Term 1 Finals are Done!

It's your friendly neighborhood Wharton West reporter "Chairman P" checkin' in after a brief hiatus to craaaam for finals. Who's got time to blog when there's so much studying to do? Whew, what a relief that Term 1 is over! It sure feels goooooood to have the MGEC, ACCT and FAP behind us!

After finals on Sat, there was a toast to the end of Term 1, with the usual hosted wine, beer, soda, and nuts. A lot of us hung out to relax and unwind, which was cool.

Happy WEMBA students toasting the end to our first term.

Then Ariel managed to break a chair and splash some wine on the top of his shirt, as shown here. How he managed that I don't know! (Notice Clifton holding the top of the chair and the pieces on the table. Notice the dark red wine stain on Ariel's shirt; that is not a shadow!)

Ariel breaks a chair

On a more serious note, I polled about 20 WEMBA students after class, asking the question: on a scale of 1 through 10, 10 being the highest, what's your overall rating of the WEMBA program, including the classes, professors, people in our class, experience, competitiveness, etc? The answers ranged from a high of 8.0 to a low of 7.0. The average response was a 7.25 out of 10.

I asked the reasons for the ratings, and here's some of the quotes, (anonymously of course):

"Overall, Wharton has met my expectations. I'm still glad I did the program even after Term 1. The people have been great and the caliber of people is very very high."

"It has been a LOT more work than I originally signed up for. Everyone is super smart, and there is an insane amount of work. I've had to study study study."

"The FAP experience sucked in my group. Some people on my team didn't do squat. I put in way too much time and it wasn't fair. That's why I graded the overall number down."

"I wish there was more time for getting to know our classmates. The program is so packed and the pace is so fast that it is hard to get the time to get to know each other."

"A 360 degree review would be useful input for grading the FAP. If we had one, it might provide incentive for more equal involvement in the teams. And it would be useful to get some feedback on the grades for our case studies during the term."

"Smetter's class was very entertaining. I loved the econ problems because they were real applications with parodies that made me laugh."

"Accounting is like a giant Easter egg hunt. It was like trying to find the magic number amidst the mass of financial data and footnotes. I never really was sure that I got the right one."

"Econ was all about not making a mathematical mistake. It felt like my upper-division engineering classes."

"I hope we actually use some of the textbooks they assign us for next quarter."

"It's pretty cruel that they give you a bag full of next quarter's books to lug home at the end of this one."

Enough of the quotes... Here's some pics of some very happy WEMBA Class32 students at Brother's #2 Korean Restaurant in SF. We headed there after finals to enjoy some traditional Korean food like kimchee, kalbi, kimchee chigae and soju. It was a great place to blow off some steam...

Smiles, kimchee and kalbi at Brother's #2

Alice, Ron, Malika and Zia

Here's some pics of Ryan's last management class (section 1). I can't imagine it's easy teaching a class full of WEMBA students after two finals and a FAP. Most of us looked pretty tired by Sat afternoon as you can see below.