<p>Thanks</p>
<p>I think it would be difficult to turn down Penn.</p>
<p>My daughter had the same decision to back back in 2010. She chose Penn, not because of the “prestige” factor, but because it had more academic depth in her area of interest (urban studies) and she found Philadelphia a lot more interesting than Medford. But she visited both campuses before deciding, and really loved the students and the creative vibe at Tufts. Had the urban studies departments not been so different from each other, she might well have decided the other way. I don’t think you can go wrong, as both schools are strong in the sciences; I think you should visit both, if possible, and decide which feels like a better fit.</p>
<p>My recommendation is to:</p>
<p>Pick the environment where you are more comfortable learning (because that will result in you achieving the highest GPA possible)</p>
<p>Pick the environment that will result in you getting better research/internship possibilities (because that will differentiate you from all the other applicants with high grades and high test scores) </p>
<p>Boston/Cambridge is the top Biotech region in the world. Tufts PreMeds do research at Tufts, Harvard and MIT labs as well as Tufts and Harvard hospitals and surrounding biotech companies.</p>
<p>Both Tufts and Harvard have a higher research citation rate than Penn in Clinical disciplines: </p>
<p>Clinical, Pre-Clinical and Health (i.e. Pre-Med) research citation rates </p>
<p>Harvard 93.2
Tufts 93.2</p>
<p>UPenn 87.2
Columbia 87.1
Yale 85.1</p>
<p>Cornell 81.1
Northwestern 81.1</p>
<p>Brown - NR
Dartmouth –NR</p>
<p>To provide an example, the top 3 choices for the son of a friend of mine (who is a prominent researcher at Harvard Med and has sat on the admissions committee) were:</p>
<p>Amherst
Tufts
Harvard</p>
<p>Amherst ultimately beat out Tufts because he was more comfortable in a smaller school in a more rural environment, figured he had access to UMass/Amherst labs during the school year and he could go anywhere he wanted in the summer for internships. Harvard was deemed to be the least undergraduate focused.</p>
<p>Very informative Mastadon. Visit and choose the one you like best. They are 2 of the best schools in the country…</p>
<p>It might actually be more informative to say that he knew he could go to Harvard for internships in the summer…</p>
<p>I have a child at Penn and a child at Tufts, and one factor to consider is the social atmosphere. Penn has a very large and visible group of extremely wealthy private high school and legacy students, and the influence of wealth is only exacerbated by Wharton. The jock/frat culture is also very prominent, which means more homophobia and misogyny (and drinking) than I feel a campus should tolerate. It’s certainly possible to avoid all that, and my child has made wonderful life-long friends there, but I have found that money – having it, making it, spending it – is a defining issue at Penn.</p>
<p>@Michigangem, to a certain extent, the influence of money can be found at any selective private school, don’t you think? My friends with children at Tufts say their children have encountered money at Tufts, just as at Penn (and Harvard, and every other Ivy, not to mention every other selective institution). There’s drinking, jocks and frats at both schools, for better or worse. I think the real issue is whether the student pondering offers of admission feels they could handle that atmosphere at one place better than the other.</p>
<p>I graduated from Tufts in 2012, and a few of my close high school friends graduated from Penn that same year. I think by and large we had similar college experiences - especially when compared to the large portion of our high school class that went to much larger universities in state. My point in saying that is that I think no matter where your child ends up, if they were going to be happy at Tufts they’d be happy at Penn and vice versa.</p>
<p>However, there were some key differences between my experience in college and after college and their experiences at/after Penn. Tufts students are more idealistic on the whole. I think a lot of this stems from the liberal arts vs. pre-professional feels of Tufts and Penn respectively. I interned at a non-profit in my hometown the summer after freshman year and there was a Penn student also interning there. We were discussing our reasons for working there and he said “I wanted to work at a non-profit this summer because, like, when else in life do you have the opportunity to do that?” And I responded “Ummm, the next 70 years??” Apparently it had never dawned on him that you could do things post-college other than investment banking. While me and a large group from Tufts ended up pursuing jobs in the private sector, we were all open to more idealistic career paths. We did community service in college not just because it looked good on the resume but because we were passionate about it. We majored in things we were interested in for the sake of learning, rather than the average starting salary. </p>
<p>To me, because of these experiences, the key difference between Tufts and Penn are the people. Vain vs. Idealistic. You’ll get a world class education at either, you’ll probably be extremely happy at either, etc. But college is so much more than happiness and education - it’s about transitioning from a child to the adult you want to become. For me, coming to Tufts transformed me into exactly the adult I wanted to become: an aware, active citizen, equipped for the job market, but more importantly equipped to make a difference in the world.</p>
<p>@tuftskid, there are plenty of idealistic students who are very active in community service at Penn, and who don’t choose career paths in the private sector, or choose based on money first. Civic House at Penn is the umbrella organization for all such groups, and it is extremely busy there. Yes, there are pre-professionals, but they too do community service: there is a whole club in the Wharton School that provides business-related advice and planning for free to community non-profits, for example. Conversely, I know Tufts students who don’t seem particularly community-oriented. There is no way that “vain vs. idealistic” is a fair generalization about the student body of either Tufts, Penn, or any other college in the country, for that matter</p>
<p>Rizado-
Colleges tend to be a collection of self-selecting as well as selected populations. The atmosphere/culture of a school is determined by the relative percentages of the various populations, rather than the existence or non-existence of a particular population. If the school is big enough, then it can exhibit different “local” atmospheres/cultures depending on what you like to do/who you like to hang out with. </p>
<p>Active citizenship, idealism, and creativity (which your daughter observed) are defining attributes of the Tufts culture. I would also add lack of pretention (irrespective of wealth), lack of cutthroat competition (despite a high level of academic motivation), political correctness and global awareness . I make no value judgments on the goodness of these defining attributes relative to other schools, only that they are different and tend to be a good fit for some students and not a good fit for others. Tufts is not for everybody. </p>
<p>I certainly know Tufts alums/students who do not fit one or more of the “Tufts stereotypes”, but there are not enough of them to impact the prevailing culture. </p>
<p>I am also certain that there are students that fit one or more of the “Tufts stereotypes” at other schools. Students that were admitted to Tufts, but chose to go else ware are very likely to be in that population.</p>
<p>In defense of Tuftskid’s position, here is the list of leading schools for Peace Corps placement:</p>
<p><a href=“http://files.peacecorps.gov/multimed...chools2013.pdf[/url]”>http://files.peacecorps.gov/multimed...chools2013.pdf</a></p>
<p>Since Penn is twice the size of Tufts and is not listed, the percentage of kids that go into the Peace Corp from Penn is less than half of what it is at Tufts. That is a significant difference.</p>
<p>The Ivies are conspicuously absent from this list, except for those that have undergraduate populations at the very top of the range that they were placed in (i.e Cornell at about 14,000 and Dartmouth at about 4000) which I find interesting. Tufts’ undergraduate population (at about 5000) is at the very bottom of the group in which it is placed.</p>
<p>Tufts has an entire college devoted to citizenship with endowed professors who perform research, and it also has scholarships for students involved in citizenship. That is unique as far as I know and it tends to attract a different type of student than Wharton does.</p>
<p>[About</a> Tisch College - Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service](<a href=“Homepage | Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life”>Homepage | Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life)</p>
<p>Although it is common practice to use sports to promote community service, at Tufts they have a program called “Fan the Fire” that uses community service to promote sports. I don’t think that is very common…</p>
<p>[url=<a href=“http://www.gotuftsjumbos.com/Fan_The_Fire/Fan_The_Fire/index]Tufts[/url”>Tufts University - Official Athletics Website]Tufts[/url</a>]</p>
<p>Interesting information, Mastadon, although I think the picture would be different if the types of community service were expanded beyond the Peace Corp. Teach for America draws many applicants from Penn, Brown and the other Ivies, as well as Tufts, for example. I don’t doubt that Tufts should be lauded for its institutional dedication to community service. But I don’t think it has the institutional monopoly on such initiatives, either.</p>
<p>Mastadon’s point isn’t that Tufts has an “institutional monopoly” on anything. His point is that while neither Wharton nor the Tisch College of Active Citizenship are defining features of their respective campuses, the types of students who are attracted to each one help contribute to a different environment.</p>
<p>Rizato</p>
<p>I was only commenting on available data.
Here is the data for Teach for America. Dartmouth is particularly impressive given its size and the fact that it also appeared on the Peace Corp list. Penn is about equivalent to Tufts in this respect due to the fact that it is about twice the size. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.teachforamerica.org/sites/default/files/2012.Top_.Contributors.pdf[/url]”>http://www.teachforamerica.org/sites/default/files/2012.Top_.Contributors.pdf</a></p>
<p>I’ve seen the TFA data. To compare Tufts and Penn properly one would really need to compare apples to apples: how many students from each school applied (vs were chosen), and what were their majors? I have a sneaking suspicion that TFA is often a job path for liberal arts majors (rather than engineering). But the point of my posts was simply that the environment at any school is not monolithic, which is why the OP needs to visit if he/she can.</p>
<p>So, this is obviously not a complete picture, but from a purely statistical point of view regarding pre-med.</p>
<p>Tufts:
</p>
<p>Penn:
</p>
<p>It’s hard to say for sure from those statistics, but it seems to imply better odds of med school admissions if you hold GPA constant. While there’s much more that goes into med school decisions than GPA, it’s useful to see how successful our students are. And even if the statistics don’t bear out an advantage to Tufts students (possible, given that Penn and Tufts slice up the percentages differently), this is still a strong indicator of our academic prep.</p>
<p>Rizado</p>
<p>In general, the TFA data is more widely promoted by some of the Ivies as a proxy for their level of citizenship, so it is better known than the Peace Corp Data. TFA and Peace Corps attract different types of people. The Peace Corps is arguably a better proxy for depth of commitment to citizenship, idealism and a more global perspective. Based on the Peace Corp data, Tufts is in the same league with Georgetown/BC . That is telling given that Tufts does not have a religious affiliation and I think it is consistent with Tuftskid’s observations. Adding TFA data to the mix does not dilute the case for his observations, and in fact, it begs the question of why the performance of some of the Ivies is so different across the two areas. </p>
<p>In the case of Tufts, if anything, the TFA numbers tend to be skewed downward because of competing programs offered by the Tisch College. I am also having trouble following your apples to apples analogy because it seems to suggest that UPenn might have a large population of volunteers that applied, but somehow were not qualified for performing community service. In terms of correlation of Peace Corps/TFA to liberal arts rather than engineering, I would tend to agree with that.</p>
<p>On the engineering side there is an organization called Engineers Without Borders that corresponds to the Peace Corp. Based on the information on the respective web pages, the Tufts chapter has three active projects on three continents. UPenn has a chapter, but based on their newsletters, one team did a project two years ago over winter break. </p>
<p>[Tufts</a> Engineers Without Borders](<a href=“http://sites.tufts.edu/ewb/]Tufts”>Tufts Engineers Without Borders)</p>
<p>[Engineers</a> Without Borders | University of Pennsylvania](<a href=“Engineers Without Borders | University of Pennsylvania”>Engineers Without Borders | University of Pennsylvania)</p>
<p>At Tufts, there is also another internationally recognized program (offered through the Center for Engineering Outreach) that Engineering , Science and Math majors participate in. Tufts is also nationally recognized for creating a female friendly engineering environment (the dean and assistant dean are females) and two professors received presidential awards for their work in STEM education, including building a nationwide organization for female STEM majors to teach STEM to young women.
[CEEO</a> Main Site](<a href=“http://ceeo.tufts.edu/]CEEO”>http://ceeo.tufts.edu/)
[President</a> Obama Honors Two Tufts University Professors for their Efforts in STEM Education | BostInno](<a href=“http://bostinno.streetwise.co/all-series/president-obama-honors-two-tufts-university-professors-for-their-efforts-in-stem-education/]President”>http://bostinno.streetwise.co/all-series/president-obama-honors-two-tufts-university-professors-for-their-efforts-in-stem-education/)</p>
<p>There is also an organization called Design for America. Some of the Ivies have chapters, but it is hard to tell what the activity level is from their web pages. UPenn does not have a chapter.
[Studios</a> @ Design for America](<a href=“http://designforamerica.com/studios/]Studios”>http://designforamerica.com/studios/)</p>
<p>This information suggests that including engineering and STEM majors shifts the balance even further toward Tufts. </p>
<p>As far as going to visit, that is always a good idea. All aspects of a culture are not visible on the surface though, and short visits are prone to sampling error (all the Wharton students could be at a Gordon Gekko fan club meeting). For those reasons, augmenting the impressions of a visit with additional data is a good idea.</p>
<p>Mastadon, I am not sure what your beef is with Wharton students. Clearly you are an ardent fan of Tufts, and they are lucky to have you in their corner. Hopefully the OP can sort out what’s what and make the best choice for him, which is the point of the thread after all.</p>
<p>Rizado-</p>
<p>I find Gordon Gekko fascinating and have no beef at all with Wharton students. Due to geography, I tend to associate more with Harvard Business School grads, but I dont think I hold any grudges as a result. </p>
<p>My philosophy (which may be different than yours) is this: every organization (whether it be a sports team, company, or college) has a certain culture. I agree with you that organizational cultures are not monolithic, but I also believe that each culture has certain differentiating attributes and thus all cultures are not the same. </p>
<p>I also believe, after observing the performance of many people who have switched teams, companies and colleges, that an individuals performance is a function of the culture of the organization that they are a part of.</p>
<p>As a result, I believe that if you want to reach your peak potential you should attempt to seek out a culture that allows you thrive, not one that you can tolerate. </p>
<p>This will maximize your probability for success and happiness.</p>
<p>For insights into my perspective on Wharton, there is an interesting book that was published by a Tufts professor in 1986. It is quite controversial in the business community among those who have read it. It is called:</p>
<p>No Contest The case against competition. </p>
<p>Here are a few quotes from that book:</p>
<p>Those children who competed for prizes made collages that were significantly less creative than those made by the control group</p>
<p>In a win/lose framework, success comes to those whose temperaments are best suited for competition.</p>
<p>In fact, as he and his colleague Janet Spence later observed, the data dramatically refute the contention that competitiveness is vital to a successful business career</p>
<p>I dont think there are many inside Wharton who would consider their school anything but ultra-competitive. They see that as good and necessary to get people to work hard and play hard.</p>
<p>I dont think there are many inside any Ivy that would consider their school anything but super-competitive. They see that as good and necessary to get people to work hard and play hard. </p>
<p>At Tufts, the perspective is that education isnt a zero sum game, so learning shouldnt be work and play shouldnt be hard. </p>
<p>That is an important cultural difference (that Gordon would not understand) and it needs to be highlighted for people to find their best fit and maximize their probability of being happy and realizing their potential.</p>
<p>[No</a> Contest](<a href=“http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/nc.htm]No”>http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/nc.htm)</p>
<p>"I don’t think there are many inside Wharton who would consider their school anything but ultra-competitive. … I don’t think there are many inside any Ivy that would consider their school anything but super-competitive. "</p>
<p>Based on personal experience (as an Ivy alum, as the mother of Ivy students, and as the aunt of a Wharton student), I will disagree with you, for the record. But since that will not convince you, I am hereby putting the entire issue to bed.</p>