<p>Why Penn? </p>
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<p>This type of thread exists for a few other schools and I thought it'd be interesting to start the same thread for Penn. Please add your comments - what attracts you to Penn, what do you think the university's greatest strengths (and shortcomings) are? What distinguishes the school from it's peers? What do you think the future offers the school?</p>
<p>There Was A Firefight!</p>
<p>Ha, I'm surprised I got in with the essay I wrote...</p>
<p>But in all seriousness, these are the actual reasons I wanted to go to Penn, not what I wrote on my essay. I liked the people, it's the party/social ivy, the work hard, play hard attitude, etc.</p>
<p>If you're asking for what to write in the 'Why Penn?' essay, the only advice I have for you is this: Write what actually interests you in the school. Nothing I wrote in my essay was standard stuff that would be found on any 'Why [insert school here]?' essay. Also, the stuff was pretty personal to me, so my essay wasn't one of many. I wrote about the times I visited and stuff like that.</p>
<p>I wrote about how I'm interested in their Computational Biology program and the work of some of their professors (made a search on their website and found a professor who did something that was actually interesting to me) and how I won't be able to fulfill my interests anywhere else...</p>
<p>This is NOT meant to be a review of application essay questions. This is your thoughts on the school as an institution in entirety, it's momentum (or lack thereof) and how it compares to other schools you know of.</p>
<p>The One University policy and everything that results from it, such as being able to take classes at any of the undergraduate schools, and the joint degree programs. In fact, the program I'm in was the first thing that caught my attention and it's the reason why I ultimately picked Penn.</p>
<p>my reasons (which have some overlap with some of the more general reasons)</p>
<ul>
<li>urban location. but philly is better than better than cambridge, new haven, or providence. i'd rather be in a city than a small town in the middle of nowhere. it was also close to home, but not too close ;)</li>
<li>"social ivy" and the "work hard-party hard" student body. intellectual student body, but people still know how to have a good time</li>
<li>interdisciplinary programs like joint/dual degree and "one university concept".</li>
<li>solid academics - for me it was wharton and bioengineering, which are both literally tops in the country (i particularly liked the clinical preceptorship and lab-based curriculum in BE and the finance/healthcare/management departments at wharton) . also the opportunity, even as an engineering or business major, to take strong liberal arts classes at the College.</li>
<li>research opportunities - especially biomedical opportunities in the College, med school, engineering etc.</li>
<li>extracurric clubs and stuff - a couple of the really unique ones that you pretty much can't find anywhere else were, for me, the weiss tech house, communitech, the global biomedical service program</li>
<li>ivy league, and all the goodies attached with that (like beating princeton in basketball)</li>
</ul>
<p>with regards to penn's momentum, i think penn is def heading in an upward trend. their application pool is growing stronger every year (though whether this is attributable to more global trends in high school education are debatable), they are growing with new buildings and expansion eastward, their rank is higher than before (while it shouldn't really mean anything, it has a huge impact nontheless), its endowment is also increasingly significantly with very loyal alumni, and the surrounding area has improved. penn itself is launching new interdisciplinary programs (such as the recent penn integrates knowledge stuff and the vagelos life sciences & managment program)</p>
<p>BOTTOM LINE: red&blue, there isn't going to be one definitive answer for this one. as my reasons demonstrated, everybody has different expectations of their school. its a tribute to penn that it has such diversified and awesome programs in so many different fields, helping it meet the expectations of a variety of people. that's the true measure of an institution.</p>
<p>Meng Cheng</p>
<p>I had two main reasons
1) The Vagelos Scholars program (and other research opportunities)
2) The AMAZING City of Philadelphia</p>
<h2>Why not?</h2>
<p>Tonight I ate at Kababeesh, a South Asian restaurant on 43rd street in a converted metallic diner. It made me realize that the reason Penn is the best is because of the amazing dining options - how many other campuses and surrounding area have 3 Mexican places, 3 Indian ones, 2 Thai, 2 Japanese, An Italian, a Creperie, three ice cream stores, a tea house, a pub and grub, tons of pizza places, good bars and a plethora of food carts?</p>
<p>Not to mention the great though expensive shopping (Gap, American Apparel, Urban Outfitters all on campus).</p>
<p>University City rules. I hate living at home.</p>
<p>interdisciplinary but pre-professional philosophy</p>
<p>g i rls .</p>
<p>If you want to talk about shortcomings, see this article:</p>
<p>for an "anti-Ivy" perspective. BTW, the unnamed school mentioned in the article where only 40% of the undergrad courses are taught by tenure track faculty is Penn (CAS specifically), though this was based on a survey conducted by the union that was trying to organize the grad students, which is not exactly an unbiased source. But their methods seem sound.</p>
<p>The criticisms in the article are of Ivies in general but they apply to Penn pretty much across the board. Of course the article is not balanced and doesn't give any of the "pluses" of an Ivy education - the biggest one being the value of an Ivy brand name degree in the job market. I don't doubt that you could get more personal attention from the faculty at say Reed or Bates, but the resume value of those degrees is much lower. If you are comparing to Wharton and you are going for a job on Wall Street, then much, much lower.</p>
<p>the grad students union report was absurdly biased. The counted every recitation as a separate class againt the professor's lecture. Given that some large lectures have a dozen recitation sessions, of course it's going to look like the faculty aren't doing much.</p>
<p>With 3 years of courses under my belt, I've had plenty of recitations but all the actual courses were done by tenure/tenure-track faculty.</p>
<p>I am a supporter of SHUT-UP</p>
<p>JohnnyK - it's possible to work backward from their data to come up with the true answer.</p>
<p>The say that there were 1228 classes, 566 recitations and 162 labs (total 1956, of which 783 were faculty taught). They also say only 10% of recit. (57) and 33% of labs (54) were faculty taught. So for regular classes, tenure track faculty taught 783-57-54= 672 out of 1228 = 55%. Now 55% is not 40% but it's not 100% either. It's still hokey because they don't count visiting professors (some of whom are more distinguished than the regular faculty) and adjuncts (ditto- some adjuncts are leading experts in their field that they work in every day and know more than some junior assistant professor). So it's a dubious assumption that "tenure track professor = good , everyone else = bad."</p>
<p>Not to mention that tenure is mostly about quantity of publications, NOT quality of teaching.</p>