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<p>Take that haughty arrogance toward nurses into medical school–assuming you even get in–or the medical profession, and see how far you get. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>By the way, Penn also has 6400 undergrads in its College of Arts and Sciences, 15 liberal arts departments ranked among the top 10 in the country, and another 10 or so ranked among the top 20, but don’t let any of that get in the way of your Penn-bashing. ;)</p>
<p>“Penn, however, accepts nursing students at the UNDERgraduate level.”</p>
<p>Well, you got me. Shame on Penn for having a nursing school (with ~125 students per year, I believe, out of 2,400). They should get rid of it. Make Penn a purer school. More intellectual. Focus more efforts on producing students who get PhDs rather than, I don’t know, save lives…and I mean, it’s not like the nursing school is innovative at all, right? I mean, the #1 nursing school in the country is just teaching girls how to give sponge baths. At least that’s what I hear. They aren’t revolutionizing health care in any way, or doing any kind of research. They should turn the nursing building in more physics labs. That way maybe undergrads have a better chance at getting into the Caltech physics PhD program.</p>
<p>
[What</a> the ■■■■■■ think of Penn](<a href=“TumsRum: Image”>TumsRum: Image)</p>
<p>[What</a> the ■■■■■■](<a href=“http://www.poptower.com/images/db/2184/500/500/the-big-bang-theory.jpg]What”>http://www.poptower.com/images/db/2184/500/500/the-big-bang-theory.jpg) want [Penn</a> students to be](<a href=“http://orbis-web.com/ebay/the-big-bang-theory-1_large.jpg]Penn”>http://orbis-web.com/ebay/the-big-bang-theory-1_large.jpg)</p>
<p>(For those of you who don’t watch the show…you’re missing out.)</p>
<p>regardless of all the supposed strengths of penn, the fact of the matter is, if a student intends to go into a field of science/mathematics and is admitted to harvard, yale, princeton, stanford, MIT, caltech, and Penn, chances are that student will not go to penn. This is not to say that Penn is not a remarkable school in its own right for other subjects (most notably, business); but when it comes to hard science, it is simply not up to par.</p>
<p>^We can’t help it if we’re sexier than people at Caltech. Maybe their jealousy is why Penn students can’t get into the Physics PhD program while the ugly people from Princeton are welcomed with open arms.</p>
<p>Will someone into hard sciences really choose Yale over Penn for the department strengths? I can see Yale giving better aid or having a better overall name being reasons why Penn would lose out, but is Yale in the same league as those other schools in hard sciences?</p>
<p>I think the biggest take-away from this data has nothing to do with Penn. It just shows that as long as you go to a decent quality public and do well, you have as many doors open to you as those at the so-called elite schools.</p>
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Once again, people are far too hasty in jumping to conclusions. The sciences are much more egalitarian than certain other fields.</p>
<p>It is much easier to be prepared at a top school than at a weaker school. Top universities are more likely to have academic superstars, have funded research opportunities, have pre-graduate advising offices, have administrators who prep students for graduate fellowships (Rhodes, Fulbright, Truman), etc.</p>
<p>Graduate admissions these days is TOUGH. In worst case scenarios, up to 100 qualified people competing for 2-3 spots. You need every leg up you can possibly get.</p>
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<p>Yes, we can agree Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, and Caltech pretty much dominate the hard sciences (I’m not sure about Yale either). Their science programs are overall stronger than Penn’s. Saying that Penn’s programs are “not up to par” is a little harsh, though. It’s biomed system is outstanding. There are 600-700 labs available for undergrads to be involved with. I chose Penn over Caltech…I guess I’m one of those rare instances when program strength was less important than other factors, like sanity and an enjoyable life. Remember people, HYPSM(C) are not the end all and be all of good schools. The best students? Probably, but I think people tend to put their academics on a pedestal farrr too high above other schools.</p>
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<p>Sorry; I missed reading that part. However, it’s still the same. for biology and Chemistry, Caltech > Chicago.</p>
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<p>You did not understand my point. My point was, modestmelody was trying to tell me that Chicago is superior to Caltech in science (or those courses that she mentioned), that’s why I was kind of hesitant to take her statement as something with substance. </p>
<p>Of course, UPenn is a great school and it doesn’t really matter that only 2 or 3 UPenn alumni have ever gone to Caltech in the past 20 years. It does not say anything to its real standard at all. Pwersonally, I would go for UPenn for physics if I don’t have offers from HYPSM or Berkeley and Caltech.</p>
<p>
I concur.</p>
<p>Well actually, the favorite poster of ilovebagels is in fact none other than ilovebagels</p>
<p>CAPA however can be a close 2nd :)</p>
<p>
Again, however, you missed the parts where I talk about going to a specific lab group or professor you want to work with. Beyond that, there are other “complications” to choosing a graduate school that go well beyond research output or rank. Graduate school, much like undergraduate, is far more complex than simply school X is ranked better than school Y, perhaps even more so than undergraduate.</p>
<p>^ More siginficantly, somewhere along the line I got the impression that modestmelody is a HE, and not a she. Is that not correct? :)</p>
<p>^ The problem with your statement, modestmelody, is that, you seemed to be confident with your idea that A LOT of Brown grads would rather end up at Chicago for some specific reasons, and Caltech doesn’t have something to match what Chicago has. Well, I would have understood it if you were referring to a few Brown grads who opted for Chicago over Caltech, after all, Chicago is a great school for science. But you mentioned, “a lot”, meaning, you’re giving us the impression that Chicago is generally a more desirable school than Caltech is for postgrad Chem, Bio and Physics. Well, either that, or Brown grads just have always seen Chicago has something that Caltech hasn’t. Given you were right about the professors that they’re after, how bad is Caltech for Brown grads that a lot of them don’t find Caltech worth attending than Chicago?</p>
<p>It wasn’t just Chicago-- I have two friends who chose Chicago, one who chose MIT, one who chose Northwestern, and one who chose UCSF (biophysics concentrator). </p>
<p>Again, you missed where I said it may be that Brown’s core competencies (as a small school) don’t align with CalTech research interests.</p>
<p>The point is not that any of these schools are better than CalTech, but rather, that there are literally thousands of reasons why students choose to go to graduate school that have nothing to do with rank, and therefore, looking at enrolled classes rather than admitted classes, and not including who applies in the first place can lead to false conclusions.</p>
<p>For instance, one of the two UChicago people wanted to be there mostly because he’s from Chicago and would rather spend the next 6 years close to home than far away again. One was at UChicago because he was most impressed with the faculty there because they didn’t act like his graduate school course work didn’t matter at all and he felt professors at most of the other top schools were dismissive of the course work-- they didn’t like teaching it and didn’t really care how their students did in those classes so long as they passed quals. The student at UCSF was not only returning home (he grew up in Palo Alto, but chose UCSF over Stanford primarily), but felt that his interests in biophysics were best met there because two lab groups matched directly with his interests.</p>
<p>I could go on and on.</p>
<p>It’s not the choice of CalTech-- we can do this same thing with any top school. It’s the notion that enrolled students is a particularly useful statistic when there is no serious prestige advantage amongst any of the top 5-10 schools in a science area, and when sometimes in the sciences there is as much prestige associated with your PI than with your institution.</p>
<p>Here is PhD productivity ranking. Penn is not in top 20. I will be surprised if Penn is in the top 50. Top research universities that are on the top 10 list are:</p>
<p>CalTech
MIT
UChicago</p>
<p>on the top 20 list:
Yale
Princeton
Rice
Harvard</p>
<p>I don’t see Penn’s name on the top list of any discipline, including economics, bioology where Penn is relatively strong.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.grinnell.edu/offices/inst...hDProd_F06.pdf[/url]”>http://www.grinnell.edu/offices/inst...hDProd_F06.pdf</a></p>
<p>The are overwhelming evidence to show that Penn is not a top 4 university in the country, from student quality, fculty quality, academic reputation, to placement to top PhD or professional programs. Penn is nowhere near MIT, Stanford, CalTech, UChicago, or Columbia.</p>
<p>^Thats because the undergrads at Penn are more preprofessional and top bio students go to med school and top econ students get jobs and MBAs down the road. That doesn’t mean Penn is a bad school or has weak students. It just speaks to the interests of the students. Penn has some of the best departments in the world though and some top PhD programs.</p>
<p>^ Not to mention that Penn’s significantly larger undergraduate population includes preprofessional schools (Wharton, Engineering, and Nursing), which the smaller undergraduate populations of the schools mentioned by the OP do not include. I’m confident that the Ph.D. production of Penn’s College of Arts and Sciences would compare favorably with the other top 10-20 universities.</p>
<p>But all of that is probably of no import to the OP, who obviously has a rather substantial ax to grind against Penn’s US News ranking. My guess is that he/she is a somewhat insecure partisan of one of the schools currently just below Penn in the ranking (he/she mentions Chicago and Columbia in his/her last post). I can’t imagine that someone affiliated with HYPSMC would be so obsessed with trying to tear down Penn in a public forum, unless there were some serious issues with insecurity.</p>
<p>^45, as a Penn student I want to go up or down in any ranking with my classmates in Wharton, SEAS and nursing. MIT is tops in business and engineering and has a fair premed population, but is still top 3 in PhD production.</p>
<p>^ Agreed, but I was addressing the apples-to-oranges comparison of Penn’s overall undergraduate Ph.D. production with that of other top 10-20 schools that only have liberal arts undergraduate components (MIT is virtually in a class by itself in terms of Ph.D. production). The OP’s contention is that Penn is inferior to the other top 10-20 schools because its overall Ph.D. production does not fall in the top 10-20. But that is not an apples-to-apples comparison.</p>
![http://www.poptower.com/images/db/2184/500/500/the-big-bang-theory.jpg]What](http://www.poptower.com/images/db/2184/500/500/the-big-bang-theory.jpg%5DWhat){kind=link}
![http://orbis-web.com/ebay/the-big-bang-theory-1_large.jpg]Penn](http://orbis-web.com/ebay/the-big-bang-theory-1_large.jpg%5DPenn){kind=link}
