<p>OK. most of this thread is total BS, let me tell u why.</p>
<p>I’m now an undergraduate transfer student at Penn, I transferred twice, I studied for a semester in the #1 CS school in the UK, and then transferred to the #1 engineering school in the middle east, and then transferred to Penn CS. And let me tell you, being at Penn (or at any top school) makes a lot of difference. I’m being taught by professors who are universally known in their fields. My psychology professor is amazing, he has been teaching psychology for more than 20 years, and he is one of the authors of the psychology textbook, he makes psychology very interesting and fun to learn it’s like going to a movie when I go to his class. My math teacher has been teaching at Penn for 34 years, he taught at Yale, Cornell and UIUC for a few years before that, and there are only 6 students in his class. My English teacher has also been teaching for more than 30 years, and she has written many books on English writing. She is so good, and her class has only 13 students, imagine the experience you can have. I’ve only been here for less than 3 months, and my adviser (who I have coffee with every week) has already recommended me to some of his connections at MIT Lincoln Labs and got me in touch with them so that I’d get an internship there. There are office hours here almost all the time for every course, and instructors are easily accessible all the time. I can study anything I want here and still get a degree in CS, I only have to complete 4 specific CS courses, and the other 36 courses can be whatever I want. I know students here at the M&T program in their senior and junior years who already are guaranteed jobs by top companies like Morgan Stanley, and the only difficulty they are facing is to choose between Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, do you think a state school senior will even dream about such an opportunity? I never had any of these experiences and opportunities at another university, and I know for sure that my close friends at Purdue, Texas A&M, Texas Austin, Oklahoma state, Wisconsin Madison, and Montana tech aren’t having the same experience or as much fun. And with all of this, I still think that Penn is not the best place to get a degree from and there are a place or two that are better and more serious.</p>
<p>It MAY be true that I will end up getting the same job as a CSU-Long Beach graduate, but in the end, I didn’t come to Penn just to get a better a job, I came here to learn and be a better person, interact with people who want to do something with their life, and study everything that I’m interested in where I can get the best education in the fields that I find interesting. I thing this is what will benefit me in the long run and let me make the right decisions in life. look for a post by Joe (Caltech '04), he talks about how graduating from Caltech opened every door for him and made him go wherever he wants.</p>
<p>It is also true that anybody can be successful if he made the best out of his education, my dad’s friend graduated from a terrible university and then he got his MS and PHd from Stanford, and now he is a professor there, because he is an amazing person.</p>
<p>NEVER judge MIT or Stanford or even Penn without studying there for at least a semester, then you can say whatever you want and everyone should respect that. If you didn’t get into MIT or Stanford that doesn’t mean that they are the same as your “highly ranked” state school. Do you think a place where 1500 students apply (for transfer admission) and only 20 get accepted (Stanford), will be the same as a place where 1500 students apply, and 2000 get accepted?</p>