The Report Card: A Review of Penn State University
The Report Card series gives an insider’s view into college life at local Philadelphia institutions. Here at Tutor Delphia, we take a lesson from our tutors and explore their alma mater from their perspective.
The Basics:
School: Penn State University (Main Campus)
Location: University Park, PA
Website: www.psu.edu
Undergraduate Students: 45,518
Public/Private: Public
Setting: Small City
Average SAT Score: Combined Total 1750-2000
Average ACT Score: 26-30
Meet Our Tutor Carlos:
I chose Penn State because it was the best bang for my buck at the time. When I was a junior in high school, I considered 5 schools: Penn State, Temple, Drexel, Carnegie Mellon, and Lehigh for Electrical Engineering. After getting into all of them except Lehigh, I started considering everything that was associated with what those schools would offer me: cost, location, campus life, rankings etc. With tuition about 18K/year in comparison to Drexel and CMU being well over $40K, [Penn State] was the highest ranking Electrical Engineering school at an affordable price.
Carlos on his first day of college at PSU
Campus Life:
The campus is huge. It has five dorm wings (East, North, South, Pollock, and West) each with several large dorm halls housing thousands of students and a dining commons. When I accepted PSU, I also signed up to live in the Engineering House. PSU has specialized housing options for students who want to live with other students studying the same major, which I would highly recommend! It was an amazing experience to live with so many people all in your same boat. To this day I am still very close with several people I met through that dorm.
In the Classroom:
The professor-student relationships all depend one what kind of class you are taking. If you are taking a large lecture hall class (say Chem 110 or anything in 100 Thomas which seats ~800 students) the relationship is abysmal. Now, where I found the best professor-student relationships were in the major classes. Most of my Electrical Engineering professors would stop whatever they were doing to help students with anything outside of the classroom. Having that “small” lecture made getting to know the professors much easier, and professors were more flexible with their students.
Carlos on graduation day with his favorite Electrical Engineering professor
Room and Board:
Living off campus [is better] — bar none. Depending on the apartment, it’s cheaper and you can cook your own meals.
In the Dining Hall:
After living on the dinning commons meal plan for the first two years, I gained about 20 lbs. A lot of the food in the commons was tasty: burgers, Chinese food, pizza, every type of breakfast food, soda, and Creamery Ice cream. Those options were offered every day and always tasted great. However, the healthy options always fell short as a myriad of frozen and poorly reheated vegetables always ended up in my plate but rarely in my stomach. Once I started living on my own, I lost most of the weight I had gained and really started to take better care of what I was putting into my body, and it made a big difference.
Extra Credit:
My extracurricular activities included [being a Teacher’s Assistant] for an Electrical Engineering class and working as an Undergraduate Research Assistant for the Applied Research Lab (ARL). During the semester, I’d work about 20 hours a week prepping for the research trips we conducted over the summer. It was an amazing experience working in the field and doing research all with some of the best coworkers and bosses I’ve ever had. My career honestly wouldn’t be where it is today without the experience and connections I got from working there.
Penn State has two gargantuan Career Fairs every year — the largest being the Fall semester Career Fair held in the Bryce Jordan Center. Hundreds of employers come to find candidates for practically every major available at Penn State. Majority of my classmates were able to snag some pretty amazing internships through these Career Fairs, and many went on to work for those companies after graduation.
Penn State and the surrounding areas are home to some of the best trout fishing and creeks in Pennsylvania. I’m a big fisherman and when I saw that I could take a Fly Fishing class as a gym credit, I just had to take it. It was through that class that I realized the true gold mine that PSU sat on. About 20 minutes North West of campus was Fisherman’s Paradise. It had some of the most beautiful water and fish I had ever seen.
Carlos trout fishing in the March of 2012
Penn State is whatever you want to make of it. If you don’t like the sheer size of Penn State, you can really break it down to something that you’d like through clubs and activities. There are countless opportunities for students to do whatever you want to do! There is a group for everything!