Congratulations to East Coast second-year Executive MBA student Mike Patterson for winning a National Science Foundation Innovation Corps Award!

Patterson and his teammates from the University of Pennsylvania were selected for their venture, Graphene Frontiers.  We asked Patterson to tell us about what it means to have won this award and how he became involved with this startup. Here’s what he said:

“Winning the NSF award was great.  Not only did we win $50,000 for our postdoctoral fellow Zhengtang Lao to work on the venture full-time, but we gained credibility.  The NSF picked only a handful of teams nationwide, and so the award is a validation that we’re onto something big.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Christy Luquire is blogging about being a first-year EMBA student in Wharton’s East Coast program for the Poets & Quants for Executives Website. So far, the resident of New Orleans has written about everything from trading in jambalaya for cheesesteaks to using iPads in class to ordering takeout seven nights in a row.

Blogging after every class weekend, the vice president of Federated Sample, a market research technology company, shares anecdotes about her life as a student working full-time who commutes to school from Louisiana. A recurring theme in many of her posts is what it’s like to juggle school, work, home and other activities. She wants readers to know that although students have to make some sacrifices, it is possible and worthwhile. 

Each year, second-year Wharton EMBA students spend a week abroad examining how businesses develop and implement strategy in a competitive global context. While that trip is the culmination of their International Seminar, it’s not uncommon for students to organize additional treks to gain further insight into the economic, political, social and cultural factors that influence business in other regions.

Last month, a group of 21 students from Wharton | San Francisco participated in a trek to Beijing and  Shanghai. We asked second-year student Hari Kannan, a technologist at VCE in the Silicon Valley, to share some highlights from the trip. Here’s what he had to say:

When Jim Smith entered Wharton’s executive MBA program in 2005, he also launched the Digital Network Group, an IT and management consulting firm with a mission to create economic and social value for local communities. Wanting to work with professors on his particular interests outside of the core classes, he sought out independent study projects that would help him develop his business. 

As a first-year EMBA student, his initial project was with Prof. Terry LaPier on leading social change through the application of information technology. “That experience provided me with an opportunity to develop a framework that effectively leverages the business, government, nonprofit and academic sectors in a cohesive, systematic and repeatable fashion,” he says. “Through that study, I came up with an idea to build a computer assisted mentoring system for students, as well as a platform to help nonprofits improve their own capacity to provide services – both of which are key elements of my business today.”

When Feng Deng applied to Wharton’s EMBA program in San Francisco, he was a successful entrepreneur running NetScreen Technologies in the Silicon Valley.  His company employed 1,000 people, but to eventually manage a larger team, he knew he needed a formal business education.

As social responsibility becomes a priority for both large organizations and new startups, the Wharton Program for Social Impact is likewise growing in popularity with current and prospective students. Raghavan Anand is a first-year Wharton | San Francisco Executive MBA student who has extensive experience in education- and healthcare-related non-profits.  He spoke to us about what social impact means to him.

While you might think that most executive MBA students come from corporate environments, there are plenty of Wharton students who come from other backgrounds. Alumnus Stephen Tang is a good example.

After finishing his PhD in biotechnology, Tang started up a technology assessment consulting firm and became the assistant director of the Center for Molecular Bioscience at Lehigh University. However, he quickly realized that he was just as interested in the business of science as he was in the science itself. But to pursue a career path in business, he knew he would need “more seasoning” in business so he applied to and was accepted into Wharton’s EMBA program.

Ian Lombard was director of the technology products group at his computer products company when he decided that it was time for a change.  He wanted to transition into a different industry, but his undergraduate degree was in molecular biology, which limited his options.  His path forward turned out to be Wharton’s MBA Program for Executives in San Francisco.

Meet and interact with Wharton MBA for Executives professors, alumni, students and admissions staff during our first-ever webcast event, streaming live from both Philadelphia & San Francisco.

Thursday, January 20, 2011
7:00-8:00pm EST / 4:00-5:00pm PST
REGISTER FOR THE WEBCAST

Get a Taste of the Classroom Experience
Live from Philadelphia: Vice Dean Anjani Jain asks faculty about their experience teaching in the program, including current topics from recent classes. 

David Bell, Professor of Marketing
Peggy Bishop Lane, Professor of Accounting
Witold Henisz, Professor of Management 

Meet Admissions Staff
Live from San Francisco:  Vice Dean Anjani Jain introduces members of the Admissions Committee, including Bernadette Birt, COO of Wharton | San Francisco and Cathy Molony, Director of Admissions, Wharton MBA Program for Executives.

Interact with Students and Alumni
Live from both Philadelphia & San Francisco:  Alumni and students share their stories about the benefits, both personal and professional, of the Wharton MBA degree.

The webcast will include forums for posting questions as you watch.  We hope you'll join us!

When Emir Kiamilev entered Wharton’s MBA Program for Executives at Wharton | San Francisco in 2005, he was running a successful tea company in Uzbekistan with yearly revenue of $7 million.  His goal was to learn how to successfully expand the company into other regions not only to grow the business, but also to mitigate the risks of political instability in Uzbekistan.

At first, everything was going according to plan. He based his family in San Diego where his parents lived and commuted to Uzbekistan once a quarter to apply the knowledge he learned in school.  He even used the tea business as the subject of a consulting project in one of his classes.

But in his second year, the worst case scenario happened – he lost the company due to political instability.  “In those countries, it’s hard to finance anything so it was a cash-based business in which we reinvested all profits.  I was married with three kids, but had no income and we were really down to nothing.  I got loans for school, but our whole lifestyle changed overnight.”

The “up side” at the time, he says, was the fact that he was in school and could access Wharton’s extensive network and dedicated career management resources.    After meeting representatives from Mattel, Inc., he was offered a position as a finance manager.  “I was excited because I wanted to come into a consumer products company and learn how Fortune 500 companies do business in corporate America,” says Kiamilev.

Kiamilev and his wife shared an entrepreneurial spirit and also wanted to start up a business.  Attending several gourmet food shows, they decided their market niche would be in confectionaries so they took online classes on topics such as how to make chocolate and even flew to Paris for lessons from a high-end chocolatier.

Ultimately, they decided to focus on caramels and in 2009, with $50,000 from friends and family, they launched Amella.  Their artisan cocoa butter caramels are now in more than 200 stores and high-end hotels and the couple hopes to break even by the end of 2010.

Kiamilev says, “It would have been much harder to start over without my Wharton education.  I’ve seen other friends go through similar situations and they could not recover.  But because of Wharton, I have the tools, knowledge and network to one day be bigger than I was in Uzbekistan.  The executive MBA program opened a lot of doors and is helping me be a better businessman.”

With a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in engineering, Joanne Medvitz loved her job in the innovative area of clean tech at PG&E in San Francisco. However, she wanted a better understanding of how business decisions drive technological advances. To fill in the holes of her “patchwork understanding” of business and be able to contribute more both to her role as product manager at the utility company and the startup she co-founded, Pop Outerwear, she decided it was time to look into MBA programs.

Being 28 and having gone to graduate school, she realzed her work experience would be similar to that of a typical full-time MBA student.  But after looking at full-time programs on both coasts, she realized they weren’t a fit for her. 

“Those students were often still in exploratory mode where I knew I wanted certain things in my future. I thought I might find similar clarity among the students in an executive MBA program.  Also, I didn’t want to lose more time out of the workforce. With the clean tech space moving so fast in the Bay Area, I thought it might look totally different if I left and came back,” she explains.

Reaching out to other PG&E employees who had gone through Wharton’s MBA Program for Executives in San Francisco, she saw how excited they were about their experience. “They talked about how good the professors were, the rigor of the curriculum, and how tight-knit their class was. I decided to sit in on a class and immediately felt the camaraderie that you’d expect in a full-time program. It was a fuller experience than I had expected,” she says.

Medvitz applied to the Wharton EMBA program in San Francisco and was accepted as a "Fellows," which is a category of students who have fewer than eight years of work experience, but are sponsored by their employers and demonstrate outstanding promise for advancement in a managerial career.

Currently a first-year student, she says she has no regrets about her decision. “I sometimes wonder what life might be like in a full-time program and I got a glimpse of that when my class recently spent a weekend at Wharton’s Philadelphia campus. I realized that at this point I don’t need things like career fairs. My classmates and I are all so passionate about helping each other in our careers that we network in a different way. As for being on a big campus, I thought I might miss that, but I realized that we love our own campus community in San Francisco even more.”

While she was a bit nervous about being less experienced than most of her classmates, Medvitz says that everyone has been “amazing. They share their experiences and connections and are so supportive.”

Medvitz described herself as pleasantly “shocked” at the professional diversity in her class. “The breadth of experiences is huge. We have everyone from entrepreneurs at startups and those recently acquired by big businesses to people in more traditional institutions. The range truly represents the West Coast and it’s awesome,” she says.

Medvitz, who was recently promoted to senior product manager, describes her experience so far as “priceless.” She says, “I was prepared to spend my own money for the entire tuition. Having the support and network of such intelligent, ambitious, positive people is invaluable. And I’m finally seeing all of the things that I can do. Not just in building my own abilities, but also what the possibilities are that might be open for me and what I can create for myself. Thanks to Wharton, I’m quickly realizing that they're limitless.”

In times of stress, Miriam Leigh has always turned to cooking as an outlet. So it’s not that surprising that she began to do a lot more entertaining when she started Wharton’s MBA for Executives Program in San Francisco.

“I felt like my life was thrown a bit into a tailspin with all the demands on my time from work and school. I found myself inviting people like my classmates over a lot to cook for them,” says Leigh, who is director of marketing and communications at Computers and Structures, Inc. “They started asking me for recipes so I decided to start a blog (http://www.mirileigh.com/) as a hobby.” But what began as a hobby and stress outlet has blossomed into a cooking blog read by thousands, popular cooking demonstration videos on YouTube, and a possible new TV show.

Leigh explains that her MBA classes inspired her to take her blog to the next level.  “It started as just a few postings, but in Prof. David Bell’s marketing class we talked about the concept of how to make your consumer feel that they are part of something and generate a sense of community. In my case, my product was the blog and I felt that videos would let people into my life – they would see me in my own kitchen – and I could do cooking demonstrations,” she says, adding that she went down the list of marketing techniques and thought about which ones she could apply.

When Leigh began receiving positive feedback from her videos and even comments that she should be on the Food Network, she thought it might indeed be worth a try. “I didn’t know anyone at that network, but I searched Wharton’s alumni database and found an alumnus who worked at Scripps Networks, the parent company of the Food Network, and sent him an introductory email asking if he could help put me in touch with anyone who might be interested in watching my videos,” she says.

Within a day, the alumnus had written back with an offer to introduce her to the creative director at the Food Network who was interested in seeing her videos. She says, “I didn’t think it would be that fast much less that I would be talking to the top guy there!”

After watching her videos, the creative director was very encouraging, giving Leigh specific pointers about what to work on and requesting additional materials as they were created. A few months later, Leigh sent more videos and landed a meeting with the network in New York.

At that point, all of her Wharton classmates had learned about the blog and her interest in creating a TV show.  She recalls, “At lunch one day, a friend casually mentioned that one of her kids goes to school with the kids of a guy who used to be a Food Network producer and asked if I wanted to be introduced to him. I said sure, and she emailed him my information. It turns out that he was the producer of a major show on the Food Network and I was so flattered when he wanted to talk.”

After finding an entertainment lawyer – again by searching the Wharton alumni database -- Leigh and the producer filmed a single episode of what will hopefully become a full TV series. Currently, she’s in discussions to see if it gets picked up by the Food Network.

Leigh, who graduated last May with her 90 San Francisco classmates, credits Wharton for much of her success. “Wharton has everything to do with what I’ve been able to do. The MBA curriculum helped me get the product off the ground and the Wharton alumni network is helping me turn it into a TV show and a career!”

Stay tuned for updates on Miriam Leigh’s blog and TV show!

When Roland Warren, president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, was attending Wharton’s MBA for Executives Program, working for a nonprofit organization wasn’t part of his career plan. He had actually applied to Wharton’s program with the goal of transitioning from a marketing role at Pepsi into the field of healthcare management.

However, during his time at Wharton, he discovered a new area of interest – wealth management – that ultimately led him into the not-for-profit world. After graduating in 1996, he took a position as an investment advisor at Goldman Sachs in private wealth management and joined the board of the National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI) where he was “blown away” by how many kids were growing up without fathers.

He recalls, “I wanted to make a difference in the lives of kids and when NFI’s founder asked me in 2000 if I would leave Goldman for the world of nonprofit management, I said yes. A lot of times people struggle between success and significance. Success is often viewed from the perspective of how much money you make, but at the end of the day, I wanted a life that was also significant and I had an opportunity to do something significant here.”

The NFI’s mission is to increase the proportion of children raised with involved, responsible, and committed fathers.  Under Warren’s leadership, the group runs a variety of activities such as public awareness campaigns and providing high-quality fatherhood resources directly to fathers, community- based organizations, businesses, prisons, military bases, hospitals, schools, and churches

He notes that one of the biggest challenges in the not-for-profit world is getting the message out for your organization and making an impact. “At nonprofits, there are similar issues to a business setting, but with less capital to work with. You have to get people to stretch themselves to accomplish your mission, but you can’t use a financial ‘carrot’ to motivate people. It’s also very competitive, perhaps more so than in the business world because dollars are scarce, results can be more difficult to measure, and returns are long term. It’s not like Apple and Dell where they can introduce a new product and the market will quickly tell you who wins,” he explains.

Fortunately, he’s found that pretty much everything he learned at Wharton has been “incredibly applicable” at the NFI. “Whether it is operations management, product development, or human resources, what I learned in school is all transferable to what I’m doing here. I think of my leadership class with Prof. Michael Useem and human resources class with Prof. Peter Cappelli all the time.”

Warren adds that having gone through the program with classmates from so many diverse industries has been useful for him at the NFI as well. In addition to helping him think about business issues from different perspectives, he’s also been able to work with a few as consultants and one former classmate currently sits on the organization’s board.

“Working in the nonprofit world, you have a different perspective on what you expect to get back from an MBA. You don’t go into nonprofits to get rich, but to be enriched,” he says. “For those of us in nonprofits, the ROI of an MBA is gaining a broader understanding of the different types of business issues that apply regardless of whether you are at IBM or a not-for-profit. And to be able to build deep relationships with your classmates is also a real return on your investment.”

For Wharton MBA Exec alumna Maxine Gowen, staying connected with the School is very important. Most recently, the founding president and CEO of Trevena, Inc., a privately held pharmaceutical company located in King of Prussia, Pa., came back to the Philadelphia campus as a judge in the final round of Wharton’s Business Plan Competition. We asked her to talk about her interactions with the School and why she stays involved. Here’s what she said:

For 20 years, Wharton Executive MBA alumnus Rick Rockelli had worked for leading Congressional-based publishers in the private sector. However, after reading an article in The Washington Post about the Close Up Foundation – an organization that helps students become informed and engaged citizens in the U.S. democracy -- the course of his career literally changed overnight.

The cover story of the of the Spring 2010 Wharton Magazine features Brian Murphy, WG'08, and the story of how his career has gone from energy trading to cake baking.  The article, Baking Up a Miracle, explains the challenges Murphy faces doing business on a an island in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. 

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!”

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