<p>I mean I internally transferred from the College to Wharton</p>
<p>Well I’m glad I chose College then :)</p>
<p>For me it was Loyola University (Chicago) and Tulane. I withdrew my Georgetown EA application, but they still sent me their admitted student survey, so maybe they count too =p</p>
<p>So, does this mean you hated the college too?
Regardless of school, you’re at Penn. It’s no different. I really don’t understand this difference in schools thing within Penn. You go to Penn. Period. You have the same opportunities, you can take the same classes, etc… Anyways, I hope you don’t mind (feel free to counter argue w/ me. I think this will be a good debate), but I’m going to address your points.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Wharton is not a math major, nor an engineering major. The only business savy people that need to really know math are quants, who need like a PhD in math to begin with. Everyone else wants to do consulting/banking/start a business, and beyond calculus/statistics, and maybe a tad more, nothing much is needed. These days, most of the things bankers/traders do are pretty set in terms of mathematics. You get multiples, you value companies, you calculate future cash flow, etc… These things have already been discovered. Remember that Penn was founded on a balance between practicality and liberal arts. I.E., in some classes at Penn, you debate and conclude at the end of the day that you all agree to disagree on the meaning of Plato’s cave, but in other classes, you learn simply practical stuff. How to get enterprise value from firm equity, etc… In regards to getting into the depth of things, I feel that most Penn professors get pretty deep into the origins of the equations, etc… In addition, high school is where you get your hand pulled by somebody. In college, you’re expected to take the initiative. You have massive libraries, infinite online resources, peers. </p></li>
<li><p>Everything you do in life will probably involve team work. I think Penn prepares you pretty darn well in regards to handling people that don’t do much since you get a feel for it early on in college rather than on the job.</p></li>
<li><p>The amount you learn should be more important than merely the grade you get. The people who copy get totally destroyed in the exams, trust me.</p></li>
<li><p>I agree with you therefore that mgmt at Penn is a joke. But only because it’s a joke everywhere else. What you get out of most in MGMT 100, for example, is friends and the knowledge on how to deal with teams I guess. The latter you learn not from the text, however, but rather from pure experience.
Also, I don’t think you can really learn how to manage a team. You’re either good at it, or you’re not good. I mean, jack welch, revived GE, and… I don’t think he even got a mgmt degree.
Also, I’m not sure if ur talking about mgmt 100, but i had a great time. a) because my team was good. b) because the whole class knew it was bs. So kids would like… in one of the case studies, purposely suggest something that is ridiculous, but use our humour and wit to come up with a plausible reasoning through using loopholes and bending rules in every way possible. : )</p></li>
<li><p>After the exam, just relax man. You generally have a feel for how well you did as an individual. Sure you don’t know how the curve will be, but still. College is not about only grades man. Join a club, play a sport. After my exams, I tend to just forget about the exams. It’s over, and once I get it back, I’ll look over it. No need to hurry.</p></li>
<li><p>Your @ an Ivy. People stereotype that you are at least somewhat well off, and beggars flock here. . </p></li>
<li><p>Welcome to America? Walk man. I always walk from Penn to center city. Have you seen what the walk will look like in the coming years? ([Penn</a> Connects : — Home](<a href=“http://www.pennconnects.upenn.edu%5DPenn”>http://www.pennconnects.upenn.edu))</p></li>
<li><p>Herm… I can’t say much about this one. I don’t know how much laundry costs in other schools, but this really shouldn’t shatter your image of Penn.</p></li>
<li><p>Your in the North East. Any school up here has crappy weather.</p></li>
<li><p>Real estate prices in a city is far more expensive than say, in Ithaca. Plus, honestly, see how much Penn has improved over the years in terms of both University City and financial aid. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>In regards to finding inspiration in classes, you have to branch out. It’s easy to have like this epic monent in small classes like English in the college, but when it comes to the general req. classes at Penn like OPIM, Econ, etc… it’s hard to since the teachers can’t really have debates, etc.. going on with every kid. But, they’re very accessible too, it’s just a matter of you e-mailing them or meeting them after class. I had lunch with my OPIM teacher, and we spoke about this project he was doing for a private company. He was creating essentially a form of artificial intelligence that collected data through marketing techniques and the user’s online actions to learn and build an individualized consumer product for that specified user. (The difference could be as minute as one person wanting a 50 inch screen HDTV, and another wanting a 49.5 inch HDTV, but the AI would detect and determine this based on user data collected through his/her computer over the years). There’s more to teacher interaction than merely in class in other words. Oh, and outside of class, I found out that one of my teachers teaches at a jail when he’s not teaching at Penn. Just like the most random things that are pretty darn interesting. </p>
<p>There are 10k students at Penn. It’s not that hard to find kids that aren’t all that into the greek thing. I have two groups of friends at penn. One is the studious, academic, “i like want to condense life into a single word” kinda group, and the other is the “dude, let’s make sure we don’t remember what happened tonight” friends. Work hard, play hard to the fullest. You can’t find kids from every and any spectrum here. Just look for them, and reach out.</p>
<p>Keep the vision though. It’s like… herm, the UN Millennium Development Goals. All the heads of states knew that they weren’t going to reach them, but they still adopted it because it would give the states a reason and incentive to at least keep on trying.
Never give up, and smile; life’s a blessing.</p>
<p>^ Excellent post.</p>
<p>Personally, I have a lot of the same complaints legend had about Penn. I guess because I’m from DC and not the West Coast some of the stuff like weather or SEPTA (try public transport in India) doesn’t bother me at all. I guess also i applied ED so I didn’t really have the option to choose unlike him who got into Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Stanford (and personally, I would have gone to Stanford over Penn in a heartbeat if I wasn’t soooooo much closer to Penn). </p>
<p>Part of me feels that preprofessional Whartons and premeds take away from some of the acadmic experience, at least thats how I felt in intro Chem and Spanish. Chem was full of premeds who were only out to get the best grade while I was taking it out of more interest than doctor aspirations. I also wanted the professors to go a little further on some stuff but lots of the time they said stuff like “wait for pchem.” </p>
<p>From some of my Wharton friends it seems that they take many of their classes because it’s required and they just want to go through the motions while getting the best grade they can. I think that may be where some of the cut and dry method comes from for Wharton classes vs some college classes. Professors might just be teaching to how a lot of the kids want to learn the material (which reminds me a lot of my high school where kids just wanted to go through the motions of AP classes to look good for college).</p>
<p>“So, does this mean you hated the college too?”
-Not really – my experience at Penn has changed a lot as a result of being in a different school, academically speaking. </p>
<p>“Regardless of school, you’re at Penn. It’s no different. I really don’t understand this difference in schools thing within Penn. You go to Penn. Period. You have the same opportunities, you can take the same classes, etc…”
-As a transfer, I’m essentially “starting later” than everyone else, and so I have to cram my schedule often. There isn’t a whole lot of affordable room to overindulge in the kind of courses I’d be taking in the College.</p>
<p>“Wharton is not a math major, nor an engineering major.[…] In college, you’re expected to take the initiative. You have massive libraries, infinite online resources, peers.”
-Sure, I can agree with that whole paragraph there. It’s just that my interpretation of Wharton, going into it, was different from the reality. Just sticking a bunch of arguments into a valuation scheme and crapping out a value is not interesting to me. I like understanding the math behind a given business function, because I gain a deeper understanding of the concept, and I usually find cool tricks/ways to do things. This is one reason why I am also an OPIM concentration, because I simply have the need to add something quantitative. I just feel that studying business in this way as an undergrad is very devoid of any creativity. It’s all very preprofessional, but there are downsides to it. I find that the most intellectually curious people are in the College/Engineering schools. In Wharton, it seems to be all about rat-racing, and I didn’t come to college for that.</p>
<p>“Everything you do in life will probably involve team work. I think Penn prepares you pretty darn well in regards to handling people that don’t do much since you get a feel for it early on in college rather than on the job.”
-Of course, but I still dislike it. I don’t like the idea that there’s always someone free-riding. On the job, teamwork is much more pleasurable, I find. If people slacked off at my places of employment like they do in my Wharton groupwork, they’d be fired! One case of this, for instance, happened in a recent class where our final project was to be scaled depending on group size. This is a problem when group members choose to do nothing, because then you leave everyone else to deal with a bigger project than they would have had to do otherwise. The only part I liked about MGMT 100 was that the slackers usually got canned. I feel that in the real world, slacking is more dangerous because nobody wants to pay someone who is obviously not adding any value to anything. In school, the teachers don’t know and don’t care who is doing the work, so people can get away with slacking because they know someone else is going to break and just get it done.</p>
<p>“3. The amount you learn should be more important than merely the grade you get. The people who copy get totally destroyed in the exams, trust me.”
-I’d say the former is 100% true and the latter is mostly true. There are plenty of people who just opt out of the busywork by copying, but still study and do well on the exams. I’ve seen it happen too often to say that it doesn’t.</p>
<p>“4. I agree with you therefore that mgmt at Penn is a joke. But only because it’s a joke everywhere else. […]”
-True, but I wish that the classes focused more on developing team dynamics, instead of ruining it with obviously skewed grading schemes. Assigning a large portion of my grade to a status report is ridiculous, especially when you’re marked down for random things that you had no idea were vulnerable to being marked down. I was marked down for things that I did under my own TA’s advice!! People who took the later status report runs did better because they were able to keep like 5% per random requirement that others in the group were marked down for already. I also dislike how MGMT eats up so much of your time, and yet the marginal benefit seems to be so small. Everything you do in that class amounts to like 50% of your grade, and then everything else is a black-box function that gets determined after the fact by a concluding essay. Admittedly, a lot of the activities were pretty fun. I agree that it’s primarily an experience-oriented thing, and I wish they’d take that route a bit further and fix up the grading a bit.</p>
<p>“5. After the exam, just relax man. You generally have a feel for how well you did as an individual. Sure you don’t know how the curve will be, but still. College is not about only grades man. Join a club, play a sport. After my exams, I tend to just forget about the exams. It’s over, and once I get it back, I’ll look over it. No need to hurry.”
-Again, I agree with this. I tend to put exams aside after finishing them as well, but I like having quick feedback. If I am making some error that I’m not even aware of, I’d rather fix that assumption sooner than later.</p>
<p>“6. Your @ an Ivy. People stereotype that you are at least somewhat well off, and beggars flock here.”
-Sure, but many other schools don’t even have this problem. You’re never going to find beggars bugging you for money in front of Frist at Princeton, for instance.</p>
<p>“7. Welcome to America? Walk man. I always walk from Penn to center city. Have you seen what the walk will look like in the coming years? (Penn Connects : <em>—</em>Home)”
-I always walk when it’s a free-time thing, but I usually take transportation to work everyday.</p>
<p>“8. Herm… I can’t say much about this one. I don’t know how much laundry costs in other schools, but this really shouldn’t shatter your image of Penn.”
-It doesn’t shatter it, but it’s mainly a facilities thing. I’ve had my AC break down countless times in various rooms, I’ve called to have my door’s peephole fixed multiple times (never got fixed, either), I’ve had part of the ceiling cave in at a work shift and flood the room with water, my light sources always seem to be extremely dim, the elevators are always broken (they once decided to shut down an elevator for maintenance WHILE I WAS STILL IN THE ELEVATOR), and one time in Hill Dining Hall, a live cockroach fell into my food from above after landing on my neck first. **** like this just keeps piling up and it’s very irritating. Things just don’t flow smoothly or work as well as they do at other schools.</p>
<p>“9. Your in the North East. Any school up here has crappy weather.”
-Which is why I wonder what it would have been like going to Stanford.</p>
<p>“10. Real estate prices in a city is far more expensive than say, in Ithaca. Plus, honestly, see how much Penn has improved over the years in terms of both University City and financial aid.”
-I mean, I agree with most of that, but financial aid is a huge hassle. I do everything myself and it’s intensely stressful, and aid is simply better at peer institutions. I like that Penn is trying to make itself more affordable… I just wish they would have done this BEFORE I came to college, lol.</p>
<p>There are tons of interesting people here on campus, sure. But a large part of college should also be about the academics and environment, and I feel that I would have had a better college experience elsewhere.</p>
<p>lol… this thread is not making me feel much better about my wharton-related worries… does the competition/lack of inspired learning get better or worse as people start taking smaller classes?</p>
<p>on the other hand, at least now i know i would have been thoroughly out of place at uchicago, if the weather bothers legendofmax bad enough in philly. lol.</p>
<p>Don’t worry about it Miss Barbara, it only matters if you are an inspired learner or not. Even in high school AP classes, I can figure out who learns because they want to and who learns to get something they want. I tend to fall into the first category, a vast number of my classmates fell into the second. And I’m in Wharton. I guess I’m going to die lol. </p>
<p>Still, I look at the required courses and I can already tell you the ones I’m not very interested in, but I’m looking forward to many as well. This is going to be what we make of it, so don’t let others weigh to heavily on your impression. Besides, I hear the competition is not as bad as people say. Sure it’s there, but I’ve also heard that there is a great deal of cooperation betweens students. </p>
<p>And don’t hate on Chicago. The weather is not THAT bad =)</p>
<p>Don’t let my post instill doubts or anything – it’s all based on my opinions and experiences so far here at Penn, and I am particularly miffed because I had so many alternate choices that were great, and yet I turned them all down. Being here at Penn has just felt “off” for me and I can’t help but wonder if I’d be feeling this way had I gone to a place like Harvard or Stanford. </p>
<p>As for the competition… it really isn’t so much an issue of competition that is the problem. There’s a lot of cooperation, indeed, but what bothers me is the fact that, as chitown said, most people are there to “get something they want” as opposed to “learning because they want to.”</p>
<p>I agree that the preprofessional bent that Penn really detracts from the intellectual environment, but I think it’s the same story at Harvard and Stanford in particular, which are also incredibly preprofessional. Wharton adds another element, but I think you’d have had the same experience at many of your other choices. Places like Brown (which I turned down for Penn to get back on topic), Yale, LACs, and even a place like MIT i think cater much more to the ‘love of learning’ crowd rather than the ‘point a to point b’ one.</p>
<p>^idk..i cant say i know a lot about stanford having only been there for 4 days during admit weekend, but i consider stanford kids (not that you could really generalize like this but you know..) to be more of the “love of learning” crowd than penn kids (also, thanks to the quarter system its much easier to take random classes just for the pleasure of it at stanford than it is at a semester school). i noticed the pre professional atmosphere in just 2 and a half days at penn. i attributed that difference in people’s attitudes not only to penn and wharton, but to the difference between east and west coast as well. i met really nice people at penn (nice enough to convince me to go there) but if i had to choose just between crowds, i would choose stanford (everyone was extremely nice/ amazing).
i chose penn b/c i wanted to be in a city and b/c it’s much closer to home than california, but until i get there in the fall i dont think i’ll stop wondering if i made the right decision, especially b/c the cold might kill me. legendof max makes me sad (i know its unintentionally haha). but there’s no school that is loved by all of its students, not even harvard or stanford, so hopefully i and everyone else who still has doubts about this will get to penn and fall completely in love with it</p>
<p>Philly: I doubt that, really – the atmospheres of the other schools are profoundly different.</p>
<p>I think Stanford has a better balance of love of learning vs preprofessional students. Harvard may be just as preprofessional as Penn, but I really know 0 about Harvard’s vibe.</p>
<p>It’s just sad that in the past week I’ve had more intellectually stimulating discussions with friends at home than I had back at school outside of class. I’m still very preprofessional myself and Penn caters to that side of me. I just wish that more of the students had more profound discussions. By profound discussions I wish to exclude political talk which leads to bickering.</p>
<p>I don’t understand what would be wrong with being very career oriented the motivated ppl i know, know what they want and are going to do what it takes to get there. I would wager that each of us on here have been in a class we were not to fond of but we still got an A, why bc we wanted an A.</p>
<p>legendofmax: I think the Stanford/Penn culture difference is mostly an east coast/west coast thing. Stanford churns out an absurd amount of professional students each year, and in my own area (medicine), a larger than expected proportion of the stab-you-in-the-back gunner premeds have been those I have met from Stanford. Do not confuse the appearance of being laid back with not being career-oriented or having a love of learning. Harvard is also a preprofessional factory much like Penn and Cornell among the ivies, and also similar to places like Stanford, Duke, and Hopkins.</p>
<p>Every kid that I’ve spoken to that went to my high school say the same thing about college. Yes, exact same deal. I really don’t think there’s a difference at all. Frankly legendofmax, I’m going to outright say that you probably got rejected somewhere else, felt that you had to “settle” for Penn, and now are taking your anger off on Penn. I see this to be completely unfair.</p>
<p>^what the hell
is it THAT hard to believe he chose penn over every other school? some people do</p>
<p>Through the way he writes, you can see that he longed for something else. It’s pretty blatant, and I’m gonna take a guess and say it’s Princeton (It’s pretty much the only school he didn’t list that’s up there). </p>
<p>The reason for my rather harsh response is because frankly, I am annoyed. There is absolutely no appreciation for Penn, and he clearly looks down upon the school when in fact, I don’t even think he deserves to go here. </p>
<p>Yes I will say it outright. For the school would have added far more value to a student who is actually humble and honest enough to really appreciate Penn. Maybe I crossed the line, but the truth sometimes hurts. Sometimes, acceptance is the only way to dig oneself out of denial as well.</p>
<p>Another reason I’m pretty angered right now is because i saw this extensively at my school. I went to Andover/Exeter, and the kids that didn’t get into “target schools” went to the respective safeties and learned absolutely nothing throughout the year because s/he thought him/herself to be above the general student body. In fact, on the contrary, the belief in entitlement just made him/her blind to the fact that all doors were available, and that it was just a matter of putting the effort into turning the nob.</p>
<p>also, andy_g, I know. I turned down a bunch of them myself. (check previous posts)</p>