Hella

Well the morning started at 8:30am (early considering my late night hours so far in Philadelphia) but I managed to hop in the shower at 7:50, catch a trolley over to school and still walk in the front door of Huntsman Hall right on time. There were “Welcome to Wharton” greeters eagerly stationed here ready to hand out a pamphlet containing a summary of the first two days’ events. I grabbed one of those and headed down to the Forum level.

In the Forum there were all sorts of groups with information booths setup to answer questions. Among them were many of the local banks, the Wharton Computer and Information Technology people, Student Health Insurance, Comcast, and quite a few representatives from various functions within the school itself. I wandered on over to the Health Insurance table to inquire about my identification card that has yet to be mailed. I signed up for health insurance coverage to begin on July 1st and still have not received my card. I was advised to call an 800 number for Chickering (the plan administrator) and was told that I did not have an address on file. I specifically remember filling out my address because it was the first form where I supplied my local Philadelphia address instead of the one back in Austin. Oh well, it’s taken care of now as long as the card arrives some time next week.

After getting that sorted out, I met some people I knew from the Welcome events, chatted a while, went to grab some fresh fruit, chatted some more in the MBA Lounge, and then headed down to the Penn Bookstore. Somewhere in there I also signed up for Comcast Digital Cable and High Speed Internet. I thought I’d save a few dollars and go with the smaller companies for DSL and cable but this has been a mistake. The DSL is slow, sometimes completely non-functional, and the cable has serious issues when there is a thunderstorm/rain (as there has been many days since my arrival here) since they get their programming from Dish Network and the weather affects the signal. Anyhow, at the bookstore I was wanting to find a backpack but I didn’t have much luck as the selection was rather limited. So I headed back to Huntsman to mingle before heading to the Dean’s Welcome. I had a little time to kill so I paid my Wharton Graduate Association dues online and also signed up for a 2-year Pub membership :).

The dean’s address was at 10:30am. It was in the same auditorium as Follies. We had three speakers, including the Dean, before the keynote was delivered. The topic of the keynote was the importance of remembering peoples’ names along with advice and tricks on how to remember a lot of names. The speaker is a memory expert and also a magician. I personally found the magic tricks a lot more interesting than the name games. Surprise, the speeches ran long and we had only 40 minutes to grab lunch and get to our 1pm meetings (at least this was the case with my cohort; it’s too bad that the speakers run long but it seems to be a running theme as the same happened at Welcome Weekend). I headed over to the food court with a friend I’d met in Houston during an informal admit gathering and two others joined us. After stuffing our faces, we quickly walked back to campus. I think we were actually provided with a lunch but this is the second time I’ve not realized that lunch was provided (it wasn’t on the “master” schedule?). And that brings me to the thing I least enjoyed about the first day.

This “master” schedule thing was supposed to be more detailed than the one previously available in our mailings. However, the only thing master about it is that it requires a Master’s degree to sort out the information. Call me lazy, but this document is a pain to use. Instead of taking advantage of a computer program and printing up everyone a nice schedule with exactly the Pre-term courses in which they’ve enrolled along with the date/time and classroom, every student has to go through this 3-page dense Excel spreadsheet marking which activities s/he should attend and filtering out all the ones that don’t apply (and that’s the majority of them considering there are 11 other cohorts and 3 other clusters). If I could fix one thing, it’d be this. Yuk. 100% user unfriendly.

From 1:00 to 2:30pm I had a Cohort orientation where we introduced ourselves. It was pretty basic but started to drag on a while as there are around 70 people. We also heard from a couple speakers about cohort history and other bits of useful information relating to the cohort system. This was really the highlight of the day since these are the people I’ll really be getting to know over the next year.

From 2:30 to 4:00pm I attended the Pre-Term overview with the rest of the cohort. The auction sytem was discussed and a lot of questions were answered. We’re supposed to fiddle with the auction system by bidding on optional Pre-Term activities but I’m going to wait until tomorrow morning to take care of that since it requires Internet Explorer and I only use Safari on my Mac. Sure I could fire up the laptop but that seems like too much effort at this point :).

The closing event of the day was a reception hosted by the MBA Program Office on Koo Plaza. There was a nice spread of food and snacks and cold soda. Best of all, there was more than enough to go around and it was free. Coping with the student budget is already interesting considering how often people are getting together (pretty much every night). Around 6:45pm, the weather had cooled off some and there was a really nice breeze making time outside rather enjoyable. However, I was ready to head back to the apartment so a few of us caught the trolley back into Center City.

My main misperception about Pre-Term is about how busy the schedule would be. Sure, I need to do some optional activities but I thought I’d be in class every day from 8 to 5 (with a lunch break of course) 6 days a week. Instead it looks like some days I only have 90 minutes of class while others I might have 3 hours. Few of the days look totally packed which is a big relief.

Filed under: B-School