>>9247738cont
I grew up about an hour outside of philly and have lived here my whole life. I don't know anyone in the math program, but I am minoring in math so between that and what I already had to take for EE and CE classes I've been in a good amount of math department classes. In general the quality of classes has been pretty good. You aren't going to get the same level of rigor in classes as you would at upenn, obviously, but depending on what you want to do I think drexel is a pretty good choice. You have 18 months of co-op to fill, so I don't think it's hard to get involved in undergraduate research. Coops also give you a chance to get a "real job" if you are into that. Basically I think drexel lets you keep your options open; you have a lot of time to explore what you want to do long-term, whether it's grad school or a certain industry, and you're well prepared for either of those.
Quarter system moves fast lol, but it's not a big enough deal to consider really. You'll be a little stressed, and it really blows not having breaks longer than 2-3 weeks, and not being on the same schedule as your old high school friends. I think the co-op makes that worth it though. A lot of my friends that graduated are still kind of floundering around, but I am secured into a sweet government job doing programming, signal processing, and now some machine learning too.
tl;dr If it comes down to drexel or another school (not upenn), I'd choose drexel unless they really cheap out on your aid. If you want to get a "real job" then drexel will set you up much better than most other schools will, but I'm not really qualified to talk about applications to grad schools/phd programs. I'd imagine your school choice at that point wouldn't matter as much, as long as you do some good research, and have solid grades/recommendations/gre scores.
