Welcome To The Wharton School

The Running of the Bulls
by Nicole Ridgway

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is the #1-ranked undergraduate business program in the country, the place where Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, Revlon CEO Ron Perelman, real-estate magnate Donald Trump, and hundreds of other Wall Street titans and Fortune 500 tycoons got their start. Each year five hundred of the best students from around the world are culled from thousands of applicants to join the school and begin a rigorous, four-year curriculum that many in the world of finance consider the equivalent of an MBA. And in the autumn of their senior year, they will begin a ten- week, tension-packed recruiting process where they will put their $150,000 educations to the test, vying for a precious position with the world's elite investment banking and consulting firms like Goldman Sachs or McKinsey - with the potential of a six-figure income and a $10,000 signing bonus on the line.

The Running of the Bulls tells the inside story of this process, and the fascinating institution behind it, through the experiences of seven Wharton students from the class of 2004, including a son of a manufacturing magnate in Bombay, a cheerleader from Texas determined to be a top investment banker, and a first-generation Indian American from Seattle who begins to question whether the Wall Street world is the right place for him. Financial reporter Nicole Ridgway follows each of them through the intensity of recruiting season, when candidates schmooze with employers at lavish presentations- then get bombarded with questions at grueling day-long interviews designed to test their will as much as their intellect.

In the tradition of Scott Turow's One L and Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker, The Running of the Bulls is fast-paced and provocative, a rollicking portrait of the high-stakes game of how Wall Street chooses its next generation.

Chapter 1

Every August they arrive in droves.

From Philadelphia International Airport, the New Jersey Turnpike, I-76 and I-95, parents drive their children to the University of Pennsylvania in order to release them into the wilds of college life. As the family car navigates through the streets of University City in the western section of Philadelphia, its passengers are treated to a spectacle of students moving through campus sporting the bronzed glow and peeling noses of summers spent under the sun. Slung over their shoulders are duffle bags stuffed with crumpled T-shirts and jeans, their arms embracing boxes and milk crates carrying sundry belongings - CDs, toiletries, socks - as they anxiously flock into the massive collegiate gothic buildings that house the dorm rooms and frame the perimeter of the Quad. Like parasitic gatekeepers, gargoyles perch in various poses on the corners of the campus buildings, watching over the procession of this year's new crop. It is a hub of activity as the dorms seemingly swallow these family units whole and spit out new ones, absent a son or daughter and without the burden of their belongings.

As it is with the start of most school years, there is a sense of anticipation about things to come. It feels as if the air has changed. It's somehow fresher than the day before. Freed from the shackles of curfews and chores, it's a whole new beginning for the 2,400 freshmen joining Penn's ranks. There is a sense of anticipation about the friendships and future careers they will forge here. Their Penn diplomas will not only help them land jobs, but will travel with them throughout their lives, gracing the walls of their future homes and offices.

In these humid early days of college life, the 500 freshmen enrolled in Penn's Wharton School - the university's esteemed undergraduate business program - are just like any other fresh-faced seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds settling into their first day of college. They awkwardly break the ice with new roommates, scan the masses for potential friends and wander through campus frantically searching for their classrooms on maps. It is in this confused, dreamlike haze that they begin their foray into college life. Come orientation, freshmen are divided into groups based on which of Penn's four schools they are enrolled in, whether it's the School of Arts and Sciences (known as "The College"), the School of Nursing, the School of Engineering and Applied Science or Wharton. Wharton's new students are now corralled together, looking just as lost as the engineering students who have been gathered together for their orientation. Yet, in a matter of days, their new world will come into sharper focus. The stark contrast between the experiences that lie before Wharton's new brood and the ones facing their peers enrolled in Penn's three other undergraduate schools will become startlingly evident.

These newly branded Whartonites soon begin to discover that during their time here, they will be defined not by what fraternity or sorority they join, but by the career choices that they make and the amount of effort they put forth to achieve that career. What they choose to tell their fellow students about their goals will become the foundation of their identities and friendships and will determine whether, in the rank and file of overachieving Whartonites, they are going to stand out.

In the late-summer swelter of August 2003, Wharton's Class of 2007 began taking their own measured steps into the world where some 77,000 Wharton alumni once trod before graduating to Wall Street or Corporate America's mahogany-paneled boardrooms. With no one else to cling to, the freshmen hang on every word uttered by their upperclassmen "Team Advisors" (TAs), who will guide them through orientation and provide a road map to their new life for the next four years.

Wearing blue Wharton T-shirts and shorts, the TAs herd freshmen from a luncheon to a two-hour advisory panel on course requirements and the services that the school offers. In the late afternoon, these packs of fresh Whartonites file into Huntsman Hall's Baker Forum for a welcome address by Wharton dean Patrick T. Harker, who is known on campus as "Professor Pat." The forum, a two-story rotunda with a sleek and modern wood-and-brick interior, is commonly used as a place for Wharton study groups to congregate during the academic year, but is enormous enough - 4,000 square feet - to accommodate the entire freshman class today. As the room begins to fill, some students sit cross-legged on the floor waiting for the presentation to begin; others are excitedly making plans with new friends. In one cluster of students, two freshman guys compare notes on the drinking games they played in high school, while another member of their group sits on the floor, twisting her shoelace around one of her fingers as she surveys the crowd.

Lining the stairs before them is a clutch of Wharton faculty and administrators grinning down at the crowd. Within moments, Suzanne Kauffman DePuyt, Wharton's Managing Director in charge of student services, and Anita Henderson, the director of academic affairs and advising, step up to the podium and cleverly usurp the students' attention. Wearing the blue Wharton orientation T-shirts over their office attire, the two launch into their own rehearsed welcome.

"To be part of this community, you have to learn the language," they announce. Then, alternately, they go through Philadelphia's distinctive vernacular:

"We don't say downtown, we say Center City."

"We don't say Philadelphia Eagles, we say Philadelphia Iggles."

"You don't eat heroes, you eat hoagies."

"You don't go to the beach, you go to the shore."

And in unison "And you don't say hello. It's YO!" they exclaim in pep rally fashion.

The two women then ask the crowd to welcome Dean Harker, Philadelphia-style.

"Yo, Dean Harker!" the students yell.

"Yo, Class of 2007!" he replies. Then, as if the last routine had no impact on him at all, Dean Patrick Harker shifts to Southernspeak: "Welcome ya'll to the Wharton School."

Tall and fit, Harker defies the stodgy, bow-tied stereotype of a college dean. A handsome man with a chiseled face and a full head of brown hair, he looks more the part of a former college football player. He's not from the South, but rather from New Jersey - and he, too, was once a freshman at Penn, although in the College. Reminiscing about his first days at the school, Dean Harker talks about his freshman year roommate, who constantly snored, and his early feelings of nervousness, which later turned into anxiety.

"What have I gotten myself in to?" he recalls asking himself over and over again. "I was one of the smartest people in my (high school) class. Now I'm surrounded by smart people."

Harker, who also earned two master's degrees and a PhD from Penn, instinctively knew that these thoughts would also encroach upon the minds of the freshmen staring up at him. Most Wharton students are already deeply ingrained with a drive to achieve great things before they even set foot on the school's campus. They have tasted superstar status in high school, whether as class valedictorian, the kid labeled "Most Likely to Succeed" or some other high-flying honor. They are the ones who set the curve higher. And now, as members of Wharton's new freshman class, they are part of an entire class of overachievers like themselves.

As Wharton's freshmen begin to decipher their syllabi and christen their pricey textbooks with highlighter markers, they begin to learn another new vernacular that will stay with them long after their college careers. It's not Philadelphia's slang, but Wall Street's - a vocabulary filled with acronyms linked to some equation or theory that ultimately calculates, Is there money in this or not?

They will take a majority of their classes, spend many a late night and have some of their greatest collegiate achievements and failures in Huntsman Hall, a redbrick building looming eight stories high at Walnut and 38th Streets on the university's campus. The $139.9 million building was officially opened in 2002, complete with a ribbon-cutting ceremony honoring both the building and its namesake, Jon M. Huntsman, a Class of 1959 Wharton grad and founder of the multinational chemical company Huntsman Corp. The billionaire businessman put up more than $50 million to construct the new home for Wharton's business students. It was one of the most prodigious gifts ever given to the school by Wharton's extraordinarily generous and affluent alumni.

With the opening of Huntsman Hall, all of Wharton's undergraduate and graduate classes were brought under the same roof for the first time, a move that dismayed some Wharton MBA students who scoffed at the idea of sharing study areas with their younger (and sometimes more cocksure) brethren. Previously, most of the MBA classes were held in Vance Hall, and Wharton's undergraduate students called Steinberg Hall-Dietrich Hall their home. With its plain brick facade bordering Locust Walk, "Steiny-D" left much to the imagination, especially compared to the grandeur of Huntsman Hall, which has become the campus mecca for Wharton's Future Business Leaders of Tomorrow. Its towering cylindrical structure and the flocks of dark-suited students heading toward its entrances have garnered the building a plethora of tongue-in-cheek nicknames, the prevailing moniker being "The Tower of Greed" (although "The Death Star" is also a well-known favorite).

Copyright © 2006 Nicole Ridgway

About the Author

Nicole Ridgway writes for Forbes magazine, and her articles have appeared in major newspapers including the Wall Street Journal, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Toronto Globe and Mail, and the Star-Ledger (Newark).