Salocin

Accepted at Wharton

It's been complete radio-silence for the past few months as I prepared to go to Wharton, made the necessary preparations and wrote another website for a company. Now here are some reflections on my acceptance at Wharton.

I was on the motorway in France going to a conference (Forum-21), and the time on my watch passed 1pm, which means 8am in Pennsylvania, which meant my admissions decision had been posted on the Wharton website. So we pulled over, hoping to find an internet point in a motorway service station. This was not to be, I called a friend at work in the UK, and gave him my login and password, and waited.

The first word of the letter, as all Wharton admits now know, was "Congratulations!", and it's hard to say if I was more relieved or more excited. I can't think of many experiences similar to business-school applications. You spend hundreds of dollars on the GMAT, months on essays that disclose very personal features of your character to completely faceless nameless admissions committees, and months worrying about whether your referees are going to write the references at all, let alone write the kinds of things that will get you accepted. Finally, you send the fruits of countless hours of labour off to who-knows-where, and then sit and wait. And wait.

Then comes an answer - INSEAD tell you they are full. Sorry. Would you like to go to Singapore? If not, we can consider you for January entry at Fontainebleau. Great, INSEAD turn themselves into my fallback plan, already things are changing in unanticipated ways.

Then Wharton accept you, and it's hard to say whether the way that makes you feel is excited, or overwhelmingly relieved.

The relief doesn't come from the fear of not getting into an MBA, although that certainly features. Such banal fears are completely eclipsed by the terror that, after having disclosed so much about yourself, your achievements and your motivations, someone somewhere could just turn around and say, "No - not good enough". Rejection based on such a complete documentation of who and what I am would have been tough.

Of course that's all nonsense - rejection from a business school doesn't mean any of that, but given the nature of the effort and the information disclosed during the application process, you can end up feeling as if everything you are is being assessed for worthiness, and I can imagine it being quite a blow to not be accepted. The process you go through when putting together the application sets things up such that a fall will be all the more painful.

After the acceptance, the flow of information suddenly and violently reverses itself, as you find yourself besieged by the school as they switch to sales mode and compete for your presence.

The Wharton Welcome Weekend was a very slick, very comprehensively organised event in which very little sleep was had, and the jetlag was dealt with through copious amounts of alcohol. We discovered various traditions (pizza-delivery "persons" in Philly's university quarters have to have courage to deliver on a thursday night!), were shown the school, and given all manner of motivating speeches.

So I will be spending the next two years in Philadelphia, and I am very much looking forward to it. I expect to have a fantastic time, meeting the most interesting people, broaden my experience and skills - most of all though, without looking to what it will earn me in the future, I think this is where I want to be now.