Wharton MBA for Executives

It’s like the first day of school.  A new term started today we so go to use our new textbooks, meet our new professors, and say hi to all of our classmates, etc.  Of course it’s not like the first day of school in that we just saw each other 2 weeks ago.  We do have one new student though (hi Matt English!) and fortunately we didn’t lose anyone.

Sections were mixed up so it was nice to see some of my old section-mates again and also meet some new people in my section.  I pretty much know everyone but it was nice seeing them in actual classes.  It gave me the opportunity to see them in a class environment (instead of over a meal or late night drinks).

MGEC Microeconomics grades are posted in Penn InTouch in case anyone isn’t aware yet.

We had a marathon day today.  It started with Macroeconomics in the morning.  Professor Abel seemed good.  It was the first lecture so we didn’t go into too much depth but it was definitely interesting to study economics from a macro level instead of the micro level that we were used to studying.  Since this is an election year it will be pretty interesting.

OPIM was great.  I really enjoyed the class and enjoyed Professor Katalan.  He was amazingly smart.  It’s not often that I’m impressed with someone but his memory impressed me.  He knew almost everyone in the class by name and company.  I think most people in our class don’t even know as much as he does about us.  I think I do only because I’m a little bit of an obsessive freak and I’ve read through our class facebook over and over again until I had it almost memorized.

Stat was also very good.  It was an intro class so there wasn’t much in terms of new stuff that I hadn’t done before but I like Professor Waterman’s teaching style.  It was a little difficult because we had all 90 of us in one room.  I think it will definitely be better in our normal smaller sections.

After stat, we had 2 class 32 Wharton West MBAs from Bain Consultants stop by to give a quick talk.  I spent 4 years in consulting earlier in my career and progressed very quickly in that field (became one of the youngest managers at KPMG back in 1999) but that lifestyle just isn’t for me anymore.  I’ve put in my 12-14 hour days and gave up my share of weekends, etc.  I left shortly before I was set to become promoted to Senior Manager.  I have always been interested in strategy consulting though (Bain, BCG, McKinsey).  I may be tempted to go to some info sessions or maybe even some interviews but in the end…probably not.  I think the one thing that was clear from their presentation was that we’re not really getting enough job placement support yet in the program.  We’ll see how things go over the next 2 terms.  Wharton West does have a dedicated person on staff for job placement so that’s great but we don’t have much access to him this year.  That’s probably for the best though since we will utilize his services next year a lot and the first year isn’t really about trying to find a new job anyway.

I’m not sure what I’ll do after the program but I’m leaning towards finding a secure job at a high tech firm (google, yahoo, ebay, hp, oracle, etc.) or going into VC/PE if that’s right for me (will have to talk to a lot more people to see if it’s a good fit).

At night, we all headed out to a karaoke bar.  It was AWESOME!  I didn’t really have high expectations but a few students got up to sing and it was overall a great time.  Thanks Nessa for organizing everything!  It was also exciting to see our great turnout.  I think we had 50+ people show up from our class so that was great.  We did take pictures so those will be posted on the picasa page shortly.