At a recent gathering at Boston, Pen’s president said that Pen’s goal is to make every student do inter-disciplinary study.
Your post about the Penn “treadmill” is a great way of summarizing my feeling of things. My average week involved 15 hours of class, 30 hours of homework/papers, and another 45-60 hours of extra-curriculars. Especially sophomore and junior years, it would not be uncommon for me to be away from my apartment from 8:45AM-12:45AM multiple days per week.
For me, that kept things interesting… I enjoy always being busy, so it was a pleasure for me to be on the move all day, every day. That wasn’t the case for some of my friends and classmates.
Regarding some other posters’ comments on not being able to get into courses, I found that the large lectures were often difficult to get into. Some were general ed courses, but a lot were intro courses for popular majors. There was also difficulty getting into smaller seminars with popular professors, but once I started getting into the 200-level courses and above, I never had any issue with scheduling.
Thanks for the informative post! You describe exactly the sentiments I heard from so many UPenn undergrads. They always seemed to be “on the go,” or on the “treadmill,” and it wasn’t rare to have 45 hours of academic commitments AND 45-60 hours of extra-curricular commitments a week. (For most people, that makes for a very busy week!)
Those that genuinely loved being on the move and bouncing from one activity to the next thoroughly enjoyed the experience. A subset were exhausted and disheartened by the treadmill. The important point to note is that it’s not for everyone.
Similarly, @Much2learn - what you describe is exactly why Chicago isn’t for everyone. If you don’t want academics to be front and center, where you might spend hours and even days at a time studying, and most other people are doing the same, it’s probably not a great place. For others, it’s a perfect place. (The overall intensity at Chicago has almost certainly ebbed, though, and the fit there is more flexible now too.)
To contrast chrisw’s post with my own Chicago experience: over a 7 day week, I probably spent about 55-60 hours on academic matters (classes, reading, work), and then maybe 10-15 hours on extra-curricular stuff. This left a LOT more time for just hanging out, having long dinners, kicking a soccer ball around with friends, etc.
Note, I raise all of the above because top research Us now try to appear to be everything to everyone. This just isn’t the case. Yes, fit can be flexible at medium or large-sized Us, but dominant cultures certainly exist.
UPenn is know for having an extremely elitist community, much like Harvard and to a certain extent Brown. There are many trust fund babies who didn’t do much to get in. There is also a huge drinking culture. Grade deflation is the sauce of major stress and depression. Also, the weather and location isn’t the best- cold icy winters and in the middle of a relatively dangerous part of Philadelphia.
“UPenn is know for having an extremely elitist community, much like Harvard and to a certain extent Brown.”
That wasn’t my experience at all. If anything, Penn was one of the most accessible, approachable elite schools, as far as I could tell. Sure, there’s elitism, just as there is at any top school. For the most part, though, given its size, its scope, and the vast array of student aspirations and inspirations, it wasn’t overly elitist, as far as I could tell.
A case in point, Penn has students studying nursing, marketing, accounting, communications, insurance management, etc. These aren’t traditionally “elite” fields, and, especially at the grad school level, it draws people from all over. Look at the house staff at a college house - there are graduate advisers who come from everywhere, and they are accepted and beloved in their communities.
I provide two counterpoints:
- When I was at Yale visiting a family friend, I ran into a lot of Yale Law students, and I was amazed at how many went to Harvard or Yale for undergrad (or Oxford or Cambridge), and the whole place had a much more "elitist" feel to me.
- When I mentioned my intention to go to Penn for grad school to some of my fellow Chicago alums, one sniffed and said, "you mean the state school ivy?"
There are certainly instances like the above two at Penn, but, for the most part, I at least didn’t find it to be elitist in the way you describe.
For me, the common thread was how “on the move” and over-scheduled the students were, not how elitist the community was.
@KalaniAnne “UPenn is know for having an extremely elitist community, much like Harvard and to a certain extent Brown. There are many trust fund babies who didn’t do much to get in. There is also a huge drinking culture. Grade deflation is the sauce of major stress and depression. Also, the weather and location isn’t the best- cold icy winters and in the middle of a relatively dangerous part of Philadelphia.”
I am guessing you know virtually nothing firsthand about Penn. Have you ever had the opportunity to visit, explore the campus, and meet some actual students?
Let’s unpack that string of misinformation.
- "UPenn is know for having an extremely elitist community, much like Harvard"
In my experience, the Penn student culture tends toward practical doers who are team oriented, hands-on, and sociable. They like what they are doing, and develop relationships with others who do also. Acting elitist does not fit well into that model at all.
- "There are many trust fund babies who didn't do much to get in."
This happens a lot less than people think. I don’t actually know any of these. If you want to call President Gutmann and ask how much it would cost to get in as a development case, I would guess it would be at least $10 million, and probably more. Not many people can just write that check.
- "There is also a huge drinking culture."
There is definitely a drinking culture on the weekends. Whether it is worse than other schools, I really do not know. However, the amount of work that is required of students means that it is more limited than at many schools where parties rage on every day. That does not happen at Penn.
- "Grade deflation is the sauce of major stress and depression. "
I don’t think Penn has grade deflation or inflation. Cornell, Princeton and Columbia (SEAS at least) seem to have lower grades. Harvard, Brown, and Yale seem to have higher grades.
- "Also, the weather and location isn't the best- cold icy winters and in the middle of a relatively dangerous part of Philadelphia."
Weather: It isn’t Hawaii, but it is the best weather in the Ivy League and much better than Cambridge, Hanover or Ithaca.
Penn students like the big-city, Philadelphia location and do not feel unsafe there at all.
“This was entirely different from my undergrad experience at Chicago, where there was a lot of emphasis on deep thinking and long, long conversations with people.”
@Cue7
Sounds like it is not an intellectual community at Penn. Did you find that there was a preponderance of those high school types motivated by chasing A’s instead course/discipline content? If so, ugh-give them their degrees during the first week of school and send them home. That would allow those interested in mastering material instead of collecting A’s to stay and do so and classes would not be contaminated by the grade grubbers.
"“This was entirely different from my undergrad experience at Chicago, where there was a lot of emphasis on deep thinking and long, long conversations with people.”
“Sounds like it is not an intellectual community at Penn.”
“Did you find that there was a preponderance of those high school types motivated by chasing A’s instead course/discipline content?”
Recasting students who actually know how to do things in the real world as “not intellectual” seems odd to me, to say the least.
Penn students are smart, and enjoy serious study and thought, but also understand the value of hands-on experience. The balance of study and practical projects is a Ben Franklin inspired trait at Penn. If you study physics or chemistry in books, but never going into the lab, does that mean you are “not intellectual?” If you actually do some writing instead of just reading books about how to write, does that mean you are “not intellectual?” Of course not. Students learn a lot more through an effective combination of the two.
I wouldn’t say that Penn lacks an intellectual atmosphere- I would just say that it is kept in balance by the very practical nature of the school and the students it attracts. I took many (many many many) humanities courses at Penn and in all of them we were having the deepest conversations possible on a college campus that often spilled over into coffee shops, college houses, and dining halls. There is no forced, pseudo-intellectualism at Penn as I found at several other universities I visited. There was a very real and honest conversation about the ideas that have shaped the world. Penn offered all of the intellectualism with about a quarter of the pretension of its peers. So yes, there were kids spending hours over dinner chatting about Sartre and there were kids eating sushi as they walked down locust walk to get to their next meetings. And there were those that alternated between the two lifestyles depending on the day. The dominant culture at Penn is certainly pre-professional; But it never comes at the expense of the intellectual. Pre-professionalism serves to keep the campus grounded, self-aware, and keenly cognizant of how the ideas we were discussing might one day play out beyond the ivory tower. It is a different brand of intellectualism-- but no less valid than that of other universities.
One of my History profs had previously taught at Columbia and would often wax poetic about how Penn’s curricular flexibility and 4 separate undergrad schools were real boons to the liberal arts because you didn’t find a ton people bogging down a humanities course because they weren’t interested in the reading or didn’t see how it would be applicable to their future. Penn provided resources to those with more practical interests without ever sacrificing the depth or breadth of resources available to those with more ‘ornamental’ interests, as Benjamin Franklin might have put it. The professor found that schools like Columbia have very lofty ideals of what an education should consist of but in practice they do a disservice to their students by forcing them all into understaffed humanities courses taught by grad students without clear departmental direction, regardless of interest or dedication. At Penn, students are rarely just collecting A’s-- they are unimaginably passionate about their school work, in part because they aren’t forced to fashion a finance degree out of a combination of Math and Econ classes or an engineering degree in the science departments. If those are their interests, they can go pursue them and they do so zealously. If their interests fit more comfortably among the more abstract areas of academia, then they’ll have a home at Penn too. Yes, all students can join Wharton clubs and take philosophy and engineering classes-- and many choose to take advantage of those opportunities. But those opportunities don’t dilute the very real intellectual force that runs through all 4 of Penn’s undergrad schools.
And let’s not forget that professional schools can be highly intellectual as well. It is none other than the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania that has the most published b-school research faculty in the world. Research is being done in every corner of this university and even the most practical schools have faculties and students that are supremely dedicated to intellectual pursuits even if they are sometimes filtered through a pre-professional lens.
@lostaccount said:
“Sounds like it is not an intellectual community at Penn. Did you find that there was a preponderance of those high school types motivated by chasing A’s instead course/discipline content?”
Hmm… I wouldn’t say that Penn isn’t an “intellectual” community. Really by definition, any school - especially any college - is engaged in an intellectual enterprise. In this way, Penn is no different.
I would say, that from what I saw, Penn didn’t have a large collection of future academics in their undergrad student body. NOTE, by academics, I mean those either currently or aspiring to be a scholar, or professor, at the higher ed level - essentially anyone planning to make a life in the ivory tower. So, I define the term narrowly.
I think the culture and the types of students selected actively play against the possibility of having lots of budding academics present in the Penn undergrad population. Training to be an academic, and being an academic, requires the very sort of imbalance that Penn (institutionally and culturally at the undergrad level) frowns upon. It requires devoted, intense, and singular study - often in isolation and while grappling with difficult problems - in ways that don’t mirror what most Penn students do or want to do.
What I saw at Penn were students who were involved in all sorts of things. Their classes/learning was a part of that, but extra-curriculars played a big role, as did social enterprises. They then learned all sorts of skills through their varied pursuits. In contrast to this, most academics have a fairly narrow skill set, and devote most of their energies to fairly myopic areas. It’s hard to find a history professor who also is an elite coder or runs a fashion blog. Being a history professor takes too much time and energy to focus on much else.
It’s much easier to find a Penn history major who’s great at coding and also is heavily involved with a fashion club on campus. That same history major is unlikely to give up all the other cultivated interests to focus singularly on the intense (and sometimes isolating) study of history at the graduate school level. That same history major may take her coding skills (honed through hours in her extra-curricular work as a coder for various clubs) to a tech company after graduation, where her writing skills and awareness of the importance of narratives - something she learned as a history major - will serve her well on the job. It’s quite unlikely that the history major would forgo all this to get a PhD in history - her Penn experience didn’t really make a PhD the next natural step. It could happen, but I think it really only does for 3-4% of the undergrad population. (As opposed to say, 15% of the Chicago population, with, at least in my day, another 5% beginning some elite PhD program and then dropping out.)
To sum, when people ask if I think Penn is pre-professional, I say that the UPenn education AND experience is great preparation for the world outside the ivory tower. (There are some undergrads who chose to stay in the ivory tower, but they are a small minority at UPenn.) This doesn’t mean that it’s pre-professional, but the academic/ivory tower isn’t as revered at Penn, precisely because that life requires a type of imbalance that is anathema to most Penn students.