Calling all Wharton Fall 09 Applicants

a friend of mine got an invite today..

i am rooting for you all...wut wut

oh wow, that is the first invite I heard. Do you know when he went complete?

dunno man..excpet he is estatic and calling everyone he got an invite...

so this week you guys should start getting some invites..

ha that is awesome. I hope they send invites throughout the day. The wait is long and painful.

So lucky! I just know I will get all my invites at 23:59 on the last day (if I get any...)

So you are Israeli Gil? Do a lot of Israelis apply to b-school? My mother is, so that makes me by default! I was there on Birthright 2 months ago

Yes I am - and so are you! Did you have a good time? I think there are 24 Israelis in the 2010 Wharton class - I hope it repeats this year - and that we're both there:).

My dad is from Israel too... 3 down, 21 to go.

Welcome aboard! This is becoming a competitive group:)

Shalom! Ani medaber ketzat ivrit aval ani lo yisraeli, ani americai.

I heard loud and clear from one of the senior people on the admissions team a while ago that they "are interviewing a lot of interesting candidates" and that a lot more are "in the pipeline" make what you will of it. I think, they will do their absolute best to interview the best candidates early enough to ensure the maximum competitiveness of the school on the general MBA market. I have no doubt about this whatsoever - this super efficient adcom is arguably the best in the world.

The recruiting for banking internship is going and that is what matters. Although I am not recruiting into banking myself, I crashed an investment bank recruitment reception last week, and they really needed Wharton MBA's. The logic is to snap people now when the competition for their skills among the employers has subdued somewhat. Having said that, there are obviously not as many jobs as would have normally been out there, but people who are focused on finance do not seem to shift their main focus as they realize that there will always be a need for financial services in one form or another, and banks will always need people.

Most people have no doubt that competition for banking jobs in the US, and consequently for consulting and GM jobs will be tougher than usual because of the shift in demand for the latter types of job. One solution is to explore employment opportunities in the overseas subsidiaries/branches of the banks that might not be as successful in the US at this time. In this case, the brands are of course of key consideration, e.g. you do not want your first banking job to be in a major Mongolian bank for example as the skills you'll get there are not readily transferable to North America or Western Europe, so you will find it very hard to make the transition once the job market stabilizes again. All in all, people are mapping out creative alternative strategies right now.

nothing from wharton yet re: interview....

same here...why does time go by so slow?

Nice! Ani tov!

there are indeed loads of Israelis this year at Wharton - probably more than Europeans! I don't know if it's usual or not, but it's certainly impressive (although one could claim that on a distribution point of view it doesn't make sense).

I think that it was an unusual year, though I know chicago also has quite a few in the 2010 class (I think around fifteen).

I actually asked the Wharton Rep in a recent speaking arrangement they held in Israel about this. She said that contrary to popular belief, they do not group applicants in pools based on where they come from, and that they simply happened to have tremendous applications from Israelis last year and couldn't turn them down.

Her basic message was - Wharton will never dismiss someone who is a strong applicant because they already have people from his country. I guess diversity is not just where you come from.

Wharton emailed me today that my scanned transcripts didn't go through properly and wanted me to rescan and email them to her. She said that I would go complete as soon as those went through, so probably tomorrow morning.