A few questions about M&T program and UPenn in general

Much2learn
Thu, 03 Sep 2015 22:28:31 +0000

@saladass

Housing
What may not be clear from @keasbey Nights post is that the housing situation at Penn is different from other Universities. At a school like Berkeley or Columbia, guaranteed housing is important. At Penn, a lot of the “off campus” housing is closer to your classes than the “on campus” housing. Off campus housing is not a problem at all. Traditionally, freshmen live on campus and most sophomores, and up prefer to be off campus. This is not considered a drawback to Penn by students.

Sports
Some of the club sport athletes are very good. They are not intramural athletes. A good number of them could have participated in varsity college athletics and are just prioritizing academics, like you are.

Course load
@saladass “How manageable is it to do 6 or 7 courses?”

This really depends on the person and the particular courses. The best students will manage it, but they will still have to be careful about the combination of courses. It would not be possible, for example to take that many time consuming CS programming classes at once. That would definitely sink anyone; even @Keasbey Nights.

You have to remember that most CAS students only take 4 courses at a time and engineers and M & Ts usually take 5, so they are already being challenged a bit more. If you can manage 5 well, then 6 is probably doable, but 7 is a lot. It is common for special/dual program students to take a course of two during the summer to alleviate some of that pressure, depending on their particular situation.