We continue with our Real Humans: MBA Students series at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1881, The Wharton School at Penn has been an innovator in business education, pioneering schooling in accounting, business law, finance, industrial management, insurance, marketing, transportation and more.
American entrepreneur and industrialist Joseph Wharton established the world’s first collegiate business school, transforming business from trade-based training to an institutionalized, respected profession. Wharton boasts business school “firsts,” including the first business school research center to open in 1921 and the first MBA program in Health Care Management. Today, Wharton maintains an impressive network of 99,000 alumni and 77 alumni clubs across 153 countries. 240 professors comprise the Wharton faculty and they are regularly published and frequently cited by the press. Students can also benefit from over 20 research facilities and 10 academic departments such as accounting, legal studies and business ethics, real estate, business economics and public policy, management, statistics, finance, and marketing.
The Wharton MBA Class of 2021 joined the prestigious school with average undergraduate GPAs of 3.6. Forty-three percent had majored in the humanities while 30 had studied STEM and 27 percent business. GMAT scores for the incoming class range between 540-790 with the mean at 732. Sixty-four countries are represented by international students, making up 30 percent of the class. Women are represented at a whopping 47 percent, while U.S. students of color make up 36 percent of the class. Five percent are LGBTQ Students.
In addition to the main Philadelphia campus, students can enroll for Wharton classes in San Francisco and Beijing, and the INSEAD campuses in Fontainebleau and Singapore. Read on to hear from five Wharton first-year students about how their professional and personal paths brought them to Philly, and the grand plans they have post-MBA.
