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The Wharton MBA
Wharton was founded in 1881 as the first collegiate business school, and that spirit of innovation still drives the school today. Wharton offers a distinctively collaborative MBA experience, unparalleled academic and career resources, and a commitment to learning and personal growth. Wharton professors create the new ideas that are transforming businesses and governments around the world and they bring that cutting-edge knowledge into the classroom, so Wharton MBAs take the lead in innovating the new ideas of the future.
Wharton has the largest business school faculty in the world – 250+ faculty members, including visiting executives and associated faculty. The most published, the most quoted, the most actively engaged with global businesses and public policy, they know how to prepare MBA students for what businesses, governments, and international agencies need – because they're working directly with these organizations every day.
With more courses and programs than any other business school, Wharton provides more
opportunities to acquire both fundamental and specialized skills. With Wharton’s wide variety of classes,
you have the flexibility to pursue the areas that most interest you, even to create an individualized major.
You'll leave Wharton with the high-level knowledge and range of skills to master new challenges, expand your
choice of careers, or reposition yourself in a new industry.
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The Wharton MBA Day In The Life Podcast
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Guest List:
- Sarah Hammer, MBA student
- Dean Thomas S. Robertson
- Mae Jennifer Shores, Sr Associate Director Wharton MBA Admissions & Financial Aid
- Kristi Ringen, Director of Student Affairs
- Emily Cieri, Managing Director, Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs
- Jeffrey Klein, Director, Wharton Graduate Leadership Program
- Peggy Bishop Lane, Deputy Vice Dean and Director of MBA Program, Accounting Professor
- Matt Lattman, MBA student and committee member, PUB
Transcription:
“Hi my name is Sarah Hammer.” “One of the things that is core to the first year is working on a learning team.” “When we look at an application, what may be striking at the end of the day is an application that is genuine, sincere, and thoughtful.” “It’s important to say what Wharton is not, is not a boutique, it’s not a niche player in the market.” “We are the most popular club in the Wharton MBA program, we have over 1,000 members.” “Scored pizza.” “Oh it’s the all encompassing vegetable one” I’m Janet Nakano for MBA Podcaster and this is the Day in the Life at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
“So today was I guess you know I feel like everybody always says this but there is no typical day, every day is a new adventure.” That’s MBA student, Sarah Hammer, “Today I woke up, let’s see I woke up at 8. I was able to shower, get dressed in 25 minutes and then I was out the door and walked for a half an hour to campus. On my walk sometimes I listen to my iPod but this morning I was actually talking to a friend of mine who has an interview at Wharton tomorrow. So I was just telling her a little bit about the culture of the school and prepping her for her interview.” Sarah says one key characteristic of Wharton is its student-driven initiatives. With about 800 MBAs in each class students can be involved in a range of areas of the school. “So just to give you an example, with welcome weekend me and two other students lead committees in organizing that and we worked with someone in the admissions office very, very closely in executing that but talking to friends who go to other schools they have people in the admissions office whose job is to run welcome weekend. So it’s a different perspective that Wharton has that I think is really valuable because in my opinion students know best kind of what the incoming admits may be feeling and thinking and want to see because they went through it a year before. And incoming students really want to have that connection with the students that are currently on-campus.”
Students also can choose to get involved in among the 80-85 different clubs available on-campus. Kristi Ringen is Director of Student Life, “Our student clubs are driven by student demand, student idea, what’s going on in the industry at the time. So our students really have complete freedom over what clubs they want to make active in any given year. The most popular ones are I would say it’s a division between the international culture clubs and the professional clubs. The international culture clubs are popular because they give our students a chance to bond with people from their own culture and country. But more importantly that group then goes and sort of spreads its culture throughout the rest of Wharton. The professional clubs it kind of goes without saying, are very popular. Usually finance and consulting are the two most popular clubs. Over the past year we’ve seen an increase in interest in the social impact club because we’re finding that more students want to go into non-profit jobs either immediately when they get out of school or a few years later.”
Sarah is co-President of the marketing club. Her major is marketing and she says she has already secured a position in the field, “I worked at Unilever over the summer. They manufacture all kinds of products; everything from Dove to Axe. I worked on Skippy Peanut Butter this summer, they make Hellman’s mayonnaise, they make all kinds of brands. It’s a great company and it was my first choice. And so I worked there for 11 weeks, I lived in Manhattan and commuted to New Jersey, it was a 15 minutes carpool ride so that was great. I loved it. I had the best time and when I got the offer at the end of the summer it was a pretty clear decision. So I am also lucky in the sense that a lot of people recruited second year for jobs and I was able to accept my summer employer’s job. I am really excited about going back and be able to enjoy second year was a little more relaxed for me.”
Sarah may have her job search out of the way but she still has a busy school schedule. Her first class began this morning at 9 o’clock, “At 9 I have an Art’s History class. It’s the history of art and architecture in Byzantium which is very random but the professor is fabulous, I really wanted to take the class. And one of the other cool thing about Wharton is you can take classes outside of the Wharton curriculum.”
Peggy Bishop Lane is Wharton’s Deputy Vice Dean and Adjunct Associate Professor of Accounting. She says the curriculum is designed to begin with what they call pre-term in August, “They go through some rather basic courses math, accounting, micro-economics and statistics to try to bring everybody up to a level playing field. And then that gets them set up for basically their fall semester where they are starting in the core. We have a program where students can waive courses in which they have prior academic experience especially when it’s significant and so the waiver process allows some students to go ahead and take some electives in the first year as well.” And how many electives can they take? “Well we think of things in terms of credit units, the full core is 10 credit units. And most of our core classes are half credit unit classes so we end up with somewhere in the order of 17 or 18 core courses. Let’s say someone took the full core that would leave them 9 credit unit of electives that they have to take. So we require 19 credits to graduate but they can take up to 21 credits, so anywhere from 9-11 credit units. Most electives are full credit units but there are some that are half.”
Sarah, she’s taking an Art History course so I guess students can do that? “Yeah so in the curriculum in this 19 credit units that we require, 19 graduate credit units. We require 15 of them to be from Wharton so that means a student should could take 4 credit units at the graduate level outside of Wharton. So in this case, art history, a lot of students will take classes at the law school if they are relevant, possibly at the engineering school especially biomedical or bioengineering type classes that make some sense for students. Others try to branch out into languages or firm up languages they have. So there are definitely opportunities to do that too.” And everyone graduates within 2 years? They can’t stay an extended semester? “Well there is a little bit of flexibility there through the August, summer after their standard May graduation. Mostly that is to enable some exchange program activity. So one of our primary exchange partners is Insead in France and Singapore and they have a period that is very attractive to our students, it’s the May/June period for them so our students don’t have to give up any of their time at Wharton they can go to Insead in May and June, all they have to do is delay their graduation until August.”
So the second year the students start working on their concentrations? Can you talk about some of the popular ones? “Yeah sure. So just in terms of language, in the graduate school here we use the term major although it’s interesting in the undergraduate division they use the term concentration so they mean the same thing but different verbiage there. Our most popular major you could imagine at the Wharton School is finance. But what a lot of people do is they actually double major so they might major in finance and marketing or finance and entrepreneurship. So we’ve seen over the past few years is a fairly good rise in other majors. In particular the two that I just mentioned, entrepreneurship and marketing as well as strategic management. What we’ve also done in the last year is added a general management major where you don’t have to focus on a particular type of management course here at Wharton but you could combine them and so that’s becoming more popular as students learn about it. Outside of official majors one area that is particularly popular in the last few years is what we call private equity area of interest. It’s not a major per say but students are very interested in it and a lot of them will try to carve out what we call an individualized major. So we have this opportunity if one of our 17 or 18 traditional majors doesn’t fit with the student’s particular area of interest they can create their own major as long as there is a theme that is approved by a faculty member. And a lot of students have looked to this field of private equity to create their individualized major. Another area that is gaining interest in a similar vein is social responsibility.”
“Here’s where they’re going, whatever, here’s whatever the four piece, five piece, six piece, whatever.” It’s 3 in the afternoon and Sarah has a class on advertising management, “With the positioning matrix so in their portfolio of products here’s where they stand up or maybe competitively here’s where they stand up. Here’s where I can further communications.” After class Sarah says she has a couple of errands to run, “We are going to the leadership office where we’re currently doing interviews right now for a program called Leadership Fellows. We had a meeting all day yesterday and I just need to check in on one kind of fact finding kind of thing that we’re going to do today. So we’re going to go upstairs. So this is Henchman Hall, there are four levels. The undergrads who are in the Wharton program usually are on the bottom two levels and I think the MBA students usually in the top two. It gets kind of crowded. There’s always a little bit of a fight for the study space but it’s a fun building and it’s nice to have all of the MBAs in kind of one area.”
“Do you know if Lyn is back there? She helps run the leadership program. “ “Hey what’s up?” “Hi. How are you? I just wanted to check in.” “Yeah I have an answer and so,” “I saw you talking to Jan in the hall.” “So yeah we’re going to have him go through.” “Okay good.” “And then we’re going to open up the process at this level to everybody.” Sounds like Sarah needs to step into a confidential meeting so we’ll catch up with her in just a bit.
Wharton offers an array of leadership opportunities. Jeffrey Klein is the Director of the Graduate Leadership Programs, “One of the things that is core to the first year of the MBA at Wharton is working on a learning team and that’s a team of 5-6 students that are together for the entire academic year and that are working together both on projects for various courses. Whether that’s the leadership course, marketing, strategies, statistics. But then also focusing on how they’re developing as a team and using the team experience as an opportunity to learn both about group dynamics, about their own leadership styles and then to give each other feedback in facilitated through 360 degree feedback essentially. So that learning team experience is kicked off with our annual learning team retreat which happens at the end of our pre-term period and right, really serves as the bridge between the pre-term orientation and the beginning of the academic year. So that’s a 2-day retreat that every MBA student attends. Our fellowship programs are their selection based processes, they are very competitive and we take groups of students who have both an interest in personal development but also an interest in service to the Wharton community. And the Leadership Fellows serve as TAs for the core leadership course, Management 652 which is required for every student. They design and deliver the learning team retreat where first year students meet their learning teams. And then they serve as facilitators and coaches and mentors for 4 learning teams throughout the course of the academic year. A second fellowship program that we have are the Venture Fellows and these are also second year students who are receiving specific training in experiential learning, in facilitating groups, in coaching students, in managing conflict and ambiguity but doing all of that in outdoor expedition environments. So we have 2 Venture Fellows associated with each of the leadership ventures and their role on those ventures is really to design and deliver that education experience. “
“Alright. So we were meeting. We meet often. But we were meeting to discuss kind of next steps in the recruitment process for Leadership Fellows. So we have an awesome pool of first year candidates who have applied to be fellows which is essentially mentors for next year’s class and we’re just going through the motions of each round kind of figuring out our next pool of first years that we’re going to interview. So we have first round is an application round, and then we have two rounds of interviews so it’s a pretty thorough process and by the end of the it we really feel like we know the candidates well and have enough data points to make great decisions. Alright so we’ll go on a campus tour? So this is Locust Walk and the cool thing about Penn I think that may be different from some of the other graduate schools is that we have a lot more interaction I think with the undergrads and the other graduate schools. This is Locust Walk and essentially all of the Penn buildings, academic buildings are kind of along this walk. So as a student you can kind of go through and see what the undergrads are up to which is interesting because they are always kind of handing out flyers and I don’t know advertising their Sororities and Fraternities and so it’s more of holistic all encompassing campus I think and the MBAs aren’t separated from it which is kind of nice. You can see these houses; these are actually the undergrad fraternity and sorority houses. There are a couple that are off campus but there are definitely a few kind of scattered around over here. And let’s see there’s a famous Ben Franklin statue of him sitting on the bench. Students live about a half an hour away walking in center city. So off-campus and you can either get to campus we take the bus, or we take cabs, we share cabs it’s only $2 if you can split the cab with 3 other people. Or it’s a good half hour walk which is a lot of nice exercise. So I try to walk.”
It’s 5:30 and Thursday night Wharton has what they call Pub. Sarah claims it’s the highlight of the week and it sure seems like it. Matt Lattman is one of Pub’s committee members, “We are the most popular club in the Wharton MBA program. We have over 1,000 members and people come by weekly classes also. So we probably have, we usually have 600-700 people come in every week to Pub. And we provide beer and pizza for that fee which is $135 a year. We work with clubs who sponsor and decorate Pub and bring in all sorts of foods and specify what beers that they have and give a theme to it and all of these decorations here are this week’s Pub sponsor which is the Penn Club and this happens every week it changes sponsors so we do a different theme every week, we bring in different beer every week and we all have a great time.”
“Hi.” Hi what’s your name? “I’m Mimi, Sue, Mimi Sue.” “Mimi and I worked at Unilever over the summer. “Mimi are you going to work there afterward too? “That’s what I am trying to decide right now. It’s either between Clorox or Unilever.” So when do you have to decide by? “Monday. I have no clue, I try to give my offers in but they won’t call me back.” “This is my husband.” Hi what’s your name? “Ross.” You’re recruiting now right? “Yeah I’m still in the recruiting process.” How’s that? “It’s okay, it’s going, I’m going through the head hunter recruiting process so it’s kind of a bit of a haphazard process. Some through on-campus and some you have to kind of work on your own. So it’s not a set process as some of the others so you have to kind of work your own network a little bit.” Where are you hoping to work? “Uh looking to be in New York and my wife is going to be working there next year too so that makes it pretty easy to know I have to be there.” “Scored pizza.” “Oh it’s the all encompassing vegetable one.”” So after this I’ll probably be here for another few hours maybe until 8 or 9 and then a group of us are going to go to hear Cold War Kids, it’s just a kind of a band that we all like who is playing in Philly. So every Thursday night different clubs host pretty big parties in the Philly area so Euro Club that is kind of run and focuses on European students is hosting a Moulin Rouge party. I don’t know exactly what that entails but I’m probably not going to go to that just because I have a big day tomorrow and kind of need to get some work done so yeah, so that’s my night. It’s kind of a typical night except usually we go to the party after.”
With more than 200 faculty members and over 36,000 MBA alumni the Wharton School is one of the largest business schools in the country. Dean Thomas Robertson, “Wharton is the first business school. It was established 126 years ago. And Wharton has been refining the craft of being a business school for those 126 years. What’s important to us is that the faculty is at the cutting edge of research in developing new knowledge in business and that our students have very, very rigorous and relevant learning experiences. It is important to say what Wharton is not; Wharton is not a boutique. It’s not a niche player in the market. Wharton is a broad, full range school. We have a very large portfolio of departments and majors and research centers and cover I think the full range of business topics and opportunities. So we’re not just the usual subjects like finance and accounting I’d say but we also have the real estate department or we have insurance or we have the legal studies and business ethics, we have healthcare management. And I could go on but Wharton is a large multi-faceted school. Many departments and 24 research centers which are conducting research in these various areas hoping to generate knowledge which will increase economic and social value.”
Emily Cieri is Managing Director of Wharton’s Entrepreneurial Programs. She says their focus is to teach students how to build a business from a high growth perspective, “So from the on-set thinking how can you build a business that is going to be scalable. Which this is seen in our research and carried over to our teaching programs as well as our co-curricular programs. One of the things that’s unique I think about entrepreneurship and powerful about our program is the diversity of entrepreneurship. We’re housed academically in the management department but entrepreneurship cuts across finance, and operations, and marketing and legal aspects. And we have courses; there are courses in all of those various departments that are included in the majors. So we have 40 some courses that are included in the major that cut across six different academic departments. So it’s very diverse in nature and it really allows students to tailor their curriculum and really get what they need from an academic perspective as they are looking at their entrepreneurial career.”
More than 6,000 candidates apply to Wharton each year and less than 20% are offered admission. Mae Jennifer Shores is Senior Associate Director in MBA Admissions and Financial Aid, “75-80% of people who apply are fine academically and professionally so it’s some of the more qualitative dimensions, some of the applications that come to the surface, things like leadership skills, interpersonal skills, personal qualities which of course are as broad as human nature whether that be maybe a little bit initiative or someone who is entrepreneurial or someone who is just a good solid citizen who contributes and gives back to his or her community. And so what stands out is often not what candidates or people on the other end of the application think is what is what stands out. We do have some amazing people in the program and some who will obviously be the type you’re going to see some day on the cover of Newsweek or Financial Times. There are some people who’ve been Olympic athletes, or worked on nuclear submarines but the bulk of people are just good, solid citizens. And so what we look at an application, what may be striking at the end of the day is an application that’s genuine, sincere, and thoughtful. Somebody is actually taken the time to think through the issues, to communicate to us in a very straightforward way who they are. And help us understand their thought process surrounding this decision. It’s not necessarily about being the best writer, being a future in a being a future Nobelaureate this is not an English literature program but people who just communicate clearly. We do have people from around the world in the program so sometimes essays can be quite charming when there are a few little grammatical errors in English but the message is clear.”
So most of this comes through, what you just talked about in the essays? “The essays are one part of it and certainly recommendation letters can tell us a lot about a candidate. Recommenders if they know a candidate well can speak to what they’ve observed in a candidate, the interactions that they have had with a candidate. What they see in terms of potential going forward so that’s another way of learning about a candidate. Certainly how someone spends their free time, whether it be extracurriculars or community service says a lot about what they value, what you invest a lot of time in. And hopefully we hope you invest in some things outside of work or school. Says a lot about who you are as a person even what you may have studied as an undergrad if you maybe did a major that was unique and it wasn’t like business or economics. Or you took some courses or did an exchange program might tell us a little bit about who you are on a qualitative dimension too. And then of course when we interview candidates that’s another opportunity to get to know someone on a personal level, know a little bit about their values, what they feel passionate about and that is another way or learning about some of these more qualitative dimensions.”
What kind of person do you look for? “We look for people who are very well rounded, well balanced either in thought and/or deed. There is no set profile and that is probably the most frustrating part for candidates or applicants to the program. We don’t look for a particular personality type, a particular background or people are necessary going to go into one career upon leaving the school. So we look for people who are thoughtful, people who are informed about what a MBA is, know what it can do for them, have really thought through their reasons for pursuing the degree and have a general sense of where they want to go after they graduate.”
Tuition to the program is close to $42,000 a year which Shore says changes periodically, “It is an investment in your future and we tell people to keep that in mind because it does feel like a daunting price when you think about it upfront. In terms of fellowships and scholarships we have a number of different ones probably some of the more prominent ones are some corporate and foundation fellowships that we have. One of them might be the Forte Fellowship which is through the Forte Foundation which is a non-profit organization that is designed to promote women in business. There’s the Robert A. Twigel Foundations which offers scholarships to underrepresented minorities in the US whether they be African Americans, Hispanic Americans or Native Americans. We have some general purpose fellowships and scholarships like the Joseph Wharton Fellowship and that is awarded based on the strength of the entire application. There are some other fellowships that we have that are targeted toward Europeans or Mexican citizens. There is an Emerging Economies Fellowship. We recently made an agreement for a fellowship that will be available to people from the Middle East once they are admitted. So there is a variety of scholarships and fellowships we award. We provide full information at the time people are admitted in terms of how they can apply for them and express and interest and then we meet by committee to award them.”
It’s 10 o’clock in the morning and Sarah is meeting with a few MBA students at the Greenfield School in Center City. She says she was up at 7:45, “Which is unusual. I don’t usually wake up that early on a Friday morning but there’s some stuff that needed to get done and I just had to be up by 8. And now I’m at Biz World which is just an organization where we teach 5th and 6th graders a little bit about business. So today is the second session out of three. We’re going to be teaching them how to price their friendship bracelets that they made last week and just a way to price it and sell it so they make money because they have already spent a certain amount of money kind of creating their bracelets to date. So it’ll be about that and I think they’re going to do a little bit about marketing. So how exactly they’re going to market their friendship bracelets to the 2nd graders.” “Are you guys waiting for somebody? You can come up because I just saw one of the teachers and they said you could go on up.”
“So we’re going upstairs to meet the kids.” “Okay I see you guys have made your bracelets and you’re now kind of ready to figure out the next step, right?” “Yeah.” “Okay what we’re going to talk about right now is we’re going to talk about pricing. So when you go to a store…” Sarah has a busy day ahead teaching class, another leadership fellows meeting, then off to a winter ball.
For MBA Podcaster, I’m Janet Nakano in Philadelphia.