MP is for Mary-PattonCheck out my interview on Accepted.com!
It crept up on me much faster than I realized, but there they were, all over social media: photos of the graduates of 2017. There were family friends with their bushy-tailed teenagers on the last day of high school; cousins on their final proud march across college campuses; and my own friends listening to graduation day speakers at their various graduate degree programs. This prompted two reactions: 1) Excitement for others, with a faint hint of nostalgia. Which quickly turned into: 2) The abrupt realization that it has already been…
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**Originally posted on the African Leadership Network blog and the Wharton Social Impact Initiative blog. While some people are nervous about doing business in “frontier” markets, I’ve always loved working in challenging environments that require original, entrepreneurial solutions. That’s how I wound up working with East African startups for three years prior to Wharton, and again for my 2015 summer internship. I am passionate about supporting entrepreneurship in these markets to create social impact, so what better way to do that than by diving straight in and directly…
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**Originally posted on The Wharton Journal. School goes by in a flash, so classmate Jenna Gebel and I created the LeadUp to allow 1Y MBAs to reflect and reconnect. Now we’re offering this three-day retreat again, October 8-11, for all Penn graduate students. The first year of business school flies by in a flurry of emotions—it’s altogether exhilarating, stressful, social, lonely, stimulating, and exhausting. You undergo a landslide of personal development during those ten months. And then, in the blink of an eye, you’re done with finals…
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I hate to admit it, but Americans have a pretty bad reputation of being overweight and lazy. In 2014 over 27% of us classified as obese, and it doesn’t show any signs of improvement. But despite (or maybe as a reaction against) this national ailment, a strong slice of us are becoming more health-conscious than ever before. The American fitness industry is worth $24 billion yet traditional gym memberships are declining as we find alternative ways to stay active, healthy, and motivated. In many ways our newfound obsession…
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Last week’s exams marked the end of our first quarter at Wharton, a month and a half that flew by in a flurry of classes, extracurriculars, and social events. With so many exciting options, it was tempting to attend every industry info session, join every club, and meet every one of our 859 first-year classmates, all while grinding through the quantitive-heavy core classes. But inevitably our Type A personalities prevailed, and most of us reverted to our perfectionist undergraduate behaviors of studying constantly and stressing over grades despite…
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One of the most important aspects we learned about that weekend (aside from the academic offerings, of course) was the social scene and student life. Wharton did a great job of making sure all of us got to know each other by arranging lunches, morning coffees, afternoon drinks… By Sunday my head was spinning with names, hometowns, and faces (or maybe that was the hangover?). f On Saturday afternoon they gave us the opportunity to hang out with some of the clubs that we might be interested in…
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The first day of Welcome Weekend was a whirlwind, beginning with coffee at 9am and ending with small group dinners until 10:30pm. After introducing ourselves in our 70-person Homeroom cluster, we all gathered for a welcome speech by the Dean of Admissions outlining the flexible curriculum and emphasis on leadership development. The highlight of this speech, by far, was this short clip they played from the TV show Suits: Back in our Homerooms, we had a [previously mentioned] mock course on Marketing taught by Professor Americus Reed (yes, that’s a link to…
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This past weekend I went to Philadelphia for the Wharton Winter Welcome Weekend (I partly wondered if they held it in wintertime just to add another W to the name). I was already pretty set on attending Wharton, but of course was curious to meet my potential future classmates, check out the campus, and see the city, which despite having lived 5.5 years close by in DC, I had never visited. I was disappointed that the Florida weather didn’t follow me to Philly, and realized that after 2…
