Grant Allen: Learning to Juggle

THE WHARTON CORE.  Before I dive into the details of my whirlwind, juggling lesson of a first semester, let me paint a bit of backdrop. Mostly, your first year is spent in "core" classes: the basics. Yes, there's a heap of debate, at Wharton and elsewhere, over what is fundamentally "core" but save for I.T., which my friend T.C. told me is required at U.T. and enjoyed only by those from I.I.T., and similar niche classes there's a fairly regimented set of first-year courses. And acronyms.

Wharton's Core falls into three buckets: 1) Leadership Essentials (leadership, communications, ethics, managing people at work, all the "soft stuff"), 2) Analytical Foundations (econ, stats, modeling, etc.), and 3) Core Business Fundamentals (strategy, finance, accounting and their ilk). For details on the Wharton Core, visit http://tinyurl.com/als7h.

For you consultants and private equity model jockeys out there, this can be a bitter pill. Why review T-accounts when you've been constructing LBO models for two years and you're paying over $4,000 per class c.u.? Or learn Crystal Ball given the odds you actually use it in your future brand manager job at Nautica or wherever being slim to none?

That's where the waiver system comes in. Based on either credentials or passing grades on a waiver test, you can take more advanced classes or waive out altogether. For instance, I waived statistics based on my engineering and econometrics background and then taking the waiver test but chose to take corporate strategy and marketing since I wanted to make sure I was perfectly grounded in these areas. The chafing workload made me rethink this decision a few times but net-net I'm happy I took all the "basics." For the data-hungry, I believe 10% waived introductory accounting, 20% took a single quarter advanced accounting class, and the rest took "accounting for dummies."

MORE THAN CASES: WHARTON PEDAGOGY.  Wharton professors are resoundingly superb even with a mixed bag of teaching styles. For the material benefiting from case discussion – marketing, strategy, and "softer" subjects – the case method is leveraged to encourage active debate and to involve everyone. This style is often associated with Harvard, though Darden is also an advocate of the case method, where your professor acts as a learning facilitator, an orchestral conductor of sorts, pushing forward Socratic debate. In ethics, it was wonderful to have a classroom of 30 going at it over Nike's use of sweatshop labor or in strategy having to defend your opponent's recommendation that Sunshine Medical should enter the lightweight wheelchair market with two-thirds of the class pitted against you.

For the more skills-based subjects where this sort of open debate and discussion diminishes detailed understanding, Wharton utilizes mostly lectures with some experiential learning and simulation. Some people visit a MGEC (Managerial Economics, pronounced "magic"), stats or accounting lecture and find it laborious and boring. Well, stats and accounting are boring. You really need to just figure out what works for you; without doubt, case-based classrooms can be scintillating and you'll save on gallons of overpriced coffee required to get you through one-sided operations lectures but you may come out with less of an understanding of the theories in play.

COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONS.  I've received a number of e-mails asking about Wharton's competitiveness. The short answer: hardly. I believe this is driven by a few things.

1) Wharton is one of three schools to have a formalized grade non-disclosure (GND) policy in place (Chicago and Stanford are the others; HBS just recently lifted its administration-mandated grade disclosure policy for the Class of '08 but will likely move to a Wharton-like system). Our policy is mandated and governed by the students through our student government (the WGA), but the GND debate rages on, fueled by articles such as "Campus Confidential" (BW Online, Sept. 12, 2005) and peer school actions. Many schools, including us, will be voting on GND policies over the coming months but recent polling has shown students here to be overwhelmingly in favor of keeping our GND policy in place and I'm doubtful that anything meaningful will change.

2) Wharton students are surprisingly collaborative. Yes, there are the competitive wonks gunning for brass ring banking or hedge fund jobs, obsessing when they don't make Director's List, our biannual top 10 percent honor roll, and scheduling twice as many learning team meetings as necessary. But these pariahs are rare. Mostly because we've all agreed not to share our grades with recruiters and because they, in turn, have agreed not to ask us about our GPAs, there's little of the squabbling and ankle-biting you see with, for example, Wharton undergrads.

PUTTING THE "I" IN "LEARNING TEAM."  I'm sure you've heard the horror stories from any number of schools: the little Napoleon of the group who wants to lead everything, pompous haranguing, catfights, the "refuser" or "excuser" who refuses to do anything or always has a conflict, the guy who slept with the married woman on his team. To be sure, there have been disasters, but our Vice Dean, Anjani Jain, clearly explained that no matter what the situation, you are prohibited from divorcing your learning team. For better or worse, richer or poorer (or much poorer if you happen to sign up for the poster project), you just gotta deal. On the bright side, this will probably be the most random group of people to whom you'll ever have to acquiesce.

I got lucky. "Fortune Five," as we were conned into calling ourselves, has two other standard issue white boys like myself, this amazingly funny/happy/recruitee-gone-wild Chinese engineer, and a lone female in a shy (she claims quiet) yet wickedly intelligent Korean CPA. At first, we had grand plans for frequent meetings, personal growth, cross-pollination of backgrounds and knowledge, yadda, yadda – we would "measure our collective success by the extent to which each of us grew in the areas in which we were weak" – but come Project One, the wheels came off, I lost my cool… It's a long story. As humorist Kin Hubbard said, "It's pretty hard to be efficient without being obnoxious."

JUGGLING LESSONS.  As I mentioned in my last posting, business school can often be "busy-ness" school. There are steady sea surges of social goings-on, cases, projects, Himalayan readings from bulkpacks costing like $75 for a fewer number of Xeroxed pages, e-mail upon e-mail, valuations of impossible-to-valuate companies, undergrad sorority formals, and so forth plus all sorts of other constraints such as family and sleeping in (necessary to burn off overzealous, late night Pat's Cheesesteaks excursions). It's a tough balancing act and as for translation to the real world, well, we'll see.

A typical day, if one exists, consists of waking up about 30 minutes before my 9 a.m. class, which for last quarter was Accounting M/W and Managing People at Work T/Th and taking a cab from Center City over to school. Other people walk or bus it; I prefer the extra half hour of sleep. If Wednesday night included any extracurriculars, which it often does, Professor Capelli was certainly kind in turning the other cheek to my sometimes tardiness. Generally, Wharton is strict about Concert Rules, the theory being that you should act as you would at any classical music performance, i.e., arriving early, not getting up, turning off cell phones. Some profs exert draconian enforcement of said stipulations, but as long as that new Beyonce ring tone you just downloaded doesn't sound off during lecture, you should be fine.

Between class, you have about ten minutes – not much time at all – to hit up the Coke machine, pick up homework from your folder, curse the T.A. who graded it, run into friends and 500 other people in the hall who you don't know but are apparently in your class, too, and then slide into your next assigned seat. If you're hungry, sorry; there are only two food options inside Huntsman: Au Bon Pain and Au Bon Pain. How an overpriced croissant shop snagged such a gustatory monopoly I'll never understand. But, hey, at least the employees are pleasant!

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