Calling All Wharton Applicants: 2019 Intake - Discussion

Round 1 here!

Guyz, what do you think about the scholarships at Wharton?

First things first, If you are looking to get into Top 10 schools as an Indian international- Forget about the scholarships.
Plus why would you care? That Wharton degree will be stamped next to your name and you would probably be running for that CEO position at some giant multinational.

Wharton's tag will take care of your loans.

If you are looking for scholarship with a decent enough profile -> Try to grab a seat at the table at Top10-Top20 schools. The likes of UNC and Emory and Mccombs and Rice etc.

Wow! That was stone-cold.

stonecold,

I understand that its tough to get scholarship in Top 10 business schools. But we cannot ignore it altogether especially considering the currency conversion rates .

No harm in trying , that's all we can do.

Two degrees from Wharton?

For anyone considering applying to one of Wharton's dual degree programs (where you earn two degrees at an accelerated pace) here is the full list of the programs they offer:

At the University of Pennsylvania

• MA in International Studies (Lauder)
• JD
• Education
• Engineering
• Environment
• Design
• Health Care Management Medicine
• Nursing
• Social Work
• Veterinary Medicine

With other schools:

• Harvard Kennedy School - Master in Public Policy
• Harvard Kennedy School - Master in Public Administration
• Harvard Kennedy School - MPA/International Development
• Johns Hopkins School of Advanced and International Studies - MA in international relations

You can apply to the whole lot of them here.

It's time to have coffee

https://mba.wharton.upenn.edu/attend-coffee-chat/

Essays for this year...

Essay 1: What do you hope to gain professionally from the Wharton MBA? (500 words)

Essay 2: Describe an impactful experience or accomplishment that is not reflected elsewhere in your application. How will you use what you learned through that experience to contribute to the Wharton community? (400 words)

How's everyone thinking to approach the new essay question (Essay #2)? What kind of experiences can be described in the essay? Can we describe the incidents/experiences happened in personal life?

gmatexam439, MV23, peterag, ya94.. Come on folks; let's do some brainstorming on essay topics.

This is a very interesting essay question. Guess what essay #2 is very similar to HEC's essay question: "What do you consider your most significant life achievement?". I would choose to talk about a story that I feel is THE BIGGEST achievement that I have had to date. The thing especially interesting about this question is that it's not limited to the corporate experience, so a person can really express himself/herself.

I am waiting to listen to what others have to talk about this.

I would approach it in a slightly different way.
I won't necessarily talk about the most impactful experience. Rather, I would pick an experience that is impactful enough, but more importantly, one that has learnings that I can apply at Wharton. I would also make sure that I didn't discuss it anywhere else in the application.
So my theme would be... what did I learn and how would I use those learnings to make my and my peers' Wharton experience better.

I found the following article on Wharton's values!

https://whartonjournal.com/2012/11/13/dg ... re-values/

I suppose that one must be aiming to highlight these potential areas !!

Is anyone going to attend any of the following events? https://mba.wharton.upenn.edu/events/

Common people! Let's share experiences !!

Hi MV23, DigitsnLetters, Narenn, NateFromHBS, ya94

Guyz, what is your take on the following essay: How many employees do you supervise? Please explain this number briefly (i.e. direct reports, matrix organization, dotted line) (500 Characters)
How do you think one should approach this one?

Well, this is an interesting development. Why are schools directly/indirectly asking about the candidate's professional hierarchy?

I haven't started on Wharton, but know that Sloan this year is asking the applicants to upload the organization chart and highlight the candidates position and reporting ladder!

So Sloan is also up there !! But that's actually good because working on Wharton's application will help us get sorted on that question

A good Learning Team can really make your experience going through Wharton's famous Core program by helping you make better comments in class, figure out challenging concepts, and work smarter so you can spend more time on networking or recruiting. Members of a well-functioning learning team often also become close friends, share useful perspectives from their previous work experience, and can help one another in their respective job searches. Conversely, a bad learning team is terrible. Imagine having to sacrifice an hour or more of sleep every day to sit with people who you don’t like and who aren’t helping you.

So what habits separate good learning teams from bad ones? How can you make the most out of your learning team?

1. Launch your team at the bar.
You are going to spend an hour of quality time every day with the members of your team every morning. That’s often more than you’ll spend talking with any other friend you’ll have at school! The most effective teams recognize that above all else they are social groups and treat one another as friends – attending each other’s parties, grabbing lunch together, and supporting one another at their club events. Therefore, before you get down to business, get to know each other first. Take turns going over each other’s life stories – and not just the resume bullets. For maximum effect, do so over a pint.

2. Set norms.
What time are you going to meet each morning? Where are you going to meet? Will you expect that everyone has thoroughly read the case, or are you okay if people skim it during the discussion? Will you communicate over email, GroupMe, or Slack? Having different answers to these questions is a recipe for tension. So make everything explicit! As you launch your team, agree upon and write down the norms your team will use to operate. Perhaps the easiest way to arrive at these norms is to go around and discuss the teams each of you have worked on and what made them work well or poorly. You can also have a frank conversation about what behaviors piss each of you off.

3. Enforce norms.
People are going to be late to learning. So what are you going to do about it when it happens? If your learning does nothing you’ll create a new norm that it’s okay to be late. Soon people will be arriving so late that it impacts your work as a learning while others might stop coming all together. While it may seem like the nice thing to do is to shrug off infractions, the respectful thing is to enforce them. As you get your team norms, set norms about how to enforce them. Maybe you could have a norm that late people get their name written on a white board or that they have to bring donuts next time. Whatever it is, make sure everyone knows that when others are relying upon you, it is not okay to drop the ball.

4. Be open about goals and weaknesses.
Your discussion group will likely be curated to have a diverse set of skills between the lot of you. Take inventory of what those skills are and manage your conversations to bring those diverse perspectives in. Groups that don’t do this often isolate their conversations to the area of shared experience (see picture below). Rather than assume that the finance guys will lead all of those case conversations, ask if someone else wants to learn this skill and try taking the lead.

5. Use “Case Captains”.
More on this in another post (stay tuned!), but in short, divide and conquer the work. With constant demands on your time from a million sources, you need to look for every way to work smarter, and not harder.


6. Facilitate to expose diverse perspectives.
When you manage your group for diversity, you gain access to the group’s full knowledge, rather than that tiny piece you have in common.

Pause every so often to note whose perspectives have been missing from the discussion. Did they see things in a different way? Constantly challenge what others are saying and look for weak points in your analysis. It is so easy to speak from common views and experiences, but when you do your analysis loses so much depth. Look at the graph at the right. When we speak about what we have in common, we only cover the tiny overlapping area. When you manage your discussion group to take advantage of its diversity, you get the insights from the entire footprint.

Hi NateFromHBS,

That's really helpful bro!

Thank for sharing the information.