Penn is known as one of America's best universities, and is internationally known as one of the world's most prestigious
universities. A faculty of about 4,500 professors serves about 10,000 undergraduate and 9,000 graduate and professional students;
the research community includes 1,000 faculty, 1,000 postdoctoral fellows, 3,000 graduate students, and 5,000 support staff, with
a budget of more than half a billion dollars each year. Admissions are among the most selective in the country and Penn
consistently ranks among the top 10 universities in surveys. In the US News & World Report Best College 2005 Survey, Penn
holds the No. 4 spot, after Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Admission is extremely competitive, and according to The Atlantic Monthly, it is the eighth most selective college in the United
States (after MIT, Princeton, Caltech, Yale, Harvard, Stanford and Columbia).Penn's most notable programs are its School of Veterinary Medicine, Wharton
School of business, School of Medicine, College of Arts and Sciences, Law School, Nursing School, Annenberg School for Communication, School of Engineering and Applied Science,
School of Education, and School of Social Work. It also contains many well-known departments including English, History,
Economics, Philosophy, Computer Science, Biology, Psychology and Anthropology. It is also noted for its Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.Penn is a national leader in interdisciplinary programs. In addition to numerous cross-disciplinary majors and joint-degree
programs, Penn is home to interdisciplinary institutions such as the Institute for Medicine and Engineering, the Joseph H. Lauder
Institute for Management and International Studies, the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, the Executive Master's in
Technology Management Program, the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business, and the Jerome Fisher Management and
Technology Program.The first medical school in the United States was founded at Penn in
1765. In 1786 Penn was chartered by the state as the first "university" in America. Penn
hosts the country's second college of veterinary medicine, and the only college to offer the degree 'VMD' instead of 'DVM' for
its veterinary graduates. The world's first all-electronic computer, ENIAC was built at Penn's Moore School of Electrical Engineering.Located in downtown Philadelphia for over a century, the campus was moved across the Schuylkill River to West Philadelphia in 1872, where it has remained. The present campus covers over 260 urban acres (1 km²).
Recent improvements to the surrounding neighborhoods include the opening of several restaurants, a large grocery store, and a
movie theater on the western edge of campus.The University of Pennsylvania should not be confused with the Pennsylvania State University (commonly referred to as "Penn State"), another
research-oriented (but state-related) university with the main campus located in the geographic center of Pennsylvania in State
College.Penn's sports teams are called the Quakers. They participate in the Ivy
League and the NCAA's Division I (Division I-AA for football). In recent decades they
often have been league champions in football (12 times from 1982 to 2003) and basketball (21 times from 1970 to 2004). The
Quakers are also part of the Philadelphia Big 5 traditional
basketball rivalriesPenn's home court, the Palestra, is an arena used for Big Five contests as well
as high-school sporting events, and Franklin Field, where the Quakers
play football, hosts the annual collegiate track and field event the
Penn Relays, and once was the home
field of the National Football League's Philadelphia Eagles.Penn has been noted for its strong student culture, particularly award-winning a cappella groups, which range from jazz
(Penn Counterparts), to traditional groups such as PennSix and Off the Beat to Penn Masala — the world's premier Hindi group, which has received global
acclaim. The University
of Pennsylvania Glee Club is the oldest continually-performing collegiate performance group in the United States, having been
founded in 1862. Penn Singers is the only collegiate group in the United
States to have performed all but one of the Gilbert and
Sullivan operettas. The Philomathean Society, Penn's
student literary society, was founded in 1813 and is the oldest continuously-existing collegiate literary society in the United States. Mask and Wig
is the oldest performing comedy group in the nation, founded in 1889. The Daily Pennsylvanian, consistently ranked as one of the best student newspapers in the country, has been
published since 1885.