History Major at Penn?

monydad
Wed, 09 Aug 2017 21:58:29 +0000

post #24 mentions Cornell.
Like Penn, apparently, many Cornell arts & sciences college (“CAS”) students do choose to take courses at more than one of its colleges, though they don’t have to.
However, unlike Penn apparently, this ability is not that profoundly marketed.

Also it’s true that students from its other colleges may take CAS courses. Mixed enrollment is often the case in many of the lower-level survey courses, in particular. But the degree to which it occurs in upper level courses really varies by field.

I was a physics major, and my fellow undergrad students in my upper level physics and math courses were all CAS students. Or at least everyone I know about was. At the lower level, the “higher” track physics & math courses intended for majors were also all CAS students. Another, “lower” track was for engineering students, but there was a different, analogous course to that for CAS students… Though that one probably also had some enrollment from some of the other colleges…

Some other majors will have mixed enrollment all the way through , particularly Biology. And there will be everything in between.

It is true that everyone mixes in the dorms, and socially in general.
And the CAS courses a Physics major may use to fill distribution requirements may have some non-CAS students in them. But the extent of that depends on the specific courses one selects.

it doesn’t really matter much though. Students in the other colleges do not want to get bad grades either. So chances are if they are signing up to take an upper level CAS course they are probably up to it. My experience was plenty of students at the other colleges were smarter than a lot of CAS students, and you wouldn’t know what college they were in unless you asked them.