I’m interested on how many dopers have successfully graduated from Wharton business school. If you did, would you please discuss the admission process and your credentials leading to acceptance. Also, how was the atmosphere and overall experience? Is it all that it’s cracked up to be? Would you be where you are today without the Wharton degree?
My sister in law finished her MBA there in May - I can’t tell you much about her credentials. I know her undergrad is from Yale, but beyond that, I don’t even know what her major was or what, exactly, she did for work in the years between Yale and Wharton. To really show my ignorance about her, I’m not sure who she works for now or what she does for them.
Basically, I’m quite unhelpful. Sorry.
My cousin graduated from there a couple of years ago now, at the worst point in the economic dip.
A) He has a dual degree in two different types of engineering from an Ivy. He got somewhere in the 700s on his GMAT but I don’t know what, precisely.
B) He absolutely loved it but he entered during the high point of the boom years and got out during the crash.
C) I know you don’t want to hear this but prior to going there he was working as a high-level analyst at an investment firm. After graduating he and most of his class had trouble finding jobs. However, he also made it difficult on himself because he was getting married and his fiancee wanted to live in a specific city so he turned down good jobs in order to accomodate that request. He was out of work for quite a while until he landed a deal through nepotism at a smallish biotech company. I think he’s looking to move out. However, there’s no guarantee that he would have kept his pre-Wharton job as most of his friends there were laid off, anyway. He says he doesn’t regret it, though, and that he thinks in the long-term it will have been a good investment.
My cousin married a guy that graduated from there in the 60s. He squandered 3 fortunes and they’re now living in an apartment with little to no savings.
I don’t think it’s because he didn’t get a good education at Wharton, he just allowed his lust for money to overrule smart business practices. It’s not that he didn’t know what to do to make and keep money, he was just more interested in hitting the big time and didn’t have the patience to make wealth happen and grow the way it normally is done: slowly, with lots of self-discipline. Instead, he was always looking to make a quick killing.
It’d be interesting to see where they would be if he had put what he surely learned at Wharton into practice.
I guess then, it is pretty obvious that outside an Ivy League undergrad, the chances of being admitted to Wharton are virtually non-existent?
I’m pretty sure my cousin didn’t go to an Ivy League school.
He came from a prominent Louisville family, though, so his family may have had ties to the school.
I have a friend who went to Harvard Business School after graduating from a state university in the Midwest (not the Big 10 or UT or anything…a fine school but not one of the prestigious state schools) because she couldn’t afford to go to a private school undergrad. She had excellent work experience and excellent grades. OTOH, my Wharton cousin did NOT get into Harvard despite coming from an Ivy undergrad so there you go. They started and graduated in the same year.