Upenn vs. Dartmouth

Cibbir_H
Mon, 02 Apr 2007 19:46:55 +0000

Well certainly Philadelphia is a larger city than Hanover, so if you are looking at sheer number of jobs available then Penn would have more.

But several things to note:

1) Penn is not the only college in/around Philadelphia, so there will be more competition for jobs from other college students like yourself who don’t go to Penn. Dartmouth, on the other hand, is the only college in Hanover. Actually, it’s pretty much created Hanover to what it is today.

2) Penn itself is a much larger school with ~10,000 undergrads, compared to Dartmouth’s ~4,000. This means that you will have more job competition from other undergrads at Penn like yourself (not just from other colleges.)

3) Penn also has a much larger graduate population than Dartmouth, so internships AND jobs could get snapped up there as well (Dartmouth has ~1,600 grad students, Penn has ~10,000)

4) Finally, of course, if you are talking about regular job opportunities, lots of people besides college/grad students will be competing for jobs around Philadelphia, whereas Hanover is a small town that is completely focused on Dartmouth…there will be almost no competition for jobs and internships besides your fellow Dartmouth classmates.

(As a side note, Dartmouth’s presence is evident also by the high real estate prices in the county, which are several times what adjacent county prices are…this won’t be a problem if you attend for you have guaranteed housing but is still worthy of note.)

The number of job opportunities that a place like Penn could get you could well outweigh negative aspects of Penn I have listed above; unfortunately I don’t have the data to stastically see which is best. However, I strongly believe that getting a regular job around Penn (not directly affiliated with the university) could be difficult since Penn is surrounded by an urban metropolis.

Hanover, as a town, cannot survive without Dartmouth. Dartmouth provides smart students, an intellecutal atmosphere, and thousands of temporary residents each year. As a result Hanover depends (at least in part) on the student population to serve the college, and this includes jobs.

Now onto Dartmouth opportunities and its disadvantages:

For “regular” jobs, I know of people who work at the various stores/shops next to the Dartmouth campus. Dartmouth almost certainly provides much better prospects for regular jobs, for the reasons I have stated above.

For internships, several things to think about:

Dartmouth has a small graduate population. As a result, a lot of the work done by graduates at other colleges is done by undergraduates at Dartmouth. This is true of engineering as well as other departments. BUT…there is a selection effect. Since research professors at the top of their field love graduate students, a lot of the really best professors in their fields don’t work at Dartmouth because they can’t do much research without graduate students! (So keep that in mind as well.)

This impacts internships in a funny way; there are less opportunities for an internship, but the chance of you getting an internship are also higher because there aren’t nearly as many graduate students. In other words, you don’t have to compete with graduate students for the availabe internships.

This does not adversely effect teaching quality at Dartmouth, but rather enhances it! The same selection effect means that Dartmouth, sort of like Princeton (where I will be headed in the fall), is focused on the undergraduate. The professors at Dartmouth are there to teach, and they are good at it. Sometimes the rock-star research professors are bad teachers or don’t like to teach anyway, so this means that Dartmouth can have an edge for accessibility to professors and professors’ interest in their undergraduate students. At Dartmouth you will likely know your professors by their first name, and you can have plenty of direct one on one talk with them (when I visited the engineering department this was the case…students had tons of opportunities to explore research opportunities and chat about stuff with their professors.)

So, a final comparison between the two:

Dartmouth - located in small town, few grad students for profs to focus their attention on, good chance of “regular” job, good chance of internship, more intellectually intimate environment where you interact with other students more frequently.

Penn - large student body, in a large city (closer to NYC for example) so there is more to do, but it is not clear that getting a “regular” job or an internship will be easier at Penn. In fact, if anything, it will be harder!

So that is why I recommended Dartmouth over Penn. You are fortunate to choose between two great colleges, but between the two I would pick Dartmouth for engineering (finance/undergrad business degree is a different story, but I presume that you are not interested in a fast track like that.)