UPENN v. NORTHWESTERN

<p>Hey guys.</p>

<p>I know that this seems like a dumb question and I don't wanna sound like one of those people who are like, well i like harvard but i also like princeton and yale, blah blah blah.</p>

<p>Anyways, I am deciding betwen the communications school at UPenn and Medill at Northwetern. I know that Northwestern is great at journalism, but I feel like Penn is just a better school over all. I've never even visited UPenn so it'd be a huge leap of faith if i did choose to go there.</p>

<p>Any advice?</p>

<p>In your case Northwestern University is clearly better than Penn as the Medill School of Journalism is regarded as the best in the country and has an outstanding reputation worldwide. The School of Communications at Northwestern is also regarded by many as the nation's best. If you enroll at Medill, you can easily double major in the College of Arts & Sciences. Penn is in an urban area of West Philadelphia, while Northwestern enjoys one of the country's best settings on the shores of Lake Michigan--including two beaches on campus--and merges into the upscale shopping & dining area of Evanston which offers quick & easy access to Chicago's Miracle Mile, Navy Pier, entertainment & downtown. SAT I scores are nearly identical, but Northwestern's endowment is a bit healthier at $7+ billion although the two are close. It is incorrect to state that Penn is the better school overall--unless you can clearly distinguish between schools like Princeton & Yale. For journalism & communications the choice is clear as would the choice be for a business major. As you have never visited Penn, I strongly encourage you to do so as the settings are very different from one another. FYI Penn borders a fairly rough area.</p>

<p>Medill @ Northwestern FTW unless you absolutely want a job in the City of Brotherly love upon graduation......just kidding....</p>

<p>A wise dean of communications at another competing school explained it this way,
"Penn is a research institution and their comm dept focuses on research; if you want a PhD in comm, then Penn is the place to be....If you want experience, internships and training to be employed in the communications field then Medill@Northwestern, Annenberg@USC and Newhouse@Syracuse are your three top picks....Just choose which part of the country you want to end up in...."</p>

<p>thanks for the responsese!</p>

<p>rodney- i got accepted at USC annenberg as well! haha</p>

<p>okay. I was leaning northwestern but that gives me reassurance.</p>

<p>:)</p>

<p>dietcoke14: Good Luck! My d is choosing between Newhouse, Annenberg and Vanderbilt...(Yea, I know weird 3rd choice, but she really wanted nice weather...)</p>

<p>One thing to keep in mind: while none of the Ivy League schools has an undergraduate journalism or communications school (at Penn you'd technically be a student in the College of Arts and Sciences, although taking courses in the Annenberg School), their graduates do extremely well in obtaining positions in journalism and communications. News organizations and communication firms appreciate the quality, breadth, and depth of the educations undergrads receive at the Ivies and other top schools (Stanford, Duke, etc.) that don't include journalism/communications schools, and hire them accordingly. Illustrative of this is the following statement about Penn's student newspaper:</p>

<p>
[quote]
The Daily Pennsylvanian is sometimes called Penn's "unofficial journalism department," seeing as the University of Pennsylvania has no official journalism department [although it does have the prestigious Annenberg School for Communication], and because many of its staff members go on to pursue careers in the print, broadcast, and electronic media. DP alumni can be found at a number of major daily newspapers and national magazines, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Time Magazine and Business Week.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>The</a> Daily Pennsylvanian - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</p>

<p>But I second the recommendation that you visit both schools, and don't just rely on statements you may read or hear, such as that "Penn borders on a fairly rough area." These kinds of generalizations don't really do justice to a school's campus, its "feel," its surrounding neighborhood, or the city in which it's located.</p>

<p>Yes, visit the campuses, please.</p>

<p>I second 45's comments on the Daily Pennsylvanian. It is an award-winning paper, easily among the best student newspapers in the country. The Daily Pennsylvanian was the focus of a Newsweek article: College</a> Papers Grow Up | Newsweek.com</p>

<p>It is the opinion of this hopelessly biased Penn student that Penn is an overall better school and between the College of Arts & Sciences, the Annenberg School, the Daily Pennsylvanian, and the Wharton School, will get you far in journalism as well as life.</p>

<p>And speaking of writing, Penn also has the Kelly Writers House, an actual Victorian house on campus devoted to writing of all types, which is an unparalleled extracurricular resource for undergrads and was recently the subject of an article in the New York Times:</p>

<p>
[quote]
December 5, 2007
Writers Find Haven on an Ivy Campus
By ALAN FINDER
PHILADELPHIA — College coaches have long scoured the country for supremely quick point guards who can transform a basketball team or fierce linebackers who can dominate a football game. Al Filreis is also perpetually on the lookout for talented high school students, although the ones he seeks do remarkable things with a pen or keyboard. He recruits writers.</p>

<p>Dr. Filreis, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is the faculty director of the Kelly Writers House, an unusual, largely extracurricular community of people passionate about writing: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, screenwriting, songwriting and myriad other forms. At an elite university filled with undergraduates preparing for professional and graduate schools — and on a campus in which the Wharton School can literally cast the largest shadow — the Writers House is an oasis for the arts set, for the unconventional, even the countercultural.</p>

<p>The house, an old, three-story Tudor cottage on Locust Walk in the center of campus here, features an array of events. There are readings, both by aspiring undergraduates and by some of the country’s most celebrated poets, nonfiction writers and novelists, including Richard Ford, John Updike and Cynthia Ozick. There are lectures, workshops, songwriters’ performances, writing sessions with local high school students, and lunches, dinners and two-day seminars with writers. Some classes are also held on the comfortable couches and chairs in the Writers House.</p>

<p>“For me, this is Swarthmore, Reed or Bard, here in the middle of a big research university,” said Dr. Filreis, a bearded, often beaming professor of modern and contemporary poetry whose enthusiasm and avuncular demeanor seem to permeate the Writers House. “This is a little bit of Bard. You can come in and people know who you are.”</p>

<p>“This is not just about writing,” he said. “That’s almost incidental.”</p>

<p>So what is the point? “Apprenticeship, mentorship, internship,” Dr. Filreis said. The goal, he added, “is to enrich the undergraduates’ lives outside the classroom.”</p>

<p>When he took the keys 12 years ago to the badly run-down cottage, for decades the home of a university chaplain, the professor’s intention was to create a loose-knit community of people who cared about the craft of writing and were willing to promote it. Today, people from across Penn’s vast assortment of schools and disciplines — nurses, engineers, business students, even a veterinarian — take part in the center’s programs. </p>

<p>But for what Dr. Filreis calls “this free space, this sandbox, this incubator” to survive and prosper, the Writers House requires an ever renewable corps of undergraduates. And so, after he quickly obtained a $1 million gift to renovate the house, Dr. Filreis set out to populate it. He began recruiting talent, and with no less effort or fervor than his colleagues in the athletic department.</p>

<p>“My line is, if you were a swimmer and you felt your backstroke was the best, the coach would be recruiting you,” he said. “Why can’t I behave like the swim coach?”</p>

<p>Dr. Filreis said he hears from at least 150 high school students a year. They typically learn about the Writers House through word of mouth, especially from alumni. Some also learn about the program through readings and fund-raisers that Dr. Filreis organizes several times a year in New York and other large cities.</p>

<p>Sixty to 80 of these students turn out each year to be seriously interested in writing; many of them visit the Writers House, spending time, often with their parents, chatting with Dr. Filreis in his cozy garret office. He writes letters to the admissions office for a portion of them, advocating their selection. Last year he wrote about 25 such letters, and he said his success rate at helping them get in is high.</p>

<p>“The reason why admissions likes the Writers House is that this is a kid I’m going to take under my wing,” he said. “If you take this kid, she’s going to succeed because I’m going to take care of her.” </p>

<p>Students, like anyone else at the university, can decide how involved they want to be. Participation can vary from the shy poet who occasionally attends a reading at the house to the outgoing aspiring sportswriter who camps out on a green couch in an alcove off the living room nearly every afternoon and evening.</p>

<p>Eric Karlan, a junior who was recruited by Dr. Filreis, is the couch’s constant companion. “I do all my homework here,” he said during lunch one afternoon with a half-dozen other students in the dining room. “If I don’t show up for a couple of days, people call and say, ‘Are you sick? Are you dead?’”</p>

<p>“It’s more than a community,” Mr. Karlan added, “it’s a family. Al is the bearded patriarch, and these guys are my brothers and sisters.”</p>

<p>Not long after Mr. Karlan arrived at Penn, he told Dr. Filreis that he would like to start a literary magazine. Less than a month later, the professor persuaded a donor to endow the magazine, appropriately called The Green Couch.</p>

<p>“It’s a very nurturing place,” said Cecilia Corrigan, a junior who writes poetry and plays, and who was also recruited by Dr. Filreis. “It was immediately so welcoming and individualized.”</p>

<p>“Here I’ve found the most amazing mentors,” Ms. Corrigan said. “You can connect with professors one on one.”</p>

<p>Jamie-Lee Josselyn came to the university from a small town in southern New Hampshire, primarily because of the Writers House. Dr. Filreis was appointed her adviser, and before she had ever attended a class at Penn, she had been at his house for pizza with the other students he was advising.</p>

<p>Once intensely shy, Ms. Josselyn said it took her two years to become deeply involved with the Writers House. She graduated in 2005 and never left, becoming Dr. Filreis’s assistant. Now every morning before coming to campus, she works on a memoir of her mother, who died when she was 12.</p>

<p>“I wasn’t able to say, ‘I’m a writer,’ when I first came to the Writers House,” Ms. Josselyn said. “We use the phrase a lot — a place to stand. You need a place to stand.”</p>

<p>A network of alumni supports the program and offers encouragement and professional advice to students. In addition, a number of well-known writers and poets who have spent time here have become unofficial alumni. This is all extremely gratifying, Dr. Filreis told a large gathering for a reading at the Louis K. Meisel Gallery in SoHo one evening in November that was organized by the Writers House. </p>

<p>But the larger point, he said in the quiet of his office the previous day, was that he and his students had created a community, and together they had enhanced the standing of the literary arts at a university better known for its economic forecasts. Dr. Filreis invoked the mentor who brought him to Penn 22 years ago, Robert Lucid, an English professor who died last December.</p>

<p>“If Bob were here,” the professor said, “he’d say what’s really important is that Penn has been enlivened by these kids.”

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</p>

<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/education/05writers.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/education/05writers.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Here's the Kelly Writers House web site:</p>

<p>Kelly</a> Writers House</p>

<p>Well I guess then it's a Tudor, not a Victorian ;)</p>

<p>^ It ain't a Tudor (the NY Times notwithstanding), it's a Gothic style Victorian:</p>

<p>
[quote]
Built in 1851 by architect Samuel Sloan as part of a Victorian real estate development called "Hamilton Village". </p>

<p>A fine example of a Gothic Cottage.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Virtual</a> Tour of Penn's Campus: Kelly Writers House</p>

<p>You can't always trust the Times. :)</p>

<p>Well regardless of what they call it, it exists and is awesome.</p>

<p>Come to Penn, we write good!</p>

<p>^ You write REAL good.</p>

<p>I'm also looking into the Communications field but I easily chose Penn over Northwestern and USC's communications schools (which I got accepted to) because it's widely known that students often change majors when they actually get into college.. so I don't want to be stuck at a school where it's prestigious for Communication dept, but not as well-rounded.</p>

<p>I just visited Penn and fell in love with it, so my decision has been made.</p>

<p>^ It must have been Spring Fling. ;)</p>

<p>Congrats on your decision. Great analysis--and choice!</p>

<p>Woohoo! Congratulations and welcome to Penn.</p>