November 27, 2005 | Filed under Business School (Wharton) by Kurt
I meant to post this a couple of months ago but it got stuck in my drafts folder. It’s here as a placeholder for future applicants/students who may find it helpful - feel free to contact me for more details if anyone is interested.
School
I bought a school recommended laptop. So far this hasn’t provided much benefit - there are plenty of computers to use on campus, so if you already have a computer at home I wouldn’t buy a laptop reflexively - wait and see if you find you need it. I also wouldn’t worry about buying the school recommended laptop.
Some of the pre-term prep material suggested that pre-term was going to be crazy with no time to handle cable/internet hookups, unpacking, etc. Unless you have no business/math/accounting background at all, academics will probably not be too stressful. I had virtually nothing to do for the first week of pre-term (probably 15 hours of commitments the first week) and several days completely free in the last week, not including labor day weekend. In retrospect I wish I had enjoyed more of my summer and showed up at the last possible minute since I could have knocked out apartment setup during my preterm downtime.
Paul Tiffany’s preterm course on business history rocks - I skipped some ‘core’ preterm classes to attend this elective.
The waiver by credential requirements are commonly overstated. Except for the statistics waiver most departments seem to approve waivers even if your credentials don’t meet the literal requirements - don’t nix your waiver application just because your courses are more than 5 years old or you can’t find your syllabus….On the other hand I ended up taking 3-4 waiver exams since I didn’t apply for credential waivers; studying for the exams will probably put me ahead of 80% of the people who waived on credential since I’ve been more recently exposed to the material and focused on learning it in the way Wharton will test for. Bottom line: lots of people wish they had waived more courses while nobody I’ve talked to thinks they waived too much.
Waiving courses may not let you backfill electives at a 1:1 ratio. Try to waive classes that occupy the same timeslot in Q1-Q2 since most electives that you’ll want to backfill with are semester long (i.e., if you waive your Q1 10:30 but not Q2 you’re not going to be able to get an elective since you still have a Q2 conflict). There’s something to be said for waiving 1-2 classes without any backfill in order to bring workload down a little; taking the full courseload+career search+activity load in the first semester is a lot of work.
Know your limits when going out during pre-term. I think 20% of the class got some kind of sickness at the leadership retreat last week and finance this morning sounded like a TB ward - nonstop hacking for 90 minutes (myself included).
Realize that the course auction is configured to give lots of advantages to second years. Don’t panic if everything in your first auction looks like you’ll never be able to afford it; things will be much easier by year 2.
Logistics
Be aware that moving in will be a pain; PODS or other container drop off probably won’t work in center city. Using a large moving company with a full size truck will require (95% likely) a transfer to a smaller truck for delivery downtown costing an additional $400 or so
Cab fare has risen since last year. I was planning on $5 cab rides to school but now it seems more like $6-8 plus tip depending on the route.
The trolley, which was totally underwhelming on my initial visit, is actually quite convenient and a bargain at $1.30/trip
Coming from Texas or anyplace else where an “old” apartment/house was built before 1985, Philadelphia housing is primitive. Be ready to ask all kinds of questions you never thought of, like “do the air conditioners actually cool this place below 85 when it’s 95 outside?” or “do the AC units leak all over the floor”. There are all kinds of new and exciting things to go wrong….
Don’t stress out about where to live within Center City. Everything is pretty convenient to everything else; I don’t see the value in paying $200/month for location a few blocks one way or the other (excepting paying for personal safety vis-a-vis location).
If any current students want to contradict me please fire away in the comments.
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November 27, 2005 | Filed under Photo, Travel by Kurt
Bighorn sheep near Banff last June. The patchy look of the fur may be due to the transition from winter coat to summer coat.
Taken with a Canon 20D at 320mm/f2.8 (35mm equiv)
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November 24, 2005 | Filed under Business School (Wharton), Finance & Investing by Kurt
Given the number of international students at Wharton, each cohort (65 student unit) has an elected officer that explains holidays and cultural issues (Diwali, Ramadan, and so on). Included in the Thanksgiving email was this gem:
Here is an interesting fact that we should all take to heart as we look for apartments in the New York city area for the summer of 2006 or any time thereafter: The entire island of Manhattan was purchased in 1626 for $24 of beads from the Canaries tribe (which by the way did not own the land)…..Gotta Love America!
Now for those in Finance, using an Opp Cost of Capital of 5% (compounded annually) and a time of 379 years we find that the FV in 2005 of that investment would be $2,576,057,716.90. The actual cost of land in New York is currently $1,050 per buildable sq foot (per Real Deal.com). There are 15,170 acres of land or 660,805,200 sq ft of buildable land in Manhattan (bureau of NY statistics) for a total value of $693,845,460,000.00. This leads to a PV in 1626 of $6,464.25 and more importantly a positive NPV of $6,440.25. Disappointingly, the IRR for this project would only have been a measly 1.56% above the opportunity cost of capital.
Everyone seems to think they can get 10% returns forever, but clearly most wealth doesn’t grow this way over the long term - no assets/investments/families that were worth $1,000 in 1800 are worth $305B today (1,000*1.10^205). Where’s the disconnect?
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November 22, 2005 | Filed under Career, Humor by Kurt
An emerging markets bond trader offered this wisdom during a recruiting event:
VaR is the bastard stepchild of econometrics. Econometrics is an ugly offshoot of economics. Economists are people without enough sex appeal to become actuaries.”
“There’s nothing like watching two guys with fat glasses and bad skin fight over what VaR means.”
Which reminded me of this, from an Emanuel Derman piece in HBR:
I went to work at Goldman Sachs in the field of quantitative finance, the branch of economics concerned with calculating the fair value of securities. At first I was charmed by the resemblance between the papers I now studied and the physics papers I used to read and write. Then, as I read further, I discovered that economists love formal mathematics much more than physicists do. Many economic journals encourage-or even demand-a faux-rigorous style with multitudes of axioms and lemmas in numbers that tend to be inversely proportional to their efficacy in the real world.
Why are economists trained so formally? It makes sense to axiomatize a discipline when the axioms are true (or almost so) and have strong predictive power. That’s the case for Euclidean geometry, for example, as well as Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory, where many valid, useful, and accurate predictions follow from applying the laws of deduction to a few initial assumptions.
But economists seem to have embraced formality and physics envy without the corresponding benefits of accuracy or predictability. In physics. Maxwell’s theory and quantum mechanics allow you to predict the way an electron spins about its own axis inside a hydrogen atom to an accuracy of 12 decimal places. Something that accurate isn’t just a model - it’s a law. In economics, by contrast, there are no laws at all, only models, and you’re immensely lucky if you can predict up from down.
Derman is a physicist who crossed over to help build GS’s quant competency. He published a memoir a few years ago that looks interesting…
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November 9, 2005 | Filed under Photo by Kurt
Preschooler at the National Aquarium in Baltimore
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