Wharton, Part 3

The Running of the Bulls
by Nicole Ridgway

(Page 3 of 4)

The students who embark on joint-degree programs find themselves even more stressed out than a typical Whartonite. Many of them opt to stay an extra year to lighten their course burdens a little.

"Engineering is actually more intense than Wharton. Sometimes it's a bit weird leaving a management class and going to 'Advanced Thermodynamics,'" recounted a fifth-year senior in the M&T program who is also enrolled in a sub-matriculation program that will award him a master's in biotechnology by the time he finally graduates. While his ten AP credits helped him avoid certain classes early on, the workload can still be overbearing at times. It's the payoff that makes it all worthwhile for some students. He hopes his three degrees will help him land a fast-track position at a consulting firm, preferably for the biotech or pharmaceutical industries.

"Doing M&T has molded how I've developed as a person," he said. "It catered to my schizophrenic needs of wanting to do this and that."

Growing up in Bombay, India, Shreevar Kheruka knew what Wharton was by the time he was twelve years old, but he didn't know about the University of Pennsylvania until well into his college search in high school. "The Wharton name would come up over and over," he recalled. "I didn't even know they were the same school."

Beyond the fact that Penn often gets confused with Penn State (the much larger state university based in central Pennsylvania), Wharton has developed such a strong reputation on its own that some people believe it to be a separate institution. It consistently appeals to scores of business-minded high school students hailing from such far-flung homelands as Mauritius, Argentina, China, Barbados and Portugal. International students representing forty different countries comprise fourteen percent of the Wharton Class of 2007's student body. In fact, Penn's campus as a whole is one of the most internationally diverse of the Ivy League schools, with students from ninety different countries making up ten percent or more of its 10,000 undergraduates.

Shreevar had also heard about other top American schools and seriously considered a handful of prestigious colleges, including Brown, Cornell, Berkeley, and Stanford. Yet Wharton, and the possibility of being able to earn a joint degree in business and engineering concurrently in the M&T program, reeled him in. M&T, he figured, would arm him with the perfect skills to help run his family's glass manufacturing business someday, and Shreevar eagerly sent in his application.

Following that anxious and nerve-racking ceremony of opening the envelope from Penn's admissions office, Shreevar felt both happy and disappointed. He had made it into Wharton, but he didn't make the cut for M&T. Always driven and rarely failing at anything he put his mind to, Shreevar decided to enroll in Wharton, determined to do everything he could to get into the M&T program by his sophomore year.

As his freshman year progressed though, Shreevar's ambitions quickly crumbled under the weight of his studies. He struggled through his first physics class - a prerequisite for the engineering part of the program required to get into M&T. Then, two weeks into the second physics class he needed to take, Shreevar walked out. Feeling defeated, he went straight to his academic advisor for help. He didn't want to take another physics class or earn a degree in engineering anymore. After a brainstorming session and a long discussion with his advisor, Shreevar dropped his M&T aspirations. Instead, he decided to pursue a minor in International Relations at the College, a skill set he figured he could use someday to expand his family's business further abroad and better deal with its international clients.

Each Wharton student graduates with a bachelor of science degree in economics. At the epicenter of the

Wharton education is a checklist of ten required courses called "the core." During their freshman and sophomore years, Wharton students tackle this rigorous combination of courses in accounting, statistics, finance, management, marketing and the almost universally loathed Operations and Information Management (or OPIM).

It all begins with Management 100. Wharton's faculty devised the course when it set about revamping the undergraduate curriculum in the early 1990s. A combination of leadership training, public speaking, writing and teamwork skills, Management 100 is a program that has been lauded by the academic community and praised as an exemplary class by the American Association for Higher Education. Wharton's freshmen meet their Management 100 Team Advisors and the other students in their class during the first days of new student orientation. It's a good way to ease them into their new surroundings, explained Jon Gantman, who now in his senior year oversees all of the Management 100 TAs. "Their TA is the one who takes them around during orientation. You go to all of your other classes and you don't know anyone. You come to Management 100 and you've met your TA, you've had lunch with them. And they ask you 'How's it going? Any problems with moving in?'"

Once classes commence, students are broken into smaller recitation groups and are charged with the task of picking a local community-service project to work on throughout the semester. In addition to their regular full-class lectures, these subgroups meet once a week with their TA to design and implement their particular project and figure out how to raise the necessary money and get services donated. In essence, the fledgling business students are taught the ropes of management by being thrown directly into the fire of nonprofit work. While doing so, they are benefiting the Philadelphia community. One such project entailed helping inner-city seventh and eighth graders to explore their career goals. Another devised "Boo at the Zoo," a Halloween celebration at the Philadelphia Zoo for local area children. The freshmen in Jon's Management 100 group organized a "Diversity Day" event for the city's youth that was sponsored by local businesses, including a popular radio station that gave away gifts at the event.

Each student in Management 100 is required to write weekly papers evaluating themselves as a leader in their team and answering questions like What kind of roles do you like to play? or What kind of negotiator are you? All of the assignments relate back to what the students are being taught in their Management 100 class or what they are working on for their community-service project. It's a combination of writing assignments and speeches that culminates in a large group presentation at the end of the semester. By that time, students have come to know their group mates exceedingly well, so much so that it's hard to believe that just a matter of twelve weeks earlier they were complete strangers.

The course is considered by many Wharton students to be the most valuable classroom experience they have at the school, because in Management 100, friendships are made that will last throughout their years at Wharton. Some of them will rely on each other as study partners and choose to work with each other for group projects over the following three years.

If Management 100 is the collective group hug of business classes during freshman year, then OPIM is considered the cold, harsh reality. It hits the freshmen when they buy the two thick textbooks on programming languages and databases that are required for the class. "There are so few kids who walk into that class and know what they are doing," said Jon. "If you don't keep up, you can get really lost."

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).