The Penn engineer's guide to courses

Classes are very similar for all first-year Engineering School students.

A typical first semester course load will be between 5 and 5.5 credit units, a system in which each class counts as a credit and a lab course usually counts as half a credit.  Three of these credits will be in basic math and sciences — introductory chemistry, physics and calculus.  

My recommendation is to place out of those courses if you can. They can be tedious and are not necessarily easy A’s,   and there are many other quality classes to take at Penn than large introductory lectures. 

Introductory chemistry and Calculus I and II (MATH 104 and 114, respectively) courses all have special engineering sections. Personally, I think it’s worth it to choose the special engineering section for chemistry because the material is more quantitative, while I’d only take the engineering section for calculus if the professor for that section was more favorably reviewed than for the other sections. The only extra material that I remember covering in MATH 104 and 114 were Taylor series in 104 and some extra linear algebra material for 114. You can wait until MATH 240 to learn those concepts, though. 

An important choice for a first semester Engineering freshman is the elective. There are still some constraints on electives for engineers.  Over the course of your undergraduate tenure, two will have to be “social science” courses which cover departments like economics, politics, or finance. An additional two will be “humanities” courses in English, philosophy, anthropology or a related field.

One of your electives during your time at Penn must be a writing seminar, and whether it fulfills a social science or humanities depends on the topic.  

The writing seminar has a generally poor reputation among undergraduates but with some careful planning — like enlisting the help of PennCourseReview, a site that rates classes and professors — it can be manageable. In fact, my writing seminar proved to be a relief from all the math-heavy courses I was taking that semester and allowed for a somewhat creative outlet. Pick a topic you’re interested in for your writing seminar because you’ll be spending the semester analyzing and writing about it.  

If you truly detest writing, engineers can take writing seminar pass/fail, but I don’t recommend that option because it can be a GPA booster compared to other classes. Most engineers take writing seminar during one of their two freshman semesters.

For the non-writing seminar semester, you should definitely look into taking a specifically freshman seminar,  because I've found that  small class settings are where Penn classes really shine.  I took one in the English department on  the Bible where we met in Van Pelt each week for three hours and got to touch medieval manuscripts from the Rare Book collection with our bare hands, as well as tour collections at the Free Library and Library Company of Philadelphia.

There’s a lot to learn at Penn, but make sure you don’t overwhelm yourself.  You’ll be doing a lot of learning outside of books and classes, too.  

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