Campus Visits Many business schools allow or even encourage students to conduct their admissions interviews during their campus visits. Although this can certainly be convenient, for a number of reasons I decided not to interview during my campus visits. This allowed me to be more relaxed during my campus visit, and to be more focused during my interviews. As a result I think I got more out of both the campus visits and the interviews.
University of Pennsylvania Wharton School I visited the Wharton campus in October 2002. As you might have heard, the University of Pennsylvania is in a rather dodgy part of Philadelphia, but it’s probably not as bad as people make it out to be. As I’m from the Philadelphia area myself, I will admit that the city, though large, doesn’t have an immense amount to offer, although New York City (a 2.5 hour drive), gambling in Atlantic City (2 hours), and the beach (1.5 hours) are within easy driving distance.
The campus itself is quite nice, a typically American college campus with large expanses of lawns and trees. The business school is housed in a new building with all the facilities and amenities you would expect, including a state of the art wireless network. Most of the MBA students I talked to lived in downtown (Center City) Philadelphia rather than in the immediate area of the school.
During the day I spent on campus I attended an information session where the speaker, a woman from the admissions committee, seemed to be trying her best to be intimidating. After that I sat in on a marketing class which was interesting but unremarkable – there wasn’t a great deal of student interaction. I then had lunch with a number of current MBA students and was very impressed. They were all extremely well-rounded, articulate, and fun. Overall I came away with a very good impression of the school.
Columbia Business School A couple days after visiting Wharton, I drove up to New York in order to see Columbia and NYU. Having lived in New York City before, I knew pretty much what to expect. Columbia (in Harlem) isn’t in a great part of town, but, like Wharton, it’s probably not as bad as people say. The business school is housed in two buildings primarily, one rather old, one quite new. In terms of facilities, I would say Columbia is average or slightly below average.
The admissions office was supposed to organize a lunch that day to allow prospective students to meet current students but only one current student showed up to talk with over ten prospective students – a bit unimpressive to say the least. I sat in on three different classes: two advanced corporate finance classes (which were quite boring), and a class on modern political economy, which was very, very interesting. This class was mostly case and discussion-based and it was clear that the students were both well-read and articulate.
The information session in the afternoon was quite standard – they showed a slide-show presenting a lot of the material from the school’s brochures. Overall, as I made my way out of campus that day, I left feeling very impressed with quality of students, but less keen on the facilities and location. |
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