WHARTON DIARY:THE SUMMER break has given me a chance to look back on our first year in Wharton's MBA programme and assess whether the experience has lived up to my expectations, writes GARETH KEANE

Two areas that are quite often of interest to people considering an MBA are the academic rigour and the quality of the student body. From a course work point of view, the contents and concepts have not been rocket science.

The real challenge has been the sheer volume of work that gets thrown at students. Each assignment and case study is not complex in itself, but the constant barrage of them makes managing the academic load very challenging.

The course work has provided a good grounding in business fundamentals. We have covered accounting, ethics, finance, law/ public policy, marketing, management, managerial economics, operations, statistics and strategy. Some of the courses have been more interesting than others, but all have had some valuable content, especially when combined with concepts from some of the other areas.

I think any good business school programme will provide the same concepts and frameworks, but where Wharton has exceeded my expectations has been in the quality of many of our professors and the contributions from my classmates.

One of the worries I had coming in to the programme was whether I would be struggling to keep my head above water. Many of the class have stellar academic pedigrees, with undergraduate and graduate degrees from august institutions such as Ivy League universities, Oxbridge and Stanford/MIT.

The Irish education system isn’t too shabby though. My schooling in Coláiste Iognáid, NUIG and Queen’s University Belfast seems to have prepared me well enough to hold my own with my classmates.

When it comes to academics, one of the popular perceptions of Wharton is that it is a very competitive environment. Certainly at the undergraduate level this seems to be true – those students are incredibly focused.

At MBA level, however, things are a lot more relaxed. One of the main reasons for this is that the MBA student body has a policy of grade non-disclosure, whereby all students agree to adhere to an honour code policy that states that grades are not shared with recruiters. MBA students have voted on this policy every year since 1994.

The fact that grades are not shared with recruiters makes for a very supportive and engaged academic environment. People are not afraid to try courses and topics that will challenge them and it enables our project teams to provide learning opportunities to team members who may be weaker in certain areas.

If grades were something we needed to manage and optimise for recruiting purposes, I imagine we would lose a lot of the academic freedom that we currently enjoy in our MBA course selection due to very understandable aversion to risk.

A second area that has really impressed me has been the quality of my classmates. In my cohort of 68 people, we had 26 nationalities, while across the entire class of 800-plus students, are more than 70 countries are represented.

Each person has something unique to bring to any discussion that we have had. Many of the debates sparked by case studies we have covered in various first year courses were enriched by input from someone who had worked in the industry or even the company being discussed.

The people I have met are all hugely talented in other facets of their lives as well. I often find myself wondering how I managed to get in when I find out that the guy sitting next to me having lunch was a former world champion sailor or that the non- profit a friend helped to found has a presence in multiple cities focused on improving the lives of underprivileged children.

Looking at the academics and my classmates, I feel the MBA programme has been fantastic so far. One could argue that it is expensive or that the academic content is not that different from any other business programme.

What adds the value is the calibre of the people I get to talk to, work with and build friendships with and the people have definitely made the experience what it has been to date.