MBA Program Office
Past Graduation Speeches
Sarah Zaia,
Class of 2001
Saleha Asif, Class of 2002
Jay Venkat, Class of 2003
Nancy Park, Class of 2004
Sean Freeman, Class of 2005
Allison Myatt, Class of 2006
Poonam Sharma, Class of 2007
Parents and family, faculty and administration, friends, and guests, thank you for being here with us today as we celebrate the graduation of the Wharton Class of 2001!
If you will grant me the creative license, I would like to open today with a quote from the final scene of the film American Beauty . At the end of the movie, Lester Burnham, the main character played by Kevin Spacey, reflected upon his life. At that moment, Lester said to the audience:
… there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much. My heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst. And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my… life.
A couple of weeks ago, I rented American Beauty , and saw it for the first time. It was a Saturday night this spring, a weekend following two big Wharton events: Bunny Bowl Bowling Tournament in New Jersey on Thursday and Walnut Walk that Friday. For our friends in the audience today who are unfamiliar with these events, suffice it to say that one to two days of rest are necessary for full recovery! That night was a stay-at-home movie night for me and for many fellow 2 nd years that closed down Bonner’s Pub at 2:30 am the night before.
As I relaxed on my couch and watched the story unravel, I became engrossed in the insights of the main character about life. Lester Burnam’s story painted a picture of how he learned to recognize and appreciate the beauty in his life that at first appeared outside of his immediate grasp. By the conclusion of the movie, he was filled with an overwhelming sense of gratitude for everything he had.
So, why am I talking on Wharton’s graduation day about American Beauty ? When this character reflected upon his life, it struck a chord in me as I approached graduation and a new phase in my own life. Over the past few months, I have sensed a similar emotion among my classmates to that which Lester Burnham expressed. I think I can best describe it as one of joyful ambivalence, if that could be a term. On the one hand, we look with excitement and hope toward the vast possibilities that lie ahead. At the same time, perhaps there is a hint of reluctance, or even a fear of letting go of the facets of Wharton life that have become ingrained within us, especially as we embark upon uncharted waters.
If I closed my eyes and played back my Wharton career, as Lester Burnham flashed back through his life at the end of American Beauty , I would see a patchwork quilt of people, ambitions, disappointments, achievements, laughter, and change: The soccer field of Camp Canadensis in the Pocono Mountains, where we first met our learning teams. The people in my cohort, the voices and personalities of whom I will remember ten years from now. Our professors. Sun Lounge, the place to eat Philly Cheesesteaks or Chinese food while working on team projects. I would remember my initial fear of QC’s, and the gratitude for each of the P’s that appeared on my Penn In Touch transcript. The terror when I was cold-called in Marketing for the first time and then asked to calculate a break-even volume in my head. Surviving case interviews. Seeing my friends perform in Follies in New York City . And cheering at Pub over pizza and beer when Wharton was voted the #1 Business School this year and last.
Apart from the colorful memories of Wharton, I would think about how at some point along the road, everything began to fall into place, just as it did for Lester Burnham. Something happens to you when you are immersed within an environment like this one. You learn to find a place at Wharton where you know that you belong, even if belonging means being different from everyone around you. In the beginning, I thought that being different from everyone else meant that I didn’t fit in here as well as some of my classmates did. What I learned, though, what you taught me, is that being different is what we share in common. This is what Wharton celebrates.
I look to my friends and my classmates today with awe and respect for the diverse involvements you have held and unique contributions you have made during the past two years. There is no cookie cutter mold for a Wharton journey. Some of you have served as our class leaders, organizing community and social events, running conferences on campus, enforcing our code of ethics, or representing our study body to faculty and administration. This made Wharton a better place for all of us. Others have brought your cultures and diverse backgrounds from abroad, making our community richer by expanding our perspectives. Many of you made it a common practice to tutor and teach your friends and classmates, building skills and confidence in each other. Reaching out like this made a difference. Over the past two years, some people in our class became parents, landed their dream job, found their future husband or wife, or a best friend. And others, like me, simply found themselves.
As we stand here together celebrating this shared achievement, the completion of our MBA degrees, I say to you, like Lester Burnham did: “There’s so much beauty in the world.” And, like Lester, I understand now that I don’t need to try to hold on to my Wharton experience in order to keep it with me. I no longer wish for time to stand still. Now we are ready to move ahead and put to good use what we have learned here together. Even if we do not physically walk across Wharton’s campus, through Vance Hall, or down Locust Walk together again as a class, the experience of being here is something that will always be a part of us. It is a bond that we will always share. This does not make saying goodbye to the people that have come to mean so much to us an easy task. But today is just the beginning. And this is cause for celebration.
And so I will conclude today and say goodbye leaving you with those poignant words:
… there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much. My heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst. And then I remember to relax and stop trying to hold on to it and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment.
To the Class of 2001, Congratulations! And thank you for two of the best years of my life.
To all those in the audience that have ever dreamed – and I hope that includes everyone here today – thank you for joining us to share in the culmination of our dream….. the graduation ceremony of the Wharton MBA Class of 2002!
Two years ago, that new identity ‘The Class of 2002’ held only vague meaning for the 780 individuals that joined the Wharton MBA program. As diverse as the 52 cultures we represented, we had but a tenuous thread tying us together into one whole. And I, for one, initially wondered if I would ever belong.
Yet, in the two years since, we have become one. One class, one community, one unit of harmony. When I look at the Wharton community, I see a microcosm of the world at large – only a far better version of it. I see an incredibly diverse group that doesn’t just tolerate but celebrates the differences among us. I see the best and the brightest from the world over work together – striving not only to accomplish individual goals but also to achieve collective excellence.
No doubt, we did compete with each other – whether it was in flag football or academics. We did vie for scarce resources – whether it was a slice of pizza at pub or the attentions of elusive recruiters. But we also laughed together and cried together, carried our team-mates when needed and could count on being carried when we began to stumble. Together we helped each other to achieve an objective few could have accomplished in isolation. Today, we join that elite breed – Wharton alumni.
And yes, I, a Muslim woman from Pakistan , was embraced by the diverse Wharton community and did belong after all. It was an Indian friend that consoled me when I cried on September 11, it was a Jewish team-mate that gave me the courage to speak up in class discussions, and it was a gay class fellow that dragged my vertically challenged self around an ice rink when I could barely stand in my skates. We have grown to accept, appreciate, and support each other irrespective of our nationalities, religious beliefs, and personal choices.
Is it all that idealistic of me then to wish the same for the world into which we must now venture?
I’m sure many would argue that I wear rose-colored glasses, especially given how radically the world has changed from the day we joined Wharton two years ago. Then, we were the charmed generation riding a decade-long wave of (quite literally!) ‘virtual’ prosperity, in a world that appeared comfortably predictable. Today, we’re a graduating class that faces a new world – in which political and ideological differences have pushed nations into conflict, recessionary pressure has created great economic uncertainty, and institutions that we, as the business community, held almost as sacred, have crumbled before us like a house of cards.
But the question arises, what does this mean for us? I believe it means this is our chance to make a difference. For true greatness is born out of our ability to rise to the challenge in times of adversity. To believe in the sun, even when it does not shine, to dare to dream when all hope seems lost, and above all, to continue to believe in each other when differences threaten to divide us.
On a micro level, perhaps having been through this upheaval will make us wiser in our decisions when we assume leadership positions in business, and more responsible in evaluating the impact of our actions on those that rely on our leadership.
But in a larger context, I like to think that we, as Wharton alumni, have a role to play that goes beyond our individual environments. In a world where aligned economic interests can often overcome centuries old national differences, our responsibility as well as our potential for impact as the business leaders of tomorrow, have increased exponentially. Let us aim for higher goals – sustainable and just distribution of economic rents, responsible and efficient use of natural resources, and respect and tolerance for the diversity among us. All of a sudden that much loved and well-worn strategic objective of ‘maximizing shareholder value’ seems relatively simple in comparison, doesn’t it!?!
But I’m convinced that we must seize this opportunity! Because future generations will not blame us for the uncertainties we face but they could hold us accountable for how we deal with them. Let us rise to this challenge and lead with both imagination and heart. Let us learn from the past even as we plan for what lies ahead. Let us take responsibility for the future, nay, let us accept that we are the future.
And in doing so, Class of 2002, let us not lose this oneness, these friendships, this concern for collective well-being that we have lived and breathed at Wharton – because I am convinced that in this collective harmony lies a better future for our world.
Dr. Martin Luther King shared his vision of an ideal world when he said “I have a dream”. At Wharton, I have lived that dream. And so, I have faith….. in the courage and generosity of the human spirit. I believe….. that the differences between us enrich rather than divide us. And I wait with hope….. for the day that we shall fulfill our promise to our future generations.
So, here’s to you Class of 2002! Here’s to Wharton – one school, one world.
Parents, relatives, friends, faculty and fellow students, welcome to the graduation ceremony of the Wharton class of 2003. For those of you who have journeyed from distant lands to be here today, a very special welcome to Philadelphia ! Today, I would like to take you on another journey – one that my classmates and I are about to complete.
For me, this journey began two years ago on a cruise ship in Egypt . I was sitting next to an elderly lady whose son who had just graduated from Kentucky State University . When she asked me about my plans, I proudly mentioned that I had just been admitted to The Wharton School. Seeing the blank expression on her face, I added: “at the University of Pennsylvania ”. The lady smiled at me and said: “Good for you; it’s not really Ivy League, but that’s OK”. Unfortunately, I did not know what Ivy League meant and could not respond!
But I packed my bags anyway and arrived in Philly filled with hope and enthusiasm; and so did 756 of my classmates. We came from over 40 countries and spoke over 40 languages. It was the beginning of a remarkable journey of education and entertainment.
Debits, credits, two-part tariffs, betas and deltas whizzed past in a frenzy. We ordered hundreds of business cards in the hope of palming them off to eager recruiters. Alas! Demand did not meet supply and we ended up with excess inventory! I remember the shame of being caught in the corridors of Vance without a handheld device. I also recollect being shocked upon realizing that my leadership bulk pack cost more than a year of my undergraduate tuition. We regressed and speculated and learnt to lead from every direction while the Wharton soccer team took home the Yale cup and the Wharthogs won the Thunderbird challenge.
But, the external world did not stand still. We watched, “suspended between outrage and impotence” as the WTC was destroyed in an act of barbaric terrorism. We came together as a community to pray, to console and to re-affirm our bonds. John Donne’s words never rang so true:
“No man is an island;
Every man is a piece of the continent;
Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for
thee”
Despite being jolted back to reality, we continued our journey. As winter turned to spring, we marveled at our peers who displayed their remarkable theatrical talents in the Wharton Follies and the International Cultural Show. We joined hands to rebuild West Philadelphia and painted the town red at Wharton 54. But we also watched in pain as the companies we once proudly worked for became poster children for corporate greed. No Class Participation point was complete without a reference to Enron or Andersen!
We completed our summer internships, and returned to the splendor of Huntsman Hall. But, even the most die-hard academic had converted to the philosophy of the wit who proclaimed that “the top 1/3 of the class ends up working for the middle 1/3 of the class in companies started by the bottom 1/3 of the class”!
Today we have come to end of our journey. No; not the end, but the beginning of a new phase…one longer in duration and more unforgiving in its terrain. Future generations are about to debate our actions. It’s not often that a graduating class is faced with so much uncertainty, but, neither is it faced with so much opportunity.
Let us set a goal for our class: twenty years down the line, our children should look back at us and hail us as ushers of a bright new dawn of corporate governance and business ethics; as a trend setting generation of socially responsible business men and women. In achieving this goal, we can count on having the entire Wharton community behind us.
On that note, let me thank all of you for making this remarkable journey so memorable. And my dear classmates, as you continue your journey through life, let me wish you success, satisfaction and joy.
Parents, family and friends, faculty and administrators, and fellow students, welcome to this graduation ceremony, a celebration of the Wharton class of 2004.
My fellow classmates, if your experiences this weekend have been anything like mine, then you have likely been asked on countless occasions to sum up your feelings about your time at Wharton. I, for one, have found this an extremely difficult task, and have taken to repeating a few positive generalizations about having had a great time, met lots of wonderful people, loved the cheesesteak, and so on. The words, even to my own ears, sound vague and inadequate.
I believe the reason for this struggle is that our time here is not meant to be summarized. In much of our work and studies, we are trained to synthesize information, to boil things down and come up with the key takeaways, to bullet-point our lives. However, the real value of the past two years lies not in the headers, but in each individual moment, however brief or discrete, that has changed us.
For each of us, there are hundreds of such instances. Not just Welcome Weekend, but the moment you walked into the overwhelming noise and bustle of Vance Hall and realized the hundreds of activities you could explore over the next two years. Not just the Learning Team Retreat, but the instant you saw everyone, cold and wet, valiantly trying to make smores by the bonfire. Not just Pre-term, but that first random conversation you had with that classmate from halfway around the world who would become one of your closest friends.
Your Wharton experience isn’t just DIP week, but that heart-pounding instant before you picked up the phone and got the job offer. It’s the moment during a guest lecture when you sat up and said, “That’s the kind of leader I want to become.” It’s the off-handed comment your professor made in class that you tucked away in your mind and will remember throughout your career.
Wharton is the first accounting study guide you received, unasked, from a classmate who just thought it might help. It’s the dozen second-years who took the time to mock interview you, and the dozen first-years you helped in return. It’s being introduced to bhangra music, experiencing dim sum in Chinatown, and learning to salsa dance.
In the instant you realized at Wharton 54 that roller skates are highly underrated, or recognized yourself in Follies, or toasted your friends on a warm beach over spring break, in the moment you rose to the surface of the Blue Lagoon in Iceland, or bounced against your classmate on a jeep ride through Africa, Wharton changed you.
Our Wharton experience, then, is not a broad platitude or generalization, but the sum total of each of these unique moments, moments that celebrate the spirit, diversity, teamwork, and intellectual drive that infuse this class. Over the last two years, we have learned the value of applying vigor and diligence to our intellectual pursuits, but it is equally important to actively recognize each of the individuals and decisions that have changed us personally. To put a different spin on an old saying, don’t lose sight of the trees for the forest.
If there does have to be one big takeaway, it is that we need to continue to review our lives with that kind of focus and detail. As we move forward in our careers, we will only go on collecting random moments that will define our legacy: the occasion when we take the risk and join a new firm, decide how to treat an employee, stand up to a superior or make a difficult ethical decision. Let ours be the class that recognizes that even the smallest of our choices has meaning in our lives and in this world, and acts with the integrity that this requires.
In a famous novel called The Power of One, author Bryce Courtenay writes:
Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth.
Over the past two years, we have been running up and down the stairs of Huntsman Hall, wandering the streets of Philadelphia—and changing the direction of each other’s lives. It is for the richness of these interactions that we came together here at Wharton two short years ago, and that we celebrate here today.
So put away the bullet points, Wharton Class of 2004, and revel in every circumstance, every random moment in which you connected, like a meteorite striking the earth. On your behalf, I thank all of our families and friends who have supported us, and I thank all of you for sharing with me this particular moment, as we begin a future filled with even greater success and happiness.
This speech traditionally starts by welcoming Parents, Faculty, Classmates, Teachers and Alumni. But, I don’t think that that welcome’s good enough today, because it implies that we are separate groups. And, while we are all different, and have played different roles in our efforts to achieve this moment, we are united today as one spirit, one body, one winner to celebrate a job well done, obstacles overcome and challenges met. So I’m breaking the tradition of welcoming separate groups, and rather, I’m going to welcome our extended Wharton Family to this - not simply a Graduation, but our Celebration - this proud moment: The Graduation of the Class of 2005.
This is a special day. The circumstances surrounding it are unique. Today, we are one. But --- we were not one yesterday, -- and we should not be one tomorrow. There is a grave danger in our becoming indistinguishable from our peers. As we look back, it has been precisely our ability to distinguish ourselves which has made us achieve as much as we have today. And as we look forward, it will be that same ability to stand out which will ensure that we fulfill our life ambitions, whatever they may be.
Not many people back home in South Africa understood my desire to leave behind friends and family. To incur a large financial burden and embark upon a further two years of rigorous study far from the place I had known since birth. No doubt many of them thought that if I had to return to school for another 2 years, I hadn’t been paying enough attention the first time. So what drove me here despite their reservations? It was precisely what fuels Wharton’s success à the chance to begin a dream life. A life where I was limited by no obstacle other than the limits of my own ambition.
Although a top-ranked school, it’s not the rankings that make Wharton the place where dreams begin. It’s the people. It’s the accomplished alumni, an astounding faculty, the organized and caring administration, and importantly, our peers. Initially intimidating personas with unbelievable resumes and ludicrously high GMAT scores, it didn’t take long for Wharton Bootcamp to break down the approach barriers. By the end of Pre-Term, we were a cohesive, motivated, finely-tuned math-statistics-accounting team with a sincere appreciation of 3am e-mails in the flurry of last-minute homework revisions.
By the end of the first year, our unforgettable experiences in cohort bingo, the logarithmic queues at Au Bon Pain, the pizza scramble at MBApub, and 5am post-party Wawa meetings had added 80-odd cohort mates to our immediate family. We had laughed, cried, sighed, yelled, psycho-analyzed, and eureka!’d together. We were One. We were Wharton. And we were proud.
As one of Wharton’s international students, I can say without any hesitation that the generosity and warmth with which Wharton and my classmates have embraced me has filled me with a sense of belonging I did not – could not – feel back home.
Where else could I stretch my intellectual capabilities with the brightest, funniest, quirkiest, sweetest people in the world? Where else could I attend Center City Pubs dressed only in boxer shorts and tuxedo jackets during Walnut Walk, or don an Afro wig and Elvis pants for Wharton 54 to disco the night away with the same people who, only a few hours later, I would be debating the benefits of discriminatory pricing policy with?
Thank you , Wharton. Thank you all, for the love in your hearts and the warmth of your smiles. This has been an experience I can only wish on future generations.
So I stand here before you today full of nostalgia for the two years behind us and full of hope for the years ahead. As Wharton has embraced me, so I hope we will all embrace the potential we have individually and collectively to achieve our dreams.
Most of us have large student loans. We are facing life in a new industry, a new city or country, or even a new family. We want jobs which pay us well. Which provide us with security, and give us breathing room. At the same time, we want to pursue our entrepreneurial spirit, and to work in a career which takes our breath away. And as I personally struggle with reconciling a life which could be unique and realize my individual ambitions, with a life where I am well rewarded for simply towing the line, I’d like to share a final thought with you.
Success in life, as I see it, is about maximizing our options. That includes where we work, when we work, where we live and how we live. It’s about positioning ourselves to take the best possible advantage of what the future has to offer us. And the more we stray from the beaten path, the more diversified our experiences are, the more options we will create for ourselves. Therefore, retaining the individualism which gave us success in the past will provide us with more chances for success in the future. I’d like us to keep considering exactly how we can use our individuality to define our success in the future. Don’t forget your option to change your life, the option to create, to renew.
We will face two options in our lives. We can choose to become someone who passively waits for a system to reward us. Or, we can choose to become someone who actively pursues options which will allow us to reward ourselves, however we define it.
In the greatest oxymoron of them all, all of us are unique. And it is only you who can truly understand the nature of your psyche, the love of your life, the one thing that truly brings you joy. Perhaps its love. Money. Time with your family. Building your own business. We're smart people, with great training and good insight. And thanks to a superb social program here at Wharton, we have a great peer network too. What then, stands in our way toward achieving our own personal greatness?
The answer, as I see it, is that the only obstacle to achieving your personal dream is the fear to embrace your potential. But its your fear, and you own it. Don’t let it own you. We have all worked very hard to get here, sacrificed, strived to get more out of life for ourselves. So, go and be the master of your own destiny.
Your dream life? Its right there, waiting for you. For we really do have the tools, the smarts, the contacts, and the opportunity to have it all. The Rabbi Hillel’s words have never been truer: “If not us then who, and if not now then when?” Friends, it IS us. And when? Well, that’s up to each one of you.
Don’t see this graduation as an end. See it as a beginning. And never forget that only you can make your dream life begin.
Parents, family, faculty, administration, friends, alumni, and fellow Graduates – CONGRATULATIONS!!! We’ve finally made it! We’ve earned our MBAs. I don’t know about you, but as someone who just two years ago felt like the admissions mistake, I am extremely excited to have reached this point.
Now we’ve all heard the cliché that life is about the journey, not the destination. I would say that Wharton is about both the journey and the destination. After all, we all want the paper in the end. The destination matters. Nobody wants to give any of us a job without that destination paper. And I’ve got a rather sizeable bill from Citibank that says I sure as hell better get a job at the end of the Wharton journey.
But the Wharton experience is more than just the destination. We’ve all learned a great deal during this two-year journey. And the ending is bittersweet. There have been some tough moments. Many, MANY tough moments. I’ve never failed more often than I have during my tenure at Wharton. For the first time in my life, success was not guaranteed by hard work alone.
But there have been some truly amazing moments. When I stepped foot on campus on the first day of preterm, I realized I lucked out. Not only had I somehow squeezed through the admissions process and lucked into a spot in the class of 2006, but I was also surrounded by some wonderful people. Accomplished, smart, driven, funny, and surprisingly humble despite all that. My classmates have impressed me since day one. During my Wharton experience, I’ve learned a lot from you all, debated with you over the merits of uttering our grades, I’ve partied with you – and seen things at Wharton 54 that I never, EVER want to see again, I’ve laughed with you, occasionally laughing AT you like when you fight over Papa John’s pizza at Pub, and I’ve mourned with you when we lost our classmate unexpectedly and much too soon.. We’ve been through a lot together these two years. Some good times and some bad. But it is you, my fellow graduates, that have truly made this experience one of the highlights of my life.
You see, the Wharton experience presents us with lessons – and some of these lessons are greater than what we learn in the hallowed halls of Huntsman Hall. Wharton, if you let it, can teach you life lessons that will stick with you forever. Lessons about working with others, about work-life balance, about how to be a better friend, about believing in your own voice, about how to fail AND succeed gracefully. These and other lessons make us all different people – better people - than when we started just two summers ago.
And so apparently, now we are ready. After learning our lessons, writing our papers, struggling through our midterms, and cracking our cases, we are ready. We are newly minted MBAs. Wharton has prepared us to take on the World of Business. We have learned how to calculate the cost of capital and to analyze the four Ps. We have learned how to understand marginal costs and how to run the supply chain of a cranberry plant. We’ve got the skills. We are in demand. We are ready to transform our future businesses in to sleeker, faster, better, and just plain cooler versions of their current selves.
But beyond all that, as we re-enter the workforce, we are faced with a unique opportunity. Business, is the art of our generation. We take ideas and dreams and bend and mold them in the pursuit of commerce. It is through these pursuits that we achieve. But over time these pursuits become less and less about the ideas and the dreams and more and more about efficiency and profit maximization.
And here is where our opportunity lies. We can refocus our art – our expression of our ideas. We can remember that life, in the end, is about more than how much profit you made. It’s about the journey AND the destination. By choosing goals that look beyond the bottom line, we can reignite the commitment to the dreams that birthed our businesses. And it is through these dreams that we can serve society, we can make society better, we CAN truly transform the world.
So fellow graduates, our Wharton journey isn’t over. It’s just beginning. We’ve got the skills. We’re in demand. We can embrace the opportunity to improve the human condition through the art of our generation – the art of commerce. And while it’s a little sad to give up the lifestyle that is Huntsman Hall, we face a world of opportunities. Because great things lie ahead us all.
About three years ago, in cities around the world, some 7000 laptops flickered on, as MBA hopefuls were sitting down to take a first crack at their admissions essays for Wharton. They huddled before their home computers, hovered across café tables, and settled into lonely boardrooms after their coworkers were already long gone for the night.
During the grueling self-examination process required for that application, we learned a lot about ourselves. And now, multiple core courses, learning team feedback sessions, leadership ventures, job interviews and rejections and summer internships and lasting new friendships later, we’ve made it.
Ladies and gentlemen, parents, partners, faculty, administration and alumni, welcome to Commencement for Wharton’s MBA Class of 2007. But it wasn’t easy getting here.
Thanks to Pre-term, we were well-aware of how woefully unprepared we were for the rigors of graduate school long before that first day of Statistics class. Thanks to the cheese-steaks in Old City and the milkshakes at Little Pete’s, our collective cholesterol levels have shot through the roof. And thanks to each other’s willingness to answer a 4am phone call, to shoulder a larger-than-fair share of the workload on a team assignment, or to summarize a case fifteen minutes before the dreaded cold-call, here we are.
In the weeks leading up to graduation we’ve had some time to reflect. There’s a scene in a popular 1980s movie called The Breakfast Club where delinquent high school students are forced to write an essay describing who they think they are. The conclusion drawn by that movie is that despite how different they all seemed on the outside, there was a little geek, a little princess, a little athlete, a little outcast, and even a little rebel in all of them. And they were bonded.
In keeping with the theme of that movie, here’s my version of a Wharton exit-essay, and the question is: In two years at Wharton, what have we learned?
We have learned that first impressions across a classroom can be deceiving, that the cheers of strangers during your first attempt at ice-climbing can be soul-redeeming, and that when marketing on television, you should almost always use either a puppy or a baby.
Preferably both.
We have learned that everybody’s voice cracks once in a while, that arguing with the professor won’t get you the DS but it will get you a lot of pats on the back at MBA Pub, and that no single one of us is ever “The Smartest Guy in the Room.”
We have learned that while a Chinese engineer, an Indian factory manager, a French venture capitalist, a marketer from New York and an entrepreneur from Pittsburgh may not be able to build a helicopter out of Legos in under sixty seconds, they can easily become friends for life just as soon as they learn how to laugh at themselves.
We have learned that spreadsheets are sometimes sensitive, that accounting is sometimes an art-form, that ethics are sometimes subjective, and that Wednesday night karaoke to the tune of “Living on a Prayer” is a fantastic international equalizer.
We have learned that rejection after a second-round interview on a Monday morning can sting just as much as rejection after a second chocolate martini on a Friday night in Center City, and that there is sometimes, if not often, no right answer.
We have learned that despite how many times we rewrote those essays, or how close we came to that maximum QC limit, or how deeply we reconsidered tucking ourselves away inside academia for these past two years, this was exactly where we needed to be. Buried in case studies and burdened by debt, we have realized that it is our shared optimism for what lies ahead that brought us all to Philadelphia.
So as the narrator says in the movie: “You can see us as you want to see us,” and like the kids in that movie, we, too are bonded. What we have learned above all is that mercifully there is no such thing as A Typical Wharton MBA.
We have far more in common than our resumes would lead us to believe.
We came from Malaysia and Miami and Mexico. We’ve worked in Detroit and Denmark and Dubai. We are headed to London and Little Rock and Los Angeles after we leave this place.
And we are, every one of us, a closeted novelist, an aspiring CEO, and a Doctor Without Borders who has just earned his MBA. We are a little bit of an investment banker from Manhattan who has yet to fail at anything, and a little bit of an engineer from Beijing with dreams of making the cover of Fortune Magazine. We are a little bit of an entrepreneur from Lebanon who has gone broke not once but twice and who carried the hopes of his parents and his wife and his newborn daughter with him into the halls of Huntsman each morning, and we are a little bit of a nice All-American Indian girl from Long Island who is just so very grateful to have been here.
Now, having learned all of this, what will we do with it? The short answer is that only time will tell. And isn’t that exciting! Because we are humbled…and we are empowered…and we are ready, simply, for whatever comes next.
We are, Wharton’s MBA Class of 2007. Thank you.