WHARTON DIARY: A Christmas break with the family puts all the semester's hard work into perspective
CHRISTMAS IS here, and with it comes the realisation that I am a quarter of the way through Wharton's MBA programme. In one way this semester seems to have flown by in no time at all, while in another I seem to have been here forever.
Our end-of-semester examinations proved to be challenging. Scheduling finals for three difficult classes on consecutive days at the start did me no favours, though it did make the second half of the exam period more manageable. The professors and their teaching assistants have managed to get a lot of our results out to us already, and based on these I'm feeling reasonably comfortable with the way I'm handling the academic demands.
My results have also illustrated one of the more challenging aspects of going back to school with a family. Like most of the students coming into Wharton in late July, I was used to being an academic high performer, but the grading curve means that 50 per cent of us are going to be below average. People joke about day-to-day life at business school offering a choice between sleeping, studying and socialising, and how you get to prioritise any two of the three. For those of us with families, adding family time to the mix does mean it becomes harder to excel at any of the three. Still, I'm managing to stay above the mean on the academic front, so I can't complain.
Academic competition hasn't just been with my classmates during the last few months. Our daughter Alison started kindergarten in September. One of the highlights of Alison's first semester has been reaching the dizzy academic heights of "Student of the Week", so every Friday I get asked whether I managed to become student of the week at Wharton yet. I have to answer no, and I can see the pity in her eyes as she tells me that it's okay.
Friendly competition during the last few months has not been restricted to the academic front.
Wharton offers students the chance to enter many different competitions designed to pit teams of MBA students against each other. Earlier this semester I was on a team that entered a Microsoft case competition, where Microsoft provided competitors with a strategic problem and gave teams a week to come up with a strategy and recommendations to implement it. A month later I joined another team to compete in the annual Venture Capital Investment Competition, where we got to spend a Saturday quizzing real entrepreneurs under the watchful eye of a panel of venture capitalists.
Competition may not be quite so friendly on the jobs front. My classmates and I are getting ready for the stress of interviews and rejections that will start in January. Many of the employers who came to campus to recruit had their application deadlines for summer internship positions in the last few weeks before the end of term, so most of us are waiting to see whether our various applications will get any further.
The number of investment banking jobs on offer is definitely lower than in previous years, and some of the major banks did not even take part in the regular recruitment cycle. This means many people who were hoping to move into investment banking after their MBA have been setting their sights on other industries, and the rivalry for any available investment banking positions will be even higher than usual.
That is all in the future though. For the moment I am taking a break over Christmas to relax, and spending some time playing and hanging out with my family. Who knows, Alison might even pass on some tips about what I need to do to become student of the week.
• Gareth Keane from Moycullen is studying for an MBA at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
gkeane@wharton.upenn.edu
