Wharton, Part 2

The Running of the Bulls
by Nicole Ridgway

(Page 2 of 4)

In Huntsman's modern, technologically advanced classrooms, Wharton students learn the underpinnings of Corporate America and Wall Street and how to succeed there. Escalators move them efficiently from class to class, and visiting CEOs are often entertained in its upper level, where window-lined conference rooms are furnished with black leather armchairs and stocked with refreshments. Students at the College take classes in buildings that date back to the nineteenth century and that sometimes have temperamental air-conditioning and wobbly desks, while the Wharton students have climate-controlled rooms with tiered, ergonomic seats (which swivel 360 degrees so students can work with one another more easily). At the front of the classroom, Wharton professors reign like the Wizard of Oz from their computerized terminal lecterns, controlling everything in the room from projector screens to the window shades.

Walking through a corner of campus that has undergone a face-lift due to the successes of Wharton's alumni not only feeds the aspirations of Wharton students, who see where their academic training could take them, but also propagates the Wharton stereotype that Whartonites are single-mindedly competitive overachievers, and further widens the sharp divide between them and those enrolled in Penn's other, less-endowed programs. To students enrolled in the College, Huntsman is a stark reminder that the Wharton School's business program is Penn's "chosen child." And, in many ways, Wharton's students are taught to feel that way as well.

From their very first days of school, Wharton students are told that they are the best and the brightest. And if they weren't convinced of this before they arrived, they will soon adopt this belief and carry it with them like an invisible badge of honor. "Walking into Wharton and being told by the dean that we are the cream of the crop and we are at the world's best business school gave us a tremendous confidence," recalled Navin Valrani, a Class of 1993 Wharton alum who now heads several divisions of Dubai-based Al Shirawi Enterprises, one of the largest conglomerates in the Middle East. "You began to feel that you could achieve things far above the norm."

It is a school comprised of what one recent grad candidly describes as "a group of the most intense kids you will ever meet." Those students who aren't intense when they set foot onto campus freshman year quickly become so in order to keep up, he explains. Other alumni concede that Wharton's academic program carries with it demanding course requirements and punishing workloads that raise students' stress levels to a fever pitch and cause them to forgo many of the activities one expects typical college students to indulge in. Their peers in the College explain that Wharton students always seem too busy and wrapped up in their class work and prospective careers to relax and just hang out. All of these perceptions amount to a litany of stereotypes ascribed to Whartonites: type-A personalities, competitive, cutthroat, power-hungry, money-hungry - none of them exactly flattering.

Jon Gantman, a friendly and outgoing Wharton senior with sandy blond hair who grew up in the nearby suburb of Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, is from a family full of Penn alumni, including his mother and father. A member of the Class of 2004, Jon is the quintessential "legacy" student. (Roughly ten percent of each Penn class is comprised of legacy students. About one-third of the legacy students who apply to Penn gain admission to the school.) Soon after embarking on their college careers, Jon and his Wharton friends began making an extra effort to avoid being typecast or sounding snobbish to their peers in the College.

"Many of them will say, 'I go to Penn,' instead of 'I go to Wharton,'" he explained. "Once I'm done with my Wharton classes, I'm a Penn student. Things become more based on the individuals and how they act. Unfortunately," he said in a disheartened tone, "it's the more outspoken Wharton students who create the stereotype."

"Wharton students don't like to be singled out as a Wharton student, especially freshman year," explained Beth Hagovsky, the director of Student Life at Wharton. "Socially, [all of Penn's students] hang out together. When they walk into classes, though, there is a divide."

Realizing that Wharton is often considered a separate, more elitist institution than its counterpart schools at Penn, the faculty has taken some strides to lessen the divide. A few years earlier, a small step was made in this direction when they changed the wording on the new freshman orientation welcome gift - a key chain on a blue nylon neck leash - to read "Penn/Wharton" instead of simply "Wharton." The Wharton "W," which was used for decades as a distinctive insignia for the school, has all but disappeared from campus as well. Instead, Wharton sweatshirts and other related paraphernalia are now emblazoned with the Penn shield.

For all of the pomp associated with Wharton, applying to the business school is deceivingly simple. It merely requires a prospective student to check the box on Penn's admission form that says "Wharton," an act that seems to underplay the weight of Wharton's demanding business curriculum and the dedication it requires of its students. Yet, gaining admission to Wharton is another feat altogether. Admissions officers admit a smaller percentage of applicants to Wharton - from fourteen to eighteen percent - than they do to Penn's three other schools, in some years by a fairly wide margin. For the past several years, Penn on the whole has tended to admit twenty percent of applicants. For the Class of 2007, Wharton received close to 4,000 applications, offered 700 prospects admission and matriculated 500 students. The average combined SAT score of those admitted to Wharton was 1440, fourteen points higher than Penn's overall average score. These scores put the average Penn and Wharton student in the ninety-seventh percentile of test takers, making them some of the best performers in the country.

For Shimika Wilder, an athletically built African-American senior whose quiet demeanor and eloquence make her seem older than her twenty-one years, the decision to check the box that said WHARTON was easy to make once she did some research. Raised in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, a small suburban town located twenty miles outside of Washington D.C., Shimika is the first person in her family to attend college. This pioneering role caused Shimika to set about her selection of colleges with even more than her usual trademark seriousness, because where she spent the next four years needed to suit both her interests and ambitions. She zealously did her research, buying a copy of U.S. News & World Report's "America's Best Colleges" to serve as her guide.

Shimika was an avid athlete, running track and playing basketball, softball and volleyball at the Queen Anne School, the college preparatory high school she attended in Maryland. A self-described "Nike fanatic," Shimika dreamed of working for the flashy sporting goods retailer someday, perhaps in finance or marketing, and wrote about starting her own sporting goods store in her college application. "I thought business was the new wave of the future," she said. "I could go into any industry."

When Shimika discovered that Penn was in Division I athletics and that Wharton topped the U.S. News' list of undergraduate business schools, she grew fairly certain that it was the place for her. Penn also offered her more scholarship money than the state schools she had applied to. Moreover, Shimika liked the idea of getting a jump on the competition. Most other undergraduate business programs delay business course requirements, sometimes until as late as junior year. At New York University's Stern School of Business and University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce, business students don't start taking these classes until sophomore year. Berkeley's Haas School of Business doesn't even admit students into its business program until they are juniors. Wharton students, on the other hand, embark on their business studies from their first day of classes.

Out of the thirty-seven courses needed to attain a Wharton degree, only about a dozen must be nonbusiness-related. Yet, the weight placed on these courses is somewhat negated because Wharton students can choose to take three of their liberal arts classes on a much less stringent "pass/fail" basis. Whartonites have the option to enroll in close to ten more liberal arts pursuits if they choose. But oftentimes, the more business-minded types would rather forgo any classes that will distract them from their business studies.

"Wharton students didn't come here to learn about Plato and philosophy," expounded Shimika. "They're here to learn about the philosophy of money. They tend to discount the college classes. They aren't here to be intellectuals. It's about maximizing returns."

Wharton students specialize their business studies by choosing among one of seventeen "concentrations," such as accounting, finance, marketing or entrepreneurship, or they can design their own program. They can switch concentrations as late as their senior year. During her senior year, Shimika switched her concentration from finance to marketing with the hope of broadening her career options after graduation.

Academic advisors encourage students to cross-pollinate their studies among Penn's four different schools in order to foster exposure to multiple disciplines. Wharton's students have the option to declare minors from one of sixty different disciplines offered at one of Penn's other schools. The most overachieving Whartonites also have the opportunity to earn two degrees simultaneously by enrolling in one of three established joint-degree programs: the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business (known as "Huntsman" on campus), the Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology (known as "M&T," it involves completing engineering degree requirements as well and is arguably the most demanding curriculum Penn has to offer), and Nursing & Health Care Management, a program between Wharton and the Nursing School that prepares students for careers in fields like hospital administration. If nothing else, these special programs, in which about twenty percent of Wharton students enroll, give students a chance to learn from different professors and work with students from Penn's other schools.

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).