What's it like to be an English major at Penn?

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Pennsylvania
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Hi there!
I recently committed to Penn, and am very excited about starting my academic career here. I’m interested in literary scholarship (as opposed to creative writing), and a big part of why I chose this school was its research opportunities. So, if it applies, what has been your intellectual experience as an English student at Penn? Did those studying literature have a certain esprit de corps? Was it much like Tartt’s “The Secret History” (sans the classical study), where everyone would sit around and discuss books and literary theory? I know it sounds awfully romantic, and probably is, but I’m extremely curious.

P.S. Does Penn prep one well for a career in academia?

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Penn’s English department–i.e., it’s graduate program in English–is generally ranked among the top 5 or so in the country. So yes, I’d say Penn can prep one well for a career in academia. :slight_smile:

Also, have you thoroughly explored the English Department website? You might get a better sense of the department there (although I realize that you’re also looking for current and recent students’ perspectives):

https://www.english.upenn.edu/undergraduate

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@ConfusedK1d congrats on your choice! welcome to Penn! the English department is one of the very best in the country and there are nay resources to take advantage of. I was not an english major but i have heard the english majors at Penn form a special intimate community. Also many Penn english grads go to top grad school programs, including Penn. There are also many student groups for people with similar interests.
I would also check out the Kelly Writers house if I were you.

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@ConfusedK1d - UPenn’s English Department is actually one of the crown jewels of its Arts & Sciences division. It has a fairly rich history (William Carlos Williams is an alum, as is H.G. Bissinger - the Friday Night Lights author), and it’s a close-knit dept/major. As @Penn95 said, the Kelly Writers House adds to the close-knit feel. Any given year, there are probably only about 50-70 seniors majoring in English, so you see the same kids in the same classes.

In terms of exit options, UPenn has detailed data on this, organized by major. As an example, see what the Class of 2012 English majors did here: http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/files/CAScp2012Report.pdf (go to p. 19 for info on English majors)

As you can see, the outcomes are fairly varied. This is Penn after all, so some English majors go on to Barclays or Citibank, but some go on to Community Legal Services, publishing jobs, etc. What I loved about this dep’t is the outcomes were actually more varied than many other majors/schools at UPenn.

You can see a small number go on to graduate school, but I imagine they get a lot of faculty support simply because they are in the minority, and emerge as faculty darlings (faculty like good students who consider the path they themselves took). The English majors all go on to good grad schools (Carnegie Mellon, Yale, USC, etc.).

I think what you’ll find is the small size leads to a lot of opportunities for growth. You’ll quickly get to know “those guys” - the students who want to pursue academia. There aren’t many, but you’ll have classes with them, get to connect, and get to see what that life is like. Faculty will support you too.

Here’s the best way I can describe English at UPenn: it’s like majoring in History at Johns Hopkins. It may not be one of Penn’s “brand” schools/majors, but it’s extremely good, and actually has carved out a niche/silo for itself that can be a big lifeline for students interested in these topics.

Finally, it deserves mention that UPenn’s incoming Provost, Wendell Pritchett, is a humanities/law guy, and that bodes well for the English department. (https://news.upenn.edu/news/wendell-pritchett-named-provost-university-pennsylvania) At a school like Penn, where STEM/Wharton can hold disproportionate weight, it’s important to have Arts&Sciences leaders balancing the school.

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@ConfusedK1d you can find the latest career data for english majors on this report.
http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/files/CAS_CPSurvey2016.pdf

About 60% went straight to research or employment. (25% went to research/education, 22% to communications, 11% went to consulting, 3% to finance)

23% went on to grad school. Some of the grad schools they went on to were: Cambridge, Oxford, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Duke, UMich, Vanderbilt.

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@ConfusedK1d Run, don’t walk, to Kelly Writer’s House - amazing resource. Al Filries is the bomb. I was an English major at Penn back when Chaucer was writing. It was 100% “critical” and “academic” then. Very east coast dusty. Much more dynamic now. You may be more interested in the scholarshipy side, and it is very good, but it is also much more vibrant overall than back when Penn shipped Mark Crispin Miller off to Hopkins (now NYU) cause he didn’t publish fast enough (and showed movies! in his film class.)

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@Penn95 - do you know why the career office stopped listing the destination of every survey taker, by major? It was GREAT that they used to do that.

That’s why I cited the 2012 report - the 2016 report actually presents less data. The 2012 report had a grid of what each english major (who responded to the survey) was doing. So you could see how many went to law school, went to grad school, etc.

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@Cue7 maybe it was too much work? they still provide very detailed data though. they provide a list of the position each major goes into as well as the breakdown of the grad schools (humanities, law, medical school, business etc).

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@Penn95 - agreed, the data is very detailed, and the career office is a market-leader. It was nice seeing the specific destinations in grid form, though, rather than a list of destinations/more incomplete info. I don’t know why they made the sudden change away from these grids.

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@calidad2020 " was an English major at Penn back when Chaucer was writing."

Old G Dogg? What ever happened to him anyway? ^:)^ ^:)^ :wink:

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@much2learn last I heard he had taken up music and was at Westminster decomposing. badum! thankyouverymuch besuretotipyourserver (Clearly Penn had no comedy writing courses when I went there…)

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In just a bit more recent history, I was at Penn when Philip Roth taught in the English Department. Was he still there when you were there, @CaliDad2020? Also, was Stuart Samuels still there teaching his film history class in the History Department (one of the most enjoyable classes I took at Penn)? You know, Penn now has a full-blown and vigorous Cinema and Media Studies program and major, which focuses on the study of film and media as one of the humanities. Like much at Penn, it’s quite interdisciplinary, including faculty from the English Department and various ethnic and cultural studies departments, in addition to faculty focussed exclusively on the study of the history, business, and analysis of film. And to think that it all started with Professor Samuels and his single, but quite popular, course in the History Department (called “Film as Social and Intellectual History,” if memory serves).

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@“45 Percenter” I was post-Roth. The only film courses I took at Penn were Kubrick and Hitchock courses taught by Mark Crispin Miller who went on to start the film dept. at JHU and is now at NYU last I looked. He was TV critic for one of the weekly news/culture mags at the time also wrote for Harpers. But didn’t publish “the tome” so didn’t get tenured.

Penn didn’t really even have a creative writing course when I was there and no real cinema studies. It was pretty ad hoc. It’s interesting and cool to see how much the cinema and media studies have grown. Al Filireis has done a ton to foster/encourage a “writer’s community” and “writer’s culture” at Penn. They didn’t really exist when I was there or at least I was unaware of it if it did (beyond the DP, UTV, XPN…) Many working writers and film/tv folks were at Penn around the time I was there but I don’t recall there being much of a community. The “academic writing” community the OP asks about was the strong force back when I was a Penn. Now it seems to have both.

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@CaliDad2020 Agree 1,000% about Al Filreis. He’s phenomenal, as is the KWH, the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, and the entire writing community and support system at Penn. Really unparalleled at comparable top schools. I was fortunate to attend a couple of sessions in the intimate front parlor of KWH at which the legendary Edward Albee did some readings and was interviewed by Al (now THAT was a real hoot!). KWH also regularly has nationally prominent writers and journalists come to speak to and interact with relatively small groups of students, including Pulitzer Prize winners and Penn alums Buzz Bissinger (who was sports editor of the DP when I was at Penn) and Jennifer Egan.

And if you haven’t already, you should check out the Cinema Studies Program website:

http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/

Quite a difference from when you and I were at Penn.

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@“45 Percenter” and @CaliDad2020 - does Lisa Scottoline still teach at the university? I heard she was popular (and a best-selling author to boot) when she taught. Not sure if she still does. She was razor sharp and funny too, from what I heard.

English really is an excellent subject to study at U of Penn. Again, the best analogy I have is it’s like studying History at Johns Hopkins - it flies under the radar, but has great offerings!

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@Cue7 Lisa was in my graduating class at Penn (before going on to Penn Law, if I’m not mistaken), but I didn’t know her. Seems that there’s always been some great writers walking around Penn’s campus. And I’m not so sure that English is as “under the radar” at Penn as you might think. There have always been a significant number of English majors at Penn (about 80 per class, the last time I checked, although they don’t all necessarily show up in the Career Plans Surveys), and Penn’s English Department has long been considered one of the top in the country, going back at least to the early to mid 20th Century. It’s almost like saying that Anthropology and the Penn Museum are “under the radar.” Maybe for someone who tends to focus on the preprofessional aspects of Penn, but it’s important to keep in mind that Penn’s College is one of the largest undergraduate liberal arts schools in the Ivy League (along with those at Harvard and Brown), and is as large as or larger than the undergraduate liberal arts components of virtually all of its peers, including your undergrad alma mater. :wink: And Penn’s liberal arts programs have long been quite vigorous and eminent, including at the undergraduate level, and they have quite a significant presence among Penn undergrads. I say that based on my own experience as a Penn undergrad (Wharton, actually) in the 1970s, and my kid’s experience as an artsy humanities type in the College within the past few years. But certainly, things like KWH and other enhancements in the past 20 years, e.g., Platt Student Performing Arts House, Cinema Studies Program and major, Theatre Arts Program and major, support of the Performing Arts Council and its various components, etc., have given the arts and humanities a higher profile on campus than they had before.

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@“45 Percenter” - It’s so funny you mention both the Penn museum and their anthropology department! Because, yes,I categorize them very similarly to the English dept - excellent, but not necessarily the most prominent parts of the brand (like history at jhu).

That may change for the Penn museum btw - in the fall, the Penn board of trustees decided to invest significant money into the renovation of the space, as a result of architectural/faculty input on the under utilization and lack of maximization of its strength. The idea, as I understand it, is that if it’s treated appropriately, the only university museum that matches it is Oxford’s.

So yes, I analogize these departments to history at jhu because, for those not in the know, they may not think of these areas as gems of the school. For those that operate in humanities circles/in this space, of course, they are well known commodities.

(On that note, the new econ bldg at 36th and sansom will be a shot in the arm for that department, which is another excellent part of the arts and sciences division.)

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@Cue7 I think the key words in your last post are “for those not in the know.” And I’m not sure how really relevant that is, UNLESS those not in the know are college applicants who might forego applying to or attending Penn under the misapprehension that it doesn’t have world-class strengths in humanities, social sciences, etc. And THAT may be where some additional PR work needs to be done. For years on this forum, I’ve occasionally read posts indicating that Penn is not a strong school for anything but Wharton and/or preprofessionalism, whatever THAT may mean in this context, and it simply isn’t true. I have to say, though, that I haven’t seen that as much recently as in the past.

In terms of museums of archaeology, the Penn Museum has long been one of the preeminent such museums in the world, university or otherwise. It’s launched more than 300 archaeological expeditions all over the world, and its holdings in several areas are comparable to those of only a select few museums in the world (e.g., the British Museum, National Museum of Iraq, etc.). But the stated goal for some time now has been to upgrade and enhance the visitor experience and museum displays, and ultimately to attract more visitors, so perhaps that’s where the comparison to Oxford’s museum is relevant.

Also, the new building at 36th and Sansom–or actually the renovation of the building at 36th and Walnut and construction of an addition that will more than double the size of the building–will house both the Political Science AND Economics departments (and will be called the Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics). While I’m sure it will be a nice upgrade of space for Economics, the department for which it will really be a shot in the arm is Political Science. Like English, Penn’s Econ department has been nationally and international prominent for many decades, and is well known to be one of the top 10 in the country. Political Science, however, has long been a curious outlier in terms of the eminence of Penn’s social science departments, usually ranked well out of the top 10, or even top 20 departments in the country. And I say that it’s an outlier because Penn’s Economics, Sociology, regional studies, and History (a related humanity) programs have long been ranked among the top 10 or so in the country. Which is ironic given that Penn’s president is a nationally prominent political scientist. But the new building should build on the strengths of the Econ department and various interdisciplinary programs it shares with Political Science to provide a generous and beautiful space where the synergies can help to elevate both departments (and especially Political Science), and literally raise the profiles of both departments on campus (similar to what the new neuroscience building has done for the physical presence of Psychology, Biology, and neuroscience on campus). It should be quite a facility. If you haven’t seen them already, you should take a look at this webpage and video:

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/node/5400

https://vimeo.com/123769634

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I have to say that one thing I completely do not understand about Penn is why so few people go to the Penn museum. They have so many amazing things and the place is virtually empty when I have been there.

I really think it needs a little more visitor experience (looking at objects isn’t meaningful if you don’t know much), and then some marketing. I think many people just do not know it is there. Really the best I have seen in a University by far.

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@“45 Percenter” - re “less prominent parts of the brand,” I meant, well, just that. Just as at Stanford (where the faculty /deans openly worry about the school becoming “the Stanford Institute of Technology,”) or at Hopkins, (a concern about the balance between humanities/medical life science offerings), the portions of the brand that carried disproportionate weight at Penn, historically, have been Wharton and the medical plant.

Now, the “from excellence to eminence” language that Pres. Gutmann evoked has been changing that (along with the success of the past capital campaign, of course), and it’s why you see less of that banter now than in the past. Wharton and the medical facilities have always been near-tippy top (read, minor quibbles aside, almost always as in the top handful of places). I believe the recent administrative push and big capital campaign was designed to carry these strengths, but also bring other departments/schools/offices into that “eminent” category.

For anthropology and the museum, they’ve been eminent for some time, so they could probably be distinguished from econ/english - although now, especially with investment in the museum, there’s a push to broaden their impact. (And yes, increasing museum attendance - and increasing ticket revenue to increase market power, is a goal here.)

For English and Econ, I believe they’ve been excellent for some time, but with the new Perelman bldg I think there are hopes to get UPenn Econ into the very first rung - a position that I’m not sure it currently occupies. (It looks like, currently, Harvard, Princeton, MIT, and Stanford, are the biggest heavy hitters here.)

Also, thanks for further substantiating my note on the new (or, yes, renovated) bldg at 36th and Sansom - the Perelman bldg will indeed house econ and poli sci. I think, though, that to get to eminence, poli sci still has a little ways to go - more than econ. Sure, it’ll be a shot in the arm for both departments, but poli sci has the bigger mountain to climb.