Tactical Aspects To Wharton’s Curriculum
Wharton believes their differentiation is in their thought leadership and faculty research. They believe they offer students a superior educational experience due to opportunities they provide to translate intellectual capital into better management knowledge. What does this mean to future MBA applicants to Wharton? We need to decipher it.
The most valuable guide you can read if you want to apply to Wharton is the Wharton’s MBA Resource Guide. It gives you all options to plan your MBA at Wharton.
This guide is a gateway to how to apply to Wharton.
The way you would approach this guide is firstly to download the PDF. And for example, if you want to work for a non—profit, be that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, you will just hit “control F” and search non-profits. You will search what type of social finance or social sector initiatives they have and look to see under what majors it would fall under.
Read the portion that applies to you.
You need to find your desired major at Wharton in this document – read all about it. Go to that section that’s within your desired major in the guide and read every single class that’s in there. More importantly, you will start to pick up nuances.
For example, there’s a general management major. And within that general management major, there is entrepreneurial management, along with a few other flavors of it as well. You’ll begin to understand the nuances of the program at Wharton that you won’t necessarily get from reading their website. Maybe you’ll also have to talk to a bunch of students.
What is really great about Wharton’s management major, is that it allows you to elect all these sub-majors. Some are international, some are entrepreneurial, some are operations focused. In a way it gives you a management buffet of classes. There’s also a risk management major, so if that’s your goal, you have a perfect major, you’ll pick up and see what a "field action project" is.
Search to see what classes would benefit you most to achieve your goals.
The biggest tip is to really think about your goals and see where the gap is. Search to see what classes would benefit you most to achieve your goals. If your goal is finance, then the classes you would need might not be in the finance major or related to it. You may have to pick two majors which are totally appropriate to you but in a different section.
A lot of people go into this exercise saying, “I’m a finance major, and I have finance goals in the long term.” But the things you might already know to reach your goals after Wharton you might already have. Therefore, there are all these other areas you could be looking. Look through the guide, if it’s HR, or if its operations, and it falls under human resources or operations, then that should tell you something. Don’t force fit the finance major because you have finance goals with a finance background. Start identifying your own unique areas of need. Then look for those classes and majors that they would go under.
How do you know what your needs are going to be?
Well, that’s a simple exercise by finding the job description on LinkedIn or indeed.com. If you want to be an analyst at a firm, hopefully they recruit at Wharton, that’s a key job description. Then assess what do you know right now based on what you’ve experienced as a professional? Your future post MBA goal? You see the job description for it. You see they’re looking for XYZ, but you only have X and Y, therefore what are you missing? The Z! So hopefully this MBA program can solve or backfill that knowledge.
Maybe it’s more product knowledge, or development knowledge, or organizational transformation? Great! So, find those classes in the 100+ page Wharton resource guide and start building a critical mass. Build a list of the core classes that you’re going to need and always pay attention to what it may fall under. The majority will fall under the management major because they have these sub-majors within the course so you can start picking from the international ones, and the entrepreneurial ones. You must really think about and study this guide.
Wharton is one of the few schools that require you to declare a major before you enter the school.
Going through this guide is half the battle. This guide also gives you a synopsis of every research center initiative. If you’re going to tell Wharton you want to spend the next couple of years with them, the first essay (your goals essay – which we will get to in next week's blog post) you must list out and be specific about the courses and clubs and majors that you want. You will see that they have a Wharton West (in San Francisco). You’ll start learning about things like math for business, pre-term, clusters and co-horts, the fact that you can get a waiver, all that stuff.
Find and read the entire syllabus of the course.
When you find your gaps and you find your courses and major, you will want to google the name of the course and “PDF” and see what PDF's come up. There will be an entire PDF dedicated specifically for that course. Read through that entire syllabus, don’t just take the lazy way out and just read the synopsis in the document – it’s just a gateway into starting your journey at Wharton.