summerinthecity

I am a junior exploring colleges and Penn sounds like a great fit for me in terms of its urban location, size, social student body and academic prestige. However, while I haven't decided exactly what my major is going to be yet, I know it will be something in the liberal arts--probably sociology or psychology. I visited Claremont McKenna this past weekend expecting to love it and instead was greatly turned off by the preprofessional feel of the campus with the majority of students majoring in economics or government and turning their noses up and students studying subjects outside of the preprofessional areas.

My question after hearing about Wharton and the general preprofessional attitude at Penn is: is the preprofessional mentality pervasive at the Penn campus? Are students who are unsure of their careers and are there for the sake of exploring the liberal arts in the minority?

freetense

aw man i dont know how to begin to answer this question in an honest way
let's just wait for meng

Venkat89

Wharton + Nursing + Engineering = professional schools. Compound that with the fact that SAS has a fair number of premeds, prelaws, and people looking to go into business. Penn can seem very preprofessional. However, there are still many many students here who are liberal arts majors and don't care *that* much about setting themselves up to get that top ibank job or to get into Harvard med/law school. I have friends majoring in anthropology, urban studies, sociology, english, and history. Penn has such strong liberal arts departments and many interesting areas. Personally, if I can find the time I would love to minor in music. You will find many people here who love studying liberal arts subjects.

ilovebagels

with 10,000 undergraduates, even a fraction of them in liberal arts would mean that penn has more liberal arts students than most liberal arts colleges!

In addition to Penn's very strong liberal arts departments, there are extracurricular resources that cater to liberal arts. Among the most outstanding are the Kelly writers house and the philomathean society (google 'em!)

gymjulie08

I was at Penn last week for Previews and I was pleasantly surprised that at one of the seminars, the dean of the College talked about how much he loves students who are undecided and want to pursue a variety of interests. It really seemed like they encourage you to take classes in lots of different areas.

45 Percenter

Remember, about 6,400 of Penn's 10,000 undergrads are in the College of Arts and Sciences. Even if only 50% of those are not headed for professional school--and it's almost certainly more than that--that's still about 3,200 undergrads. As the bagelman points out, no matter how you slice it, there are lots of undergrads at Penn--certainly 50% or more--who are not preprofessional.

summerinthecity

Thanks for the input.