Art History & Business

Wharton15
Mon, 25 Jul 2011 13:28:30 +0000

The business component of your aspirations is going to be a bit different at Penn than at most schools. Penn doesn’t offer a business minor, nor a business administration degree; they offer a B.S. in Economics (which is admittedly similar) through Wharton, which is separate from Penn College (CAS), like Engineering (SEAS) or Nursing. If you want a business degree, you have to get one from Wharton (which is, to brag for a moment, the most competitive and prestigious undergraduate business school in the world).

You pick which school you want to be accepted to when applying to Penn; obviously you’d be choosing between CAS and Wharton. Wharton is more competitive (1/3 the ED rate, 1/2 the RD rate) than the other schools in Penn (and they look for a different type of applicant), but if you get in, you can just choose to get a second degree or a minor in Art History from CAS. However if you apply and are accepted to CAS and want a second degree from Wharton, you have to apply for a highly competitive internal transfer. Since the curricula of CAS and Wharton are almost completely different there is no double major/minor option, unfortunately. You could however use electives/extra spaces in your schedule to take Wharton classes, though you would not get a Wharton degree/major/minor that way.

So essentially if you want business to be part of your education at Penn, you have to be in Wharton–but I’d like to caution that Wharton is (in my opinion) just as much about a life path/career as it is about learning, and the students in it are correspondingly more competitively pre-professional and quantitatively-oriented than most other schools in America. If that doesn’t appeal to you or suit your tastes, you may prefer to major in Art History and then take Wharton courses as your schedule permits.