MBA @ Wharton: Recap of Term 1 & Term 2

Doing an MBA at Wharton, while pursuing a fulltime job has been everything I expected to experience AND much more!

Chairman P has done an outstanding job of chronicling Wharton's MBAExec program; I hope to continue on Ron's tracks, add more color and additional insider perspectives on the whole experience.

To start with, I'll try to recap our Term 1 and Term 2. I'll focus on two distinct aspects: the hard skills and everything else.

Term 1

To me the first term/semester (started on May 22, 2006) was the hardest of all. We had a seriously steep ramp-up curve:

1. The first week added the lion's share to the steep slope... about 6-8 hours of classwork a day for five days, oscillating somewhat awkwardly between seemingly ultra-soft stuff ("Managing People At Work") to hard $$$ realities around running a firm ("Microeconomics") to understanding how firms mis/represent their performance ("Financial Accounting").
   
2. I suspect most folk have to maintain a delicate balance of being physically away from work, at the same time being somewhat tuned into what's going on there, while getting a ton of new concepts being pounded at you. The context switches are hard in general, but it could be a lot harder depending on one's particular situation and relationships at work. I for one had a particularly tough time being weaned away from work.
3. Thanks to friends who had just graduated from the program - I had a ton of insight about how the program worked before I started, perhaps a bit too much! The one thing I would emphasize for someone starting the program in 07 or later is to focus on preparing ahead of time. What you really get out of the class is largely a function of how much work you put in ahead of the class. Note that I do admit that this is easy to say but much harder to implement!
   
4. You're just starting to get to know people... and generally alcohol is involved when you meet new people! With hindsight, I would say temper it down to maybe two or three drinks, depending on your tolerance level. Its not exactly easy to transition from a 6-8 hr sleeping hour schedule to alcohol+4hr sleep+7 hours of classwork!

So, what the heck did I really learn in these three courses?

1. Microeconomics: Arguably the most important lesson I learned was in the very first class: the real value of a company (to its shareholders) is the present value of its future cashflows discounted at the opportunity cost. I am constantly reminded of this every time I evaluate buying a company's stock for my personal portfolio. In general the course reminded me of the importance of economic profit, and the importance of watching costs inside the firm and marginal cost per user gained. Ideas around expected utility and game theory were intellectually stimulating but I'm still working on developing a real world appreciation for those. We cogitated about common sense concepts of monopoly and cut-throat competition (commoditization) in a more rigorous and theoritical framework.
   
2. Financial Accounting: Having spent most of my career as a technologist, I had worried a lot about my real customers and what they really want. This course exposed to me what your obligations are to a new category of customers: the investors and analysts. In terms of sheer material, I probably learned the most in this course and a newfound appreciation for the difference between accounting profits and real/economic profits. In contrast with Microeconomics, the last day of class where we took apart the financial statements of a real company and looked for holes all over was my most memorable class.
   
3. Managing People At Work: Lesser said about this course the better! Basically, many of us already have a great deal of experience managing people at work... this course attempted to reify one's perspectives on people management. While I do agree working with and managing people is the most important aspect of running a firm, I'm ambivalent about the utility of being taught management frameworks in class! All that said, the Field Application Project (FAP) was a commendable component of the course: to complete the requirements of the FAP, you identify a 'management' type project in a company of your choice and you apply the frameworks and concepts you learned in class to a real life problem. This might sound very sexy in theory, but when you combine heavy workload in Accounting and Microecon with a real life (i.e work & family) and your first exposure to study group dynamics, you end up losing appetite to solve a real world problem fast... UNLESS you can combine it with something at your work place. One way to ensure you (and your group) does a good job in this course is to pick a project that you or someone in your study group is personally invested in.

Term 2

In my experience, Term 2 was much easier to manage in comparison to Term 1. I had a better sense of devising a best known method to optimize my performance at home, work and school. Term 2 should have been more work, with three 1/2 credit courses and two 1 credit courses.

While its hard to describe what I really learned from our Leadership class and how best I can apply what I learned in the the real world, I have to say Prof Mike Useem is probably the best person to teach the course. In particular, I enjoyed the corporate social responsibility slant of the course.

Macroeconomics was most fascinating to me. I have a new sense of awareness about the macroeconomic environment in which a) firms conduct business, b) I invest my own money :-), and c) the use of macroeconomic trends and numbers to evaluate the social impact of government policies. Hats off to Prof Andrew Abel for a great course! The YouTube video from Columbia sums up the type of things you learn in a Macroeconomics course, including their opinion on our textbook!!

Prof Waterman's Statistics was another great course - much of it was about statistical methods and inferences to real world problems. When I invest my own money and look through technical analysis, I have a much better sense for correlation, alpha, and beta among other things. The course also hones your skills to draw better inferences from pictorial descriptions of data such as histograms and graphs.

The trip to Philly was another highlight of Term 2.

At the end of these two terms, the one thing I feel certain about is the workload associated with any course at Wharton. It doesn't matter whether its a soft course or a quantitative one - you have to expect to put in an obscene amount of time to stay on top of what's being covered in class and do reasonably well in the evaluation components (exams, assignments, projects etc).


Beyond the Classroom

The Wharton experience is intense. The program doesn't sacrifice academic rigor: that includes the number of credits, the number of hours of instruction and tests. Basically the program cuts you no slack just because you are holding a fulltime job.

You quickly learn how to best optimize your effort - at work, with family and at school. You learn to not waste time and the art of prioritizing. When you are working upwards of 65 hours a week, you develop a unique combination of mental and physical stamina as well as the ability to context switch. I believe these are important qualities to have in an operating manager. You also learn to better appreciate leisure and downtime!

The flip side is that you end up attempting to absorb a TON of material in a compressed calendar schedule. (For instance, Abel & Bernanke's 600 page text book.) Add to this the pressure of grades, it ends up being a challenge to develop a real world appreciation for the concepts being taught.

The residency requirement (at Le Meridien) gets you socializing with your classmates (poker, fantasy football and parties), but when you are juggling several balls, you are pretty strapped for time and energy to network outside your class especially during the regular work week.