WHARTON DIARY: A spring break provided time for rugby and an opportunity for some team building
WE ARE into the final quarter of our first year at Wharton, which comes as a bit of a shock to all of us. Finishing the third quarter at the start of March, we got a much-needed week off for spring break. Many classmates took advantage of this free time to visit different corners of the globe.
A variety of different Wharton leadership ventures took parties of students off on a range of ventures like climbing mountains in Ecuador or racing yachts in the Caribbean, using the challenges of working in small teams as a way to provide leadership experiences and lessons.
At the same time, students from a number of countries led visits back to their homelands. More than 130 people travelled to Japan on an organised trek for a week, both sightseeing and meeting business and political leaders. I’m hoping to go on this trip next year as I have heard great things about the experience.
A lot of our coursework across different areas has involved analysis and case studies of Toyota and the Toyota production system, and I am told that one of the highlights of the Wharton Japan trek was a visit to Toyota City to see the infamous and on cords and kanban cards in real life.
The week off in the Keane household was an awful lot quieter than this, given that the children are not that excited by operations management research and hence not that interested in a visit to a Toyota plant. We did travel down to Washington DC for a weekend and spent a very enjoyable day walking around the various monuments on the national mall.
In complete contrast to my quiet family time, the Wharton rugby club spent a week in Argentina over the spring break, training and playing games against local sides in Buenos Aires. The team is building to one of the highlights of the MBA rugby season, the MBA World Championships which is held at Duke University every year.
Ireland’s Smurfit Graduate Business School has a very proud record in the competition, and the Smurfit team has been world champions for the past three years. I’m looking forward to the tournament, as many of the leading business schools from around the world send squads to compete. We expect to see all the usual US schools, along with a number of the European schools like London Business School and Insead. The second-year MBA students, who have experienced the weekend before, have told us it will be one of the highlights of the year.
As part of the training regime for the competition, my Irish colleagues and I have been forcing people who have never played the game before business school to watch Ireland’s triumphant progress in the Six Nations. Most of them don’t seem to realise just how momentous an occasion last Saturday was, but I spent all weekend with a grin on my face – and I am even trying to figure out how to work Declan Kidney into my class contributions in some of our people management and team building courses.
We started a new set of courses in Q4, and it looks like we are going to be kept busy until the end of the academic year. Many of my classmates are still trying to find jobs for the summer so the pressure has started to build again. Some recent developments seem to be grounds for renewed optimism about the economy, with the Obama administration’s announcement earlier this week of its bailout proposals provoking positive reactions from the markets and also from many of Wharton’s professors. I think most of us are reasonably confident we will find something interesting to do for the summer.
Gareth Keane, from Moycullen, Co Galway, is studying for an MBA at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
gkeane@wharton.upenn.edu
