My Story: From Hedge Fund To Apple

The Wharton School

Today, I am very glad to say that it was one of the best risks I have ever taken. I wanted to go to a school where I could forge bonds within a strong community that would last throughout my life and also take on rigorous academic coursework. I didn’t have a full understanding of the sense of community or of how rigorous the coursework would be. Now, I’m the biggest Wharton cheerleader because I believe in the school.

Being involved in Wharton’s People Analytics Conference has been so fulfilling. It was founded last year by my classmate, Lisa Donchak, and I joined her team as the sponsorship chair. I didn’t know exactly what I was doing, but I designed a strategy and got the conference funded with the help of our two faculty advisors, Cade Massey and Adam Grant. The inaugural event brought together 250 of the leading minds in the field of People Analytics – the data driven approach to managing, motivating, hiring, attrition and putting people in optimal roles. Think “Moneyball” for business.

This year, I stepped in as conference chair and my team and I grew the event to 450 people structured as a two-day event with a bunch of press at the Ritz Carlton. My favorite memory of business school was the moment right before I walked on stage to give the opening remarks. I looked out onto the audience that included people like Laszlo Bock from Google, Jeff Ma of the famous MIT Blackjack Team, former NBA star Shane Battier, author Dan Pink, and Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan. All these incredible people dedicated two days of their lives to attend this conference that we, a bunch of twenty-something MBAs, had put together. It’s very rewarding to think that our work has put Wharton at the forefront of the people analytics movement. We’ve created something over two years that will be intertwined with the Wharton brand for many years to come.

[As far as my long-term professional goals], I’ll answer this vaguely because of what I said before – it’s impossible to fully understand what a career or job is really like until you are actually doing it. What I do know is that I want my career to excite me every day and to allow me to think about meaningful and challenging solutions. I’m excited to go to work at Apple for two reasons. First, the concentration of smart people is incredibly high. It was amazing how great everyone seemed. And second, well, it’s best exemplified by an experience when my boss came in one morning during my internship. He said, “Today is a great day. We have a potential problem. We have an earnings report in a couple days and I don’t know the solution to the problem, and that’s ok. It’s actually good because we have a chance to learn something new!” If that would have happened in a finance firm, people would be yelling at each other and pulling their hair out.

[What would I tell future applicants to Wharton?] I would tell them that it is more of a mentality – never sacrifice yourself or your health for your job. Remember that you only get to do this whole life thing once, so make sure you don’t wake up at 45 or 60, only to realize that you spent the best years of your life in an office toiling away while someone was yelling at you. You must be courageous and think hard about what you want your life to look like.

I think my greatest piece of advice would be to have the guts to take “smart” risks in terms of the lifestyle you decide to pursue.

Overall, my time at Wharton has been the best two years of my life. Looking at my life before and after is night and day. The students are humble and hungry. They’re good people and good friends. When I meet alumni, we have a high level of respect for each other just for being Wharton alums without knowing anything else.

DON’T MISS: CLASS OF 2015: WORLD’S BEST-AND-BRIGHTEST MBAs