UPenn vs Cornell - Creative writing & personal fit

JHS
Tue, 04 Mar 2014 19:26:55 +0000

Different strokes for different folks. I had a cousin who lived in Chicago and Philadelphia, and the happiest times of his life were when he was in grad school at Cornell. Ithaca and Cornell were plenty big enough to provide interesting things to do, he loved the outdoors and felt claustrophobic and uncomfortable in urban environments, the scale felt manageable to him. When he needed to go someplace else, he got a ride. It may not be the choice I would make, or Poeme or 45 Percenter (both of whom, of course, chose Penn), but there are lots of people who can be really, really happy at Cornell. When I was growing up, Cornell, much more than Penn or Harvard or Columbia, was the model of what a university ought to look like, and where it ought to be: a beautiful place in a great college town, far removed from the distractions and intrusions of a big city.

Anyway, I am so out of date that I would have ranked Cornell’s English department higher than Penn’s, by a considerable margin, but based on the reputations of people who are mostly dead or retired now. But I know from children of friends, and from my daughter who once upon a time was very interested in writing programs, and had lots of friends in them, that Kelly Writers’ House is one of the premier writing programs in the country, especially in the context of a liberal arts college (i.e., non-BFA). In high school, my kid had turned down what amounted to a guaranteed Penn admission (long story), but several years later, with a lot more information and experience, she said, “You know, I sort of blew it if I really wanted to have a great creative writing program in college. I should have been paying a lot more attention to Penn and Hopkins than I did. That’s where the best programs are. At the time, I didn’t understand how different they could be.”