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…
Share this:
**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…
Share this:
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…
Share this:
We’ve all had to persuade someone to do something. Most of the time we press actions on people and expect them to cooperate without doing any of the negotiation prep work. In a recent leadership workshop, Wharton brought in an FBI hostage negotiator to teach the best skills and steps to influence behavioral change. Although we may not negotiate international kidnappings anytime soon, these techniques actually come in handy on a day-to-day basis: moderating conflict amongst friends, handling a disgruntled employee, charming a customer service rep to give…
Share this:
This past weekend several of Wharton’s tech/design/entrepreneurship clubs organized a day-long design thinking workshop and competitive hackathon, the very first Wharton ProductHack. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a hackathon is not a coordinated group effort to break into banks and foreign government systems – it’s an event where software programmers, product managers, and interface designers collaborate intensively on software products. The first “Hackathon” took place in 1999 when developers were challenged to write new software for the Palm phone (remember those?) in the Java coding…
Share this:
At 1.2 million square feet, the Amazon Fulfillment Center (FC) in Middletown, Delaware is the size of 21 football fields and employs roughly 2,500 full-time employees, swelling to almost 7,000 employees for the holiday season. Codified as PHL-7, it’s one of 75 Amazon shipping complexes spread across the US, but the only one in the northeast open to the public. Last Friday the Tech Club at Wharton arranged a tour of the Delaware FC to walk us through a product’s lifecycle in the center from when it arrives…
Share this:
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…
Share this:
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…
Share this:
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…
Share this:
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…
