First Impressions of Philly / Penn

I have been fairly impressed with Philadelphia in my first week in town. I signed a lease for an apartment at 23rd and Walnut which is just 10 minutes walking from campus. It's a spacious 1 bedroom on the 7th floor, with windows facing the South and the West. Everything seems great about the apartment so far except the 911 squad of ambulances and fire engines that head South on 23rd street at midnight.


Philadelphia is a manageable city. The weather is mild compared to New York and especially Boston. The people are also extremely friendly and down to earth, unlike a lot of the people in the Bay Area, New York, and Boston. Not a single person I've met in Philly so far has been anything but warm and kind. I guess it really is the City of Brotherly Love.

Adjusting to UPenn will take some time. I have never been in a university this large, with a medical school, law school, dental school, etc. MIT was much more homogeneous with the majority of students doing engineering, especially Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. I'm glad to be here at Penn though, and am finally getting to experience a large university with a variety of students across a variety of disciplines. I wonder if I had been an undergrad here, how would my life have been any different now? To be sure, I would have had more exposure to more kinds of people. And the environment here is very supportive, unlike MIT which adheres to the sink or swim approach that it is famous for.

Academics will be difficult for me. I am one of the few students in the program who doesn't have a life sciences background. When we are in class discussing pHs, pKas, etc. I have to go back into the deep trenches of my memory to remember these terms from college and high school. I guess this means that I'm going to have to work harder than everyone else just to catch up. But, I have to remind myself that the purpose of the next 2 years is to transition into health care, and it won't be easy. For the last 4 years, my brain has been wired to think in terms of business. For the 4 years before that, my brain was wired to think like an engineer. Now, I have to retrain my brain to think like a life scientist. I was good at these things at one point in time - a long time ago - can I be good or at least decent at them again? Or is this one transition too many for me? Time will tell. And time will also tell if this transition was even worth it, assuming I do make the transition. Right now, my goal is to finalize my classes and look for a health care job. Let's see how that goes.