In early January, Wharton offered its first ever course in India: “Innovation and the Indian Health Care Industry.”  This three-day mini-course, held at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, covered the full range of health care issues in India - hospital management, medical tourism, pharmaceuticals, and more.  Nine executive MBA students attended, joining 21 full-time MBA students, and three undergraduates.  The course was directed by Wharton health care professor Lawton Burns, but lectures were given by eleven executives and leaders in Indian healthcare, many of whom have ongoing ties to Wharton.

Dr. Prasad Kilaru was one of three medical doctors in the EMBA program to take the course.  “From a physician’s standpoint, there was really great information on hospitals, non-profits, pharmaceuticals, and more,” he said. “I also really enjoyed the lectures on medical tourism, including the presentation from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”  

Rajani Veeramachaneni, a first-year MBA Exec student who runs her own strategy consulting firm claims it was “one of the best academic courses she has ever taken, as it approached the issue from so many angles.”  Veeramachaneni enjoyed not only the lectures on hospital management and medical tourism but the presentations on cutting-edge technologies, including e-Help, mobile health, and wireless medical technology.   “I was impressed by the low-cost structure of India’s healthcare system,” she said, “from which the U.S. can learn a lot.”

Robert Zwolinski, a second-year EMBA student in San Francisco, took the course with the aim of applying his findings to his current job.  As the Director of Operations of a small pharmaceutical company in the Bay Area, Zwolinski wanted to explore the possibility of outsourcing development work – including formulation development, clinical development, and clinical trials.  “The course provided me an excellent opportunity to find out what I need to send work over there,” he said.  “India is not just a low cost option.  India offers many advantages – the education, talent, and intellectual capacity for specific activities - all of these advantages combine to make India a high quality option that can facilitate speed to market for products in development.”

While it’s not uncommon for Wharton EMBA students to hear from guest speakers in class, the Wharton | San Francisco Friday Night Panel Series provides another opportunity to learn from business leaders on topics ranging from venture capital to managing organizations through change. A recent event on “Business Exits in the Current Economic Environment” featured panelists such as Larry Sonsini, chairman of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Wharton alumnus Frank Quattrone, former managing director of CSFB and founding partner of Qatalyst, Wharton alumnus Ted Schlein, managing partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, and Wharton Prof. Raffi Amit. 

“This is great access to information that affects my job when I walk into work on Monday,” says second-year Wharton | San Francisco EMBA student Mike Krems, senior vice president at PCG Asset Management in San Diego. “The Friday night panel series help provide a great depth of experience because you have the benefit of learning from someone else’s story. A lot of what comes out of the events are personal anecdotes that help leverage someone else’s experience for your own development.”

The recent event hosted by Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs on business exits was so popular that it was standing room only, notes Krems. “The topic was relevant to my business, but the quality of the speakers on the panel was such that I probably would have gone to see them no matter what they were talking about.”

With so many students and alumni in attendance at these events, networking is always a big part of the sessions as well. The VC event began with a social hour followed by the panel discussion and ended with additional time for networking.

“I’ve been to three or four of these Friday night panel discussions and they have all been a great addition to our regular classes,” adds Krems.

When first-year Wharton EMBA student Frank Edwards, a group manager of IT Infrastructure at PepsiCo in Dallas, heard about the workshop on the Development of Web-based Services (OPIM 654) offered at Wharton | San Francisco he knew it was an opportunity he didn’t want to miss. Not only would the workshop apply management science to a creative topic like innovation, but it also would provide a chance to interact with first- and second-year Wharton EMBA students from both the East and West Coast programs as well as full-time Wharton MBA students.

The intense four-day workshop, led by Prof. Karl Ulrich, was structured as a tournament in which all students submitted ideas for online products or services that were whittled down by votes each day until six finalists remained. Edwards’ idea for Appmyself.com, a site which creates custom mobile applications, not only made it to the final round, but Edwards and several Wharton Executive MBA students from both coasts are now developing a business plan around the idea.

“The workshop showed how there are a lot of really good ideas out there and after just some small tuning and development, you can make great improvements within a couple of days in terms of understanding the customers’ needs and what your product can and should do,” he says. “The amount of opportunities that exist that are within reach is somewhat surprising.”

Edwards, who attends Wharton’s EMBA program in Philadelphia, says he also was pleasantly surprised by how much he got out of interacting with such a diversity of Wharton Executive MBA and full-time MBA students. “It was a chance to hear their perspectives and see the differences and similarities between our classes. And it was nice to validate all that you hear about how the executive program is indeed the same as the full-time program. You see that we really mirror the work that they do.”

As for the Wharton | San Francisco facility, Edwards was “amazed” by how similar the East and West Coast classrooms are. “Being from Texas, I could have applied to the Wharton program on either coast because they are equidistant to me. At the workshop, I saw that it really is the same experience in San Francisco as in Philadelphia in terms of the same professors and classrooms even down to the details like the same lights and ceiling tiles! The learning experience was very consistent, and I’m now planning to do a semester at Wharton | San Francisco to broaden my network,” he says.

Second-year Wharton EMBA student, Christina Todasco, who attends the program at Wharton|San Francisco and is a finance director at Johnson & Johnson in San Jose, agrees that the opportunity to interact with so many other types of students was a highlight of the workshop. “My team in the workshop was well balanced with folks from every single class and that made it really enjoyable because we learned a lot about their experiences.  We’ve all been staying in touch,” she says.

Todasco, who signed up for the workshop to try something “really different,” adds that she learned a lot about the importance of coming up with a lot of ideas. “If it’s just you and two other people trying to come up with the next big thing, you are limited to the purview of just three people. So you need to start with as many ideas as possible and then vote to whittle them down, getting as much feedback along the way as possible. You may think you have an awesome idea, but when no one votes for your idea, it may not actually have been that awesome.”

Emilio Maldonado, a first-year EMBA student at Wharton | San Francisco and manager of software development at Cisco Systems in San Jose, says that he learned a lot about the importance of feedback as well. “Instead of jumping in and defining the product features, you need to step back and refine the thought process and get more input in order to get to something more refined with a better chance of success,” he says.

Second-year East Coast Executive MBA student Tanya Andrien, who is a director at Duff & Phelps in Austin, says that the workshop exceeded her expectations. “Many of our classes are theoretical, but this was all about practical information you would use in starting and running a business. Prof. Karl Ulrich has a lot of experience running businesses and was really frank about successes and failures,” she says. “There were a lot of things I learned in the workshop that I wish I had known when I was working in a start-up. It was fascinating!”

Congratulations to our first-year Wharton EMBA students who recently won first place at the Western U.S. finals of the CFA Global Investment Research Challenge in Las Vegas! They now head to the Americas Challenge in New York to take on other regional winners from North and South America.

In her first year in Wharton’s EMBA Program, Sarah Sullivan, a program analyst at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, DC, heard about the social impact projects in Wharton’s Global Consulting Practicum (GCP). They sounded like a good fit with her growing interest in social enterprises in developing countries, but she wanted to finish her core courses before signing up.

So after completing her first year courses as well as an independent study over the summer for a small beeswax producing company in Cameroon, she and five EMBA classmates signed up for the GCP. The course typically pairs teams of Wharton full-time and executive MBA students and faculty with teams from partner universities in countries such as China, India, Peru, and Israel to consult with a client company interested in entering or expanding its position in the U.S. market. However, their social impact project was a bit unique in that it involved working with a partnership between the University of Pennsylvania, government of Botswana, and the University of Botswana to build capacity in Botswana in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Having recently returned from a visit to Botswana for the GCP project, we asked Sullivan and her teammate William “Willy” McColgan to share some of the highlights of their trip with us. Here’s what Sullivan had to say:

“Since we left at the end of December, everything was still closed for the holidays in Botswana so we spent the first four days in South Africa and went on safari. It was a great opportunity to get to know my classmates even better and build a stronger foundation for our group.

When we went to Gaborone, Botswana, we first met the University of Botswana business students who were working with us on the project to hammer out our goals and what we would be doing for our client. We then met with a lot of people in Gaborone – doctors, people from the Center for Disease Control, the Ministry of Health, and a few business leaders and citizens. We even got a tour of the capital and a neighboring village, which was a chance to see more of the country and get a better feel for the culture.

We were blown away by how developed Botswana is compared to many other African countries. Yet despite their development and healthcare infrastructure, it has the highest prevalence of HIV with 25% of the population infected. There is not enough capacity in terms of beds, space, medicine, and number of hours with doctors and staff. Seeing that was really hard. And it made coordinating the work really challenging because you could spend hours on this fascinating project.

While there, we did identify a lot of issues that the partnership is facing. We’ll now conduct more research on the partnership and what needs to be done to sustain its funding with a long-term strategy. Our goal is to have specific recommendations in place by May.

This experience has confirmed my interest in doing business development and strategic planning for social enterprises in developing countries in the future. It also made me realize what an incredible opportunity I’ve had at Wharton that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I’ve travelled to new places, met a lot of great people, seen other organizations in different environments, and gotten a world view of society. This was a capstone experience for me!”

McColgan agrees that the GCP trip was a wonderful experience. Here’s what he said about the project:
“When I first heard about the GCP’s social impact projects, I thought that no matter what else I do in the EMBA program, this is something I would look back on years from now and say it was really worthwhile and made an impact.

Once we arrived in Botswana, we headed straight over the border into South Africa for a safari to get adjusted to the time difference and prepare for the week ahead. What I remember the most from those days was getting stuck in the mud as it started to get dark and imagining all the things moving around you as well as a toga party on the game reserve on New Year’s Eve.

When we got to Botswana, we spent a lot of time planning and discussing our project and meeting with hospital staff, government representatives, and our University of Botswana counterparts. Later in the week, we went on the medical wards and met with residents from Penn’s Medical School as well as a Penn School of Nursing faculty member doing research on sabbatical. The University of Pennsylvania has certainly made an impact in Botswana. Hopefully our Wharton EMBA GCP team can help this continue.

This will definitely be a highlight of my time at Wharton. And I certainly strengthened my relationships with my classmates during that time, which is lasting. We’ll always have Africa!”

Many thanks to Sarah and Willy for sharing their GCP experiences. Learn more about the GCP.

Related blog: Wharton's Global Consulting Practicum EMBA Students Build International Teams While Working and Having Fun

While needing to fly every other weekend to get to school may sound like a significant challenge, second-year Wharton | San Francisco Executive MBA student Dan Paik says that his commute from Redondo Beach, California to San Francisco hasn’t been that bad.

In fact, he says most EMBA students who live in southern California don’t have all that different of a schedule from students who live in the Bay Area. The biggest difference, he says, is that the southern California students probably wake up a few hours earlier to catch a 7:00am flight on Friday mornings in order to arrive at Wharton | San Francisco by 9:30am and get home a few hours later on Saturday evenings.

For Paik, his schedule is a little bit different from most commuters in his area because instead of catching Friday morning flights, he usually flies from LAX on Thursday evenings into Oakland where he spends the night at his brother’s home and then takes a train on Friday mornings into San Francisco.

But regardless of when they arrive, “the majority of people I talk to who are based near Los Angeles don’t mind the travel because they spend their flights to school catching up on reading,” he says. “And in this day and age, we are constantly connected to the office so those brief couple of hours in transit is a welcome respite because we can turn off our phones – we actually like the travel time.”

Paik notes that the flight home provides time to bond with classmates. When classes end at 4:00pm on Saturday, the commuters share taxis to the airport. Those going to Los Angeles usually catch a 5:00pm flight out of SFO airport and those headed to San Diego usually catch a 4:50pm flight out of Oakland. “It’s pretty much a given that it’s not study time because we are done with classes and can hang out and listen to music or watch part of a movie together on the flight. It’s our time to kick back and relax after a weekend of classes.”

He adds that because Wharton students need flights at nonpeak times, getting tickets hasn’t been an issue.  “We are flying in on Thursday nights or Friday mornings when flights are never full and then we leave on Saturday afternoons which is also a good time to find flights. Southwest tickets usually cost about $50 each way from LAX, but we earn a lot of frequent flier miles and free flights,” he says.

As for the impact on his job, Paik explains that for the first year of the program he was running his own business, Juice Wireless, so setting a schedule amenable to commuting wasn’t an issue. Now, as VP of Technology at ThisNext.com, he says it’s still not a big deal. “I leave the office on Thursdays at the usual time I would leave work for the day anyway. In two years, I’ve never had an instance where I had an important meeting that had to happen that night,” he says.

Paik says that most people in southern California probably do consider more local schools – at least at first -- when thinking about EMBA programs. However, one of Wharton’s advantages is its national and international reputation.  He explains, “If you were to move to another part of the country or expand internationally at some point in your career, which a lot of us might do at some point, it’s good to have those networks open. That is a big reason why I'm getting a Wharton MBA as opposed to one from a local school.”

Paik adds, “To get to go to a school like Wharton is definitely worth the commute!”

Read more about other students’ commutes.

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Many Wharton l San Francisco EMBA students had a bit of a different commute the other week. Instead of heading to San Francisco as usual, the entire first-year class flew to Wharton’s campus in Philadelphia to attend classes and meet their East Coast classmates.

The Philadelphia trip is a highlight every year for West Coast executive MBA students, providing opportunities for bonding and networking. This year, the weekend kicked off with a speed networking session, which paired students from different coasts by job sector and interests. The groups also came together for a talk by Wharton alumnus Jay Fishman, CEO of The Travelers Companies, Inc. as well as meals and evening social activities.

First-year student Casey Wendelberg, who attends the East Coast program and is director of business development for CSM Companies in Houston, says that a big benefit of the weekend was the networking. “The weekend confirmed my opinion that we have a broad, diverse group of students in so many areas from startups to people who work at Intel and a wide range in between. I met someone who works at an HR software management company and my company has been looking into that so we are now considering using his services. It was great timing and a great experience,” he says.

Fellow East Coast executive MBA student Lauren Huneke, an associate at Jones Lang LaSalle in Washington, D.C., says that the speed networking event was a lot of fun. “A lot of us almost lost our voices by the end of the night,” she says. “Our program is so intense that there is a lot of camaraderie among the classes and it was really nice to meet more people going through the exact same thing, but on a different coast – there was an immediate connection and hopefully we’ll reconnect with them later.”

Wharton|San Francisco first-year student Jonathan Ben-Horin, a senior associate at Caltius Equity Partners in Los Angeles, says that in addition to meeting lots of East Coast students, he liked being on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus. “It was really nice to become more connected with the home campus and see that we are part of the Penn community,” he says. “And having a background in finance, it was great to mingle with East Coast students in my field. I really doubled the size of my business school network in one weekend.”

Ben-Horin adds that the trip also provided a chance to get to know his fellow West Coast students better. “Most people flew in on Wednesday night and stayed until Sunday so I had more time to spend with my classmates and really made an effort to meet people that I don’t normally get a chance to talk to with all of the social activities. The trip definitely enriched our program experience quite significantly.”

Their choices included China, India, Brazil, Argentina, and Spain. But when it came time to vote on where they would go for their International Trip next month, the second-year EMBA students at Wharton|San Francisco voted for Spain and the trip committee has been busy planning for it ever since.

The week-long trip marks the culmination of a semester-long focus on how businesses develop and implement strategy in a competitive global context. It follows the two-course core sequence, Competitive Strategy and Global Strategic Management.

Second-year student Suki Toguchi, a member of the trip planning committee and manager at Ernst and Young in San Francisco, explains, “It’s about applying what we have learned to analyze and understand companies.” Her class is planning to visit 12 companies during the trip such as Banco Santander, Teva Pharmaceuticals, San Miguel Brewery, as well as attend a private equity forum.

When they aren’t visiting companies, Toguchi says that there will be plenty of class dinners, visits to discos, and even a soccer game. “This is the most exciting event for our class,” says Toguchi. “We’ve heard a lot from alumni about how the international trip is a chance to really bond with our classmates and reinforce the networking that already exists. I’m looking forward to that bonding, especially as the program is nearing the end and this will be a very memorable part of our experience at Wharton.”

Second-year students at Wharton’s Philadelphia campus have also been busy planning their international trip, but instead of Spain they elected to visit Singapore. Planning Committee member Amar Duggassani, EVP of Hotel Gaming Business Solutions for the Rainmaker Group in Atlanta, explains that he voted for Singapore “because it represents a microcosm of a global community with different cultures in a big city-state environment where government takes an active role in business.”

He added, “We’ll be starting my company’s operation in Singapore next year so I also wanted to have exposure to that business environment and really understand the cultural issues and see how business is run over there.”

During their week-long trip, students will visit companies such as Air Products, Temasek, the Discovery Channel, Johnson & Johnson, Accenture, IBM, Google, and Dell. On the social side, they also are planning lots of dinners and activities, including a night tour of the Singapore Zoo and visits to Kuala Lampur and Sentosa Island. Many students are planning smaller group trips before and after the official class trip to places such as Bali, India, and Vietnam.

Fellow trip planning committee member Sarah Sullivan, a program analyst at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C., adds, “Being able to spend a week together is what I’m looking forward to the most. It will be a time to work hard and play hard!”