I parked my car in a garage right in front of the Huntsman building and
after walking around UPenn's campus for half an hour, went to the
Admissions Office at around 10 am. I met a very friendly first year
student there, who had an interesting background (he lived in US for ~10
years, then went to India and studied there until he was 18 and then
came back) and he took me to his class.
It was a statistics class. The
professor showed the number of airline passengers in US for each month
in 1949-1960 and the problem was to estimate the number of passengers in
January of 1961. Then he built a statistical model to approximate the
period 1949-1960 (based on the exponential increase of the number of
passengers at that time, seasoning effects, the level of overall
economy) and based on that model approximated the number of passengers
in January of 1961. It was an interesting class (and professor had a
unique sense of humor) because while I have a good quant background and
statistics wasn't a foreign subject for me, I've never had statistics
class told from very practical and business-like point of view. And that
was interesting.
After the class I went back to the
Admissions office and then we - a group of probably 15 students - went
and had a lunch with students. The student who sat on our table was a
second year former submarine officer and he was very enthusiastic and
also very honest about Wharton.
The campus tour started at 1:30 and
we walked around the campus and in Huntsman hall for about an hour.
UPenn's campus is different from other campuses I've seen: the buildings
are bigger. In most campuses that I've been, the buildings are 2 stories
high (maximum 3). At UPenn, 4-5-6 story buildings seemed to be the
average. Huntsman is probably one of the biggest ones and is very
high-tech. In each study room, and there were many of them in Huntsman
building, there are 2 computers with flat screens and a high tech board
which is just like regular board but whatever you write on it, you can
see on the computers as well. So you can do the meeting just on the
board and whenever you're done, you can move your notes to your laptop
and that's it.
At 2:30, Kimberly, who is a member of AdComm, gave a presentation for
about 30 prospective applicants in a conference room. She said that the
AdComm evaluates applications on 4 main criteria which are
1. Academics i.e. your GMAT, GPA
and transcripts. She said that if your scores on both sections of GMAT
are above 80%, then that's good. Between 70 and 80 percent is in "gray
area" and AdComm looks at other areas and below 70% is not good. She
said that if your total GMAT score is below 600, you should almost
always retake it.
2. Professional career.
3. Personal qualities.
4. Presentation and timing.
She said that the first essay is
the most important essay because it asks the five important questions
that AdComm members have about each applicant which are 1) why MBA 2)
why now 3) why Wharton 4) short term goals and 5) long term goals.
Kimberly also said that during the feedback sessions for the dinged
applicants, she speaks about 90% of the time about these 5 points, so
make sure you nail each of those points. She also said that she likes to
drink Diet Coke when she reads the applications so if you work for Coca
Cola, highlight any project that you worked on Diet Coke :).
After the presentation, we -
probably a group of 7 applicants - went outside, sat around a table and
talked with 2 current students. In the middle of conversation it turned
out that both of those students actively participated in s2s chats. One
of them was TANNIAH and the other student was called, if I remember
correctly, Nat in chat sessions (unfortunately I don't remember his
exact username). It was really exciting and at first quite surprising to
meet the people with whom you've chatted and exchanged messages on s2s
in real life.
By the way, Nat had a very interesting journey through the B-School
application process, so if you'll see him during a campus visit, ask him
to tell his story.
After chatting with Tannia and Nat
for about an hour, we went to the MBA pub, which was nicely decorated,
had good music and free beer. We talked with students (most of the time
with Tannia), spouses and other people at Wharton about their school and
we had a great time. One of the people that I talked to worked in the
career management office (I'm not sure if that's the exact name) and he
said that initials signs show that this year will be better for
recruiting than last year was. Consulting companies seem to have
significantly increased the hiring, which was an encouraging news for
me. By the way,
Tannia (TANNIAH on s2s forum) has very friendly and also very
outgoing personality. I have a lot of outgoing friends and I'm pretty
outgoing myself, but Tannia's level of outgoingness (can I say that?) is
contagious. When we were in a pub, standing with a group, talking and
drinking beer, almost every other person who passed by our group was a
good friend of Tannia. So they stopped, hugged Tannia, talked a bit with
her and only after that they went to get another beer. FANATICALFAN is
laid back, very friendly and speaks with Australian "accent". Just as
you would imagine a guy from Melbourne would be like. Unfortunately I
didn't meet other s2s regulars - Alex, Mae and LauderJPN (Tannia and FF
said that LauderJPN has graduated and he's in Japan now).
I left the pub at around 7:30 to
drive back to Boston. So ... Wharton is a great school and it has great
people. I really enjoyed my time there.
P.S. I got out of
Boston the day before my campus visit in late afternoon. It took me 8
hours to drive to Philly (and I had the joy of being stuck in a traffic
around NYC) and reached there in the middle of a night. I was barely
able to sleep for couple of hours before I had to get up to go to
Wharton. Because of that, I was feeling pretty tired the whole day
(although, obviously, I tried not to show it). So if you are going to
drive from Boston, make sure you leave enough time for a good night's
sleep.
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