Barely time to catch our breath

WHARTON DIARY:A crazy few weeks has just ended, but now employers will arrive at the campus en masse, writes Gareth Keane

WHARTON DIVIDES each MBA class into cohorts of 65 to 70 students, and these cohorts are further divided into learning teams of five or six students. The learning team tackles all of the group work required for classes together.

Some learning teams find the interpersonal dynamics tougher than others, and there are already some horror stories circulating about the experiences various people have had.

I have been lucky with my learning team - the five of us get on well. There is a guy from San Francisco who worked for a venture capital firm, another guy who is an ex-consultant from Miami, a girl who worked in a marketing start-up in Los Angeles, and a girl who was in Singapore's air force. As a team we have been wrestling with many assignments and projects, sometimes more successfully than others, and having a lot of fun along the way.

One of the more interesting things we have been asked to do involved playing economic simulation games with similar teams of students at the Insead campuses in Fontainebleau and Singapore.

Without any direct form of communication between our teams and those overseas, we were able to put some of our newly-acquired game theory knowledge into practice in exercises that encouraged us to figure out how to collaborate with and signal to competitors in order to increase profits for all firms. It was a fantastic way to get to grips with arcane microeconomic concepts, as we tried to second-guess what our counterparts in the Insead teams would do in each round.

Our first quarter has finished, so we are starting into a new set of courses this week. This might mean we have a few days to catch our breath before the workload starts increasing, which will be much appreciated after the crazy finish to the first quarter we just suffered. As well as final exams for all the courses that were finishing, we had to endure midterm exams for our full-semester courses and cope with a number of team-based projects that had to be submitted.

There may not be that much of a chance to relax, though, as the recruiting process is about to intensify. Most of the class will choose to do an internship next summer, usually designed to get some experience in whatever industry they plan to target for a full-time job when we finish.

Even with the current economic conditions, the number of companies coming on campus to talk to us is huge, with more than 160 employers about to arrive to give formal presentations to the first-year MBA students in the next few weeks.

Many of these events will be scheduled to clash with each other, something which appears to be deliberate. It forces students to narrow down their industry choices pretty rapidly when the McKinsey information session is on in one hotel at exactly the same time as the Morgan Stanley reception in another hotel.

There are lots of events outside the formal career management programme as well. For example, McKinsey has invited MBA students interested in working in its European offices to a reception in New York this weekend, so I plan to travel p to that.

Wharton's many professionally focused student clubs also run career events, and I will be spending two days in London over the Thanksgiving holiday visiting venture capital firms as part of the Wharton PE/VC club's London career trek.

As a result, November looks like it will be busy, with events on my calendar almost every weekend. It won't all be hard work though - the Wharton rugby club is travelling to play Harvard Business School next Saturday, and this looks like it will be more of a social/networking event than a competitive game. The main reason for this is that both teams are heading to Thunderbird School of Global Management's annual rugby tournament in Phoenix the following weekend, so each side will probably be keeping their true potential under wraps until there is something meaningful to play for.

Wharton recently hosted and won our own annual tournament, which saw teams from Columbia, Yale, NYU and Duke visit Philadelphia for a weekend. It was enjoyable, though I did fulfil the dire predictions of my wife by hurting my ankle. The doctor thinks it is tendonitis, so hopefully it will be better by the time we travel to Harvard.

gkeane@wharton.upenn.edu