If you want to study in an American city, it's Washington or nothing

If you want to study away from Penn but don’t want to leave the country, Washington is currently the only city where you can do it.

Through Penn in Washington, around 15 to 20 students live in D.C., working as interns during the day and taking two or three classes in the evening. Though this model seems like it could be applied to other industries and large cities in the country, it remains the only option of its kind.

College senior Bryce Arbour participated in Penn in Washington because it was in line with his interests. Arbour is a philosophy, politics and economics major with a public policy concentration.

“I came into Penn as a freshman knowing I was interested in public policy,” he said. “I’d always been interested in that line of work.”

Arbour said he hoped Penn had a program in D.C. because he knew other schools did. But he admitted he is puzzled that there aren’t more similar programs in other parts of the country as well.

“Especially with the Wharton influence that there is at Penn I was always surprised there wasn’t a program like Penn in Washington for [the] private sector or financial sector in New York,” he said. “Even tech, too — you could do something in San Francisco.”

While Wharton has an MBA campus set up in San Francisco, there aren’t any opportunities for undergraduates there yet.

Deirdre Martinez, resident senior fellow in the Robert A. Fox Leadership Program and director of the Penn in Washington Program, thinks the program stands alone because there really isn’t another city quite as specialized.

“It makes sense since DC really only has one industry,” she said. “If you’re going to set up a program in New York [it would require] multiple people in areas of expertise in different industries.”

Martinez doesn’t think it’s unusual that it’s the only in-country option that Penn has for studying away from campus, either.

“I think that it’s pretty unusual to have a program even in Washington,” she said. “There are a couple dozen of all the universities that actually have programs in Washington. A lot of students go through a third party like The Washington Center [for Internships and Academic Seminars] .”

Martinez added that Penn has a fairly broad pool of students who choose to go to D.C. This semester a chemistry major participated in the program, and they have had engineers in the past.

“Increasingly, it’s becoming pretty obvious that having some sort of expertise in Washington is helpful beyond political science,” she said.

Washington programs are popular among schools similar to Penn. Princeton, Cornell and Stanford have similar programs, and Harvard has a program exclusively during the summer. Of these schools, Stanford is the only school to also have a program in New York.

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