History Major at Penn?

Cue7
Tue, 08 Aug 2017 18:34:51 +0000

@“45 Percenter” - as always, you present your position well. And yes, I think we’re mostly in agreement.

HOWEVER - while it is possible for CAS students to have a “traditional and compartmentalized” approach, doesn’t that cut against Penn’s ethos? Yes, this is possible, but the school’s entire push - it’s entire identity, really - is to cut across fields of study - to cut across theory and practicality. You could go to UPenn, dive into the philosophy major, only interact with the Philo club, and have an experience that resembles what you’d find at Swarthmore or St. Johns College. Or, you could dive into subject matter at Wharton, avoid interaction with CAS nursing etc., and have an experience that resembles NYU Stern. But isn’t that the wrong approach?

But isn’t pursuing the “traditional and compartmentalized” approach in direct contravention to the spirit of the Penn experience? Aren’t you then missing out on the Penn experience, and trying to make it an experience that is more readily found elsewhere (by structure and design)?

It may be possible - but it still leads to extremely poor comparisons, and seems suboptimal. Indeed, it seems to endorse going to a school while being in opposition to the dominant pedagogical approach of the school. There’s dissonance in that, no?