I’m trying to decide between UPenn M&T program and USC CSB (or CSCE). I’m interested in being a tech entrepreneur, not much into wall street, but I do want to take business classes to help broaden my knowledge. Upenn has the best undergrad business school, while USC has the benefit of Silicon Valley + one of the best CS programs. There is also a chance that I might not get into M&T program, and will have to settle with just a CS degree, which would be pretty sad; though, I’ve heard than you can still get a dual degree without being in a coordinated program. While at USC I’ll be happy with either CSB or CSCE(my backup choice) due to USC having the best CS department and being in Silicon Valley.
USC=access to the Silicon Valley, and places like MSFT and AMZN. Penn=access to Wall Street.
By the way, USC is not in Silicon Valley.
A lot of M&T kids work in Silicon Valley, though. If your stats are good enough, you should/could apply ED to M&T.
Go to San Jose St and work at Google
USC is in Los Angeles. Silicon Valley is 300 miles north, near San Francisco.
This is completely incorrect.
Couldn’t edit my post, but I wanted to say that: Even though USC isn’t directly in Silicon Valley, it’s still in California, specifically Los Angeles, which has it’s own set of entrepreneurial opportunities.
Here’s some evidence:
Great. I agree that USC sends people to top tech companies. My next-door neighbor is a USC graduate who works at Google.
However, I have tons of Penn CS friends that graduated this year and are now working at:
Google
Facebook
Microsoft
Amazon
LinkedIn
Airbnb
Square
Dropbox
Palantir
Uber
All of these companies recruit heavily out of Penn, as in they have dedicated recruiters for the school. Claiming that Penn places into Wall Street but not Silicon Valley is 100% incorrect.
Penn’s undergraduate CS program has also doubled in student size in the last few years, so it would not surprise me if these numbers would change in the next couple of years. Every computer science student I’ve met at Penn has had absolutely no trouble getting interviews and collecting offers.
If the original poster’s top two choices are Penn and USC, and he gets into Penn, he would do well to attend Penn.
@“Keasbey Nights” What about summer internships(instead of “after graduation”? I know USC students get plenty of startup internships during the summer after freshman year. What’s about in Philadelphia?
USC has the new entrepreneurial program funded by Jimmy Iovino and Dr Dre that looks fantastic.
And in California at least, USC is more prestigious than Penn. Just as Penn is more prestigious than USC in Philadelphia.
Airbnb???lol.
^
That’s a little bit of a stretch IMHO.
@austrie Absolutely, including sending people to Google / Facebook / Microsoft after their freshman year.
@SeattleTW I agree with @2018dad. Let’s try to be reasonable here. Penn is not the best university in America, but it is almost objectively considered more academically rigorous than USC. And then M&T? The original poster would be crazy to turn down Penn M&T for USC if he or she got into both.
And Airbnb is considered one of the hottest start-ups to get an engineering or design job at, so I’m not sure why the “lol” comment is there.
Penn more rigorous? Lol. Penn is a good school (i got into its law school) but really doesn’t compete with USC on the West Coast and in Los Angeles or the Bay area or Seattle. Out here the Pac 12 schools rule.
I’ve made significant money using Airbnb but it might not last long the way local regulations go. Time will tell. But it’s no salesforce.com.
Gosh!
14
USC has a fantastic alumni/networking culture and in the business world, that is more important then your diploma. I can agree if the claim is that USC graduates are in better position to get jobs fresh out of college. In my opinion, USC is not more prestigious than Penn in California. There are more SC alumni in the position of hire and they are not shy of telling people that they are SC graduate. I think Sc has a bigger presence but no way is USC a more prestigious. There are still a good amount of football/Greek culture that stymies the intellectual culture that the SC administration desperately wants to market to potential high school seniors. I have heard too many stories of questionable admits to think of USC as more than a strong local school. Heck, they admitted Rob Kardashian.
I’m in CSBA at USC. It’s everything I thought it would be and more. Knowing what I know, I couldn’t think of any other program in the US that I would value higher besides Stanford’s. Then I read this thread and I thought Penn M&T would be one of those exceptions… Keep in mind you’d be doing this for Wharton, not for Penn CS. Wharton alone will open more doors on the East Coast than the collective prestige of every college on the West Coast combined, minus Stanford.
16, thanks for your anecdotal experience. Clearly you've never been on campus for more than a few hours, so unfortunately that leads to a lackadaisical and non-value adding contribution. Notwithstanding the fact that barely 20% of the student body is Greek, and a good portion of that being professional fraternities, Greek life has basically been constrained to a strip of road a couple of blocks off campus. Aside from the obnoxious t-shirts, I could have gone through my four years here unaware that fraternities and sororities even exist here.
USC greek culture is on the way down, and this is the result of close-minded Californian parents persisting with the belief that Greek culture and academics are mutually exclusive. Parents take from the limited sample space of the Californian public universities, the correlation between lack of social bonding with that of increased academic performance. As you go up the rankings of the UCs, you find the students becoming increasingly isolated and socially dissatisfied.
Unaware to these parents is that across the rest of the nation, the most elite private universities have the largest and most obnoxious greek atmospheres. Taking the other university in this discussion given the convenience if its example, uPenn has a relatively modest Greek culture among the ivies, and it’s still 50% larger than USC’s at 30% of all students.
Rich and powerful families send their children to these places for the primary incentive of networking with the heirs of other rich and powerful families. The exclusivity and seductiveness of the “top” fraternities seek to self-select these individuals. The majority of f500 CEOs and POTUS’s had been active members of the worst kinds of fraternities - the most elitist, racist, and generally backwards groups. Regardless of what others may think, greek life is effective for the purpose of producing (or self-selecting) well-connected, extroverted individuals - a personality type that finds success in various capacities related to institutional sales and leadership.
It is for the reasons above that USC is a top destination for private/magnet high schools in the South and East, who view USC as the only comparable alternative to elite institutions in the South and East in California. Maintaining private school traditions such as a cappella groups and rowing teams reinforces this attraction.
Focusing out your final point, the fact that you would single out Rob Kardashian I feel displays an underlying bias and contempt for individuals of wealth and familial success, of which you’d coincidentally find in annoying abundance at USC. Objectively, Rob Kardashian is very a successful businessman and entrepreneur supported by the resources he has access to because of his family name. Behind the facade they keep towards the media, the Kardashians are a very powerful family with significant history behind the sources of their wealth. I doubt you’re aware of what GPA/SAT Rob Kardashian had in high school and regardless of what they were, I guarantee you ivy league universities would have been running to the phones at seeing the Kardashian surname on a college application.
Regardless of what you or other people might associate with notorious individuals, it is very immature and close-minded to imply they are a reflection of the quality of a university. Out of the hundreds of thousands of alumni of any university, some will end up in jail and some will aggravate off a lot of people. If you know of him as an alumnus of the school, and he’s not in jail, that is already a success on the school’s part, which is more than can be said for certain other graduates of my school. Donald Trump graduated from Wharton, and although I have certain thoughts I have about him that I will keep to myself, I am wholeheartedly telling OP to choose uPenn. Trump never even entered my mind in this consideration, and I have many more thoughts about him than… Rob Kardashian.
In Southern California, USC has a fantastic reputation and may very well be more prestigious than Penn. Mention Penn to a Los Angeleno who’s not a college professor or graduate of an elite school, and they’ll probably bring up Joe Paterno. Just because it’s an Ivy doesn’t mean it carries the same heft as Harvard, Princeton and Yale.
Elsewhere in the country, a degree from Penn will be more impressive. Once you get out of California, USC is still a football school.
Agreed. I thought Penn was a public school until I applied to its law school. I learned years later about Wharton. And, if you think USC is located in a not so nice area, Penn is located in west Philly, a veritable war zone that makes USC look like Beverly Hills by comparison. That’s the main reason I turned it down.