MBA Road Trip: Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania
In 1881, during the second Industrial Revolution, Philadelphia magnate Joseph Wharton founded the nation's first collegiate school of business at the University of Pennsylvania.
Today, the Wharton School, based in Huntsman Hall along Penn's tree-lined pedestrian thoroughfare Locust Walk, says it has the world's largest alumni network -- more than 93,000 graduates -- and boasts the second biggest full-time enrollment at approximately 1,700 MBA students, after Harvard University.
Unlike Stanford University and Harvard, Wharton also enrolls about 2,500 undergraduates. With more than 5,000 students overall, counting doctoral and executive MBA students, the school can feel like a big place. But "there are a lot of layers to the onion," says second-year student Jake Gorelov, 27, who has worked in consulting in Boston and the Netherlands and media in New York.
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Cohorts of 70 students take certain core classes -- marketing, microeconomics, statistics -- together, and cohorts are divided into learning teams of five or six, who work closely on exercises in teamwork and leadership. Each MBA candidate is also linked up with several second-year peers for advice on student life, academics and careers -- essentially their "own personal board of directors," says Kembrel Jones, deputy vice dean of student life.
The core requirements offer some flexibility -- an operations requirement can be satisfied with a course on innovation or business analytics, say -- and students choose their direction from among 18 majors, including health care management and business economics and public policy, or they can design their own.
"Our goal is to get all the advantages of the size but enable people to tailor the experience," says finance professor Howard Kaufold, vice dean of the MBA program. While some see the campus culture as quite competitive, most students "champion each other," says former Chicago management consultant Emily Kasavana, 27, class of 2015.
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Many Whartonites live in the bustling Center City neighborhood, and the average MBA candidate is involved in nine student-run activities. Students come out in droves for Thursday pub nights and big annual events like the student-choreographed dance performance -- no experience required.
Finance figures large in the identity of Wharton, once dubbed "the closest thing that exists to a Wall Street farm team" by The New York Times. In fact, the original name was the Wharton School of Finance and Economy. But students are quick to say that times have changed.
About 35 percent of 2014 grads went into careers in finance, down from 41 percent in 2012. Wharton can feel a little insular, but it's "kind of a fluid bubble," notes second-year student Casey Brett, 27, who formerly worked in player development for baseball's Seattle Mariners.
Travel options abound, including several-day courses that immerse students in subjects like finance in the Middle East and North Africa and supply chain management in Japan. Last year, Alana Rush, 30, spent a week trekking and camping on an Antarctic island with about 40 peers in one of the popular outdoor expeditions known as Leadership Ventures.
"You're met with challenges you wouldn't normally face," says Rush, who arrived at Wharton after working in education in Boston and as a consultant in Mumbai and Abu Dhabi. "It takes all the things that you learn in a management classroom, and it puts them to use in a very real-world situation."
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This story is excerpted from the U.S. News "Best Graduate Schools 2016" guidebook, which features in-depth articles, rankings and data.
