| Okay this is very long - I tried to answer your questions as thoroughly as I could. If you have any additional questions, please feel free to post them.
Wharton's program does offer a lot of flexibility. About 43% of your degree requirements are NOT in Wharton. So it's not even that you can take courses outside of Wharton, you MUST. You can fit minors into your curriculum without adding any extra courses. You can do a dual degree with another school at Penn. You can study abroad. You can still pursue all the other academic interests you have outside of business. The curriculum is as flexible as you let it be!
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Wharton's program is not like a liberal arts program in Economics.
- The teaching methods (and therefore the learning methods) are very different. Wharton uses a LOT of cases, also simulations, negotiations, and a lot of discussion (participation can be a significant part of your grade). Liberal arts programs are going to place more emphasis on lectures as a teaching method.
- The learning methods in Wharton are VERY hands on. You will start with a problem - dissect it, examine the environment you are operating in, identify the key players, evaluate potential solutions. After you have tackled that problem, THEN you examine theories to back up what you have done on your own. In a liberal arts curriculum, you start with the theory or abstract ideas and spend a lot of time examining issues with those theories. Once you have mastered the theory, you then look to problems that allow you to apply it. So Wharton has sort of a backwards learning approach compared to a traditional liberal arts curriculum.
- The classes you take are going to be very different. Wharton students take things like finance, accounting, marketing, management, operations, etc. as REQUIREMENTS. And then they have the freedom to explore disciplines like health care management, real estate, entrepreneurship, retailing, insurance, etc. Academic departments like that don't even exist in the vast majority of liberal arts schools, so you won't get exposure to the same courses that Wharton students are exposed to.
So in that sense it can be very difficult to create a schedule at another institution that will give you the same academic experience that Wharton gives you. On the other hand, if you are at Wharton and you want to mirror a liberal arts curriculum you CAN. You can get a minor in Economics, you can get a dual degree in Economics, etc.
That's the benefit of being at a place like Penn that offers multiple fields of study. Here you can do it all, while at a liberal arts institution you are predominantly restricted to liberal arts unless they happen to have more than one school.
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Math is not a hugely popular dual degree for Wharton undergrads, but it is a popular minor. A lot of Wharton students will get a dual degree with something non-quantitative, like History or Anthropology or English or Spanish.
Doing a dual degree is definitely doable here (and one of the perks of being at Penn). Yes, it will be more difficult, yes there will be more courses to take, yes you might have to take 6 or 7 classes in a semester or stay for a summer. BUT, you will also graduate from Penn with two undergraduate degrees (for the price of one!). |