Wharton MBA for Executives

Wharton West is in Philadelphia!  We had our first day of classes on the Penn campus.  The campus is very nice but we haven’t had a chance to see much of it.  We had classes starting at 9:30.  Classes went on all day long until 6:45.

Most of us flew in last night and we got to enjoy an awesome BYOB dinner at the small Italian restaurant.  The food was great and the ambience of the restaurant was superb.  With 24 of us in attendance, we took over the restaurant.

Today we had a chance to meet with our East counterparts over lunch and dinner.  Dinner was pretty cool because the school set up a bar and catered bbq out in Koo Plaza.  There were a lot of Wharton West, Wharton East, and even some Wharton MBA full time students in attendance.  I sawProfessor Smetters and Professor MacDuffie and for some reason, it felt great to see them.  It was like seeing old friends or something.  East definitely missed out by not having Smetters teach them MGEC.

After dinner, most of us went back to the hotel to work on OPIM homework.  Unfortunately for me, it’s a Thursday and work at home doesn’t end just because I’m out here so I had to get back to my hotel room and get a few hours of work done.  I had to conduct a few conference calls, make some plans, and fix some bugs, etc.  It’s amazing how everything seems to break and degenerate into complete chaos back in the home office when I’m out at Wharton.

I finally got done at around 11:30 so I used the opportunity to head out to Smokey Joe’s, a college bar a few blocks away.  I got there at around 11:45 and it was a madhouse.  There was a line out the door (but it was moving pretty quickly).  After I got in, I realized just how packed the place was.  It was virtually impossible to get anywhere because of all of the grads, undergrads, etc.  I’m pretty sure they were in violation of fire codes but whatever…who cares.

With so many undergrads in the bar, most of us joked around that it had been so long since we’ve mingled with undergrads.  Most of us also said that we didn’t look that young when we were 21 (yeah right).

I left after about an hour because it was just too hard to talk and mingle in there.

Random note…a few of the east folks seem to read this blog so that’s cool to know.  They seemed to know who I am.  I guess “RVD” isn’t fooling anyone.

I haven’t gone out for cheese steak yet but I did buy a crapload of Wharton gear at the Wharton store in Huntsman (it was much smaller than I had imagined) and a lot of Wharton and Penn gear from the Penn store next to the hotel.  I think I got something like 3 t-shirts, 2 tanktops, sweats, shorts, 3 baby t-shirts (real baby ones), 2 baby sweatshirts, 2 baby t’s (for women), 2 hats (one baby hat), license plate frame, pin, keychain, 2 binders, 2 folders, etc….yeah I probably got more stuff but don’t want to remember it all.

We haven’t had as much of a chance to meet the east folks but hopefully tomorrow will be better.  It’s also a little sad that this is our only trip out here…seems like another trip would be nice.

And finally…we had classes too!  Leadership with Professor Useem was excellent.  His reputation as a great professor is accurate.  His class was very engaging and interactive.  Statistics was also very interesting as Professor Waterman talked about sampling and a sampling study he is involved in regarding the downloading of illegal media via usenet.  I actually had a pretty lengthy discussion with him regarding the usenet, gnutella (limewire, bearshare, etc.), bittorrent, etc.  The usenet is essentially a newsgroup (similar to a message board today).  I remember going onto the usenet back in 1991 for the first time.  I was actually a pretty active usenet user on various groups such as soc.culture.korean, misc.consumer, alt.sport.fan.baseball.sf-giants, alt.sport.fan.baseball.la-dodgers(I was a troll in there), alt.religion.monica, and a few more.  I literally went on usenet for about 2 hours every day for 6 years.  I stopped at the end when the internet got much more popular and usenet was simply way too dated.

On the usenet, they have binary newsgroup where people post music, movies, pictures, etc.  I never really got into these because Cal (my undergrad) didn’t carry them on their server but this is where a lot of illegal media gets downloaded.  It kind of seems to me like a futile attempt at shutting down media sharing because almost anyone can create a usenet server and subscribe to the binaries but yeah, it’s true that you would need huge disks and a ton of bandwidth.  It’s not feasible to download everything and check how much of it is illegal so they download a sample and determine how much of it is illegal by analyzing just the sample.  The sample DOESN’T change because of popular size.  In any case, my familiarity with the subject made it an interesting class.

Tomorrow is a full day of classes (we have leadership twice!) and an outside dinner at the restaurant with Wharton East.  I am looking forward to dinner and hopefully a philly cheese steak.  It’s probably not good for my diet but I am imagining a Geno’s cheesesteak in my left hand and a Pat’s cheesesteak in my right hand. The tragic part?  I’m lactose intolerant.