("I Wanna Be In Love With You" By Blue Wednesday)
♪ Oh I wanna be in love with you ♪
♪ I wanna be in love with you ♪
♪ I wanna see you getting through ♪
♪ That's what the Lord said to me ♪
♪ I wanna take you by the hand ♪
♪ Try to make you understand ♪
♪ Why you're living in the demon and ♪
♪ Trust me ♪
♪ Well, yeah ♪
♪ Oh I wanna be in love with you ♪
♪ I wanna be in love with you ♪
- Hey guys, my name is Peter Wang Hjemdahl.
I'm a senior at the Wharton School
of the University of Pennsylvania.
I'm studying finance and business analytics,
with a minor in economics.
I wake up usually at nine, ten a.m. in the morning.
I take a couple phone calls.
And then I usually have classes anywhere between
one class or three to four classes on a daily basis,
depends on the day.
After class, usually I grab food with friends,
usually have a couple meetings,
and then, you know, have some calls
with some people in Asia or in the Asia-Pacific.
And go to sleep usually for 12 a.m. or 1 a.m.
So, yeah.
[gentle piano music]
- Tell me a little bit about why you picked Wharton.
- So I picked Wharton, I think, because it's,
a really good balance between,
both a business education but also a liberal arts education.
'Cause the way I think about it,
business is really a means to an end, right?
It's a skill-set, it's a trade,
but you gotta apply it to an end.
And that end is the other side of the Wharton curriculum,
which is like the liberal arts curriculum,
in which you have a lot of flexibility
to kinda pursuing that end.
Whether it be environment, be social justice.
So I think it's a really good kinda good balance
to have that, to get that trade really honed in,
but also apply that to something else.
That's basically why I chose Wharton.
I think the Wharton classes are mostly very skill based,
as oppose to like your minors or
the other things you have going on.
It's very, learning about the world overall.
So I think, that's a great balance.
- So what are the requirements for the Wharton degree?
And like how does that balance
with the liberal arts part of it?
- So on the business side of things, the 50% of it,
- Right.
- A big part of that is core classes,
so you have Accounting 101, Marketing,
Operations Management, Finance 100.
So you really get that core skill-set
of a business person, right?
But also you have a concentration,
which is four classes as opposed to
a major at other schools.
So concentration is only really a semester
worth of classes.
And on the liberal arts side you have
requirements in the fields, like science,
societal, arts and culture, stuff like that.
- So it's not a strictly, you can only study business
if you're at Wharton,
you can really study anything you want,
and you're also getting that skill-set.
- Yeah exactly, well you obviously
have to do a concentration,
you have to require those core classes.
You know, just looking, I approach a problem now,
as opposed to four years ago
in so much more of a systematic way
than I've done previously.
And I think that's because of the rigorous analytical
skill set we build through different classes,
in like both core but also concentration classes,
on the business side of things.
(relaxed hip-hop music)
- [Interviewer] Tell me a little bit about
your extra-curriculars here.
- Greek life is pretty big here at Penn.
I think around 20, 30% of people are in Greek life,
and I'm in a business fraternity,
so it's a co-ed fraternity, both, guys and girls as well,
and people with a passion of business, as well.
And I have this, where my main group of friends are,
we go drinking, we'll go do sports,
we'll go apple picking, last weekend.
I mean there's just a lotta like--
- Nice! - Yeah,
just group of friends basically.
I think even from the professional point of view, there's,
outwards facing versus inwards facing organizations,
for example Wharton Council,
or like Wharton Undergraduate Finance Club.
They organize events for the Penn community,
as opposed to other organizations that are based
at Penn, but do work outside.
And there's a lot of consulting clubs on campus,
in which, there's groups or teams
of student consultants who consult
for start-ups, for companies.
I am part of one of those called
Penn Social Entrepreneurship Movement.
So this semester I'm actually working with
an urban design firm.
- Great! - On the outskirts
of Philadelphia.
So they do environmentally friendly,
design of spaces, creative design of spaces.
So that's one example of something I'm involved in,
but I'm very much involved in the social impact stuff,
but there's so much, I mean, there's everything.
I personally think I look at Penn as a jump-board,
like a springboard to the outside.
I really wanna use my philosophy,
with coming here and being here,
is like using this as a springboard
to jump to professional world, something like that.
So the involvements I do engage in professionally
are the ones that engage with the real world
and there's a lot of opportunities
for that at Penn either, or.
So this area overall is the most historic area of Penn.
That one over there, the College Hall,
is the oldest building we have on campus.
And then behind you have Houston Hall,
which is now a dining hall but also a workspace.
But yeah, this is the oldest part of campus
and I think the prettiest as well.
- Cool let's check it out.
- Cool.
(relaxed jazz-funk music)
- [Interviewer] So we saw you this summer.
Tell me a little about your summer internship.
- So my summer internship was with a consulting firm
that dedicated itself to social impact and development.
So it's called Dalberg Global Development Advisors,
and they work with basically big players
in national development like United Nations, the World Bank,
the United States Agency for International Development,
other big bilateral aid agencies,
to work on projects in developing countries.
And I was basically helping them design
a strategy for community health financing
as well as for the financing of clean cook stoves.
I mean this is what I'm really passionate about.
- Right. - I think the point
of summer internship is
really kinda proving or using it as a test,
a two month test to see whether or not
you like that industry,
I've done that test multiple times
at different places.
So I signed, the offer, I got a return offer
from my summer employer--
- Hey, congrats!
- Thank you, thank you.
So I signed the offer,
but with one year flexibility,
in which I can actually pursue my own company for a year.
So I have a start-up myself.
It's a social enterprise, focusing on
the informal recycling industry in India,
so I'm hoping to pursue that.
So the President of the University of Pennsylvania
is Amy Gutmann and she has a prize called
the President's Innovation Prize.
That's a $150,000 for a graduating Penn senior,
who wants to pursue a social enterprise going forward.
So I'm basically in the running for that prize,
I wanna get that,
and if I get that then I have the money for myself
but also for the company to work on it for a year
and then join Dalberg, which is the firm
I was working at this summer, after that year.
It's not a traditional career path.
I think a lot of people come to Wharton
to do finance, to do corporate business development,
within big multi-national companies,
but I think that with the growing
field of business, there's so many more opportunities.
And I think that there's a space for everybody.
- [Interviewer] So what would you say
has been the most surprising thing about Wharton?
- So one special thing about Penn that is different
than any other Ivy League or any other school in America,
is that I think it's super interdisciplinary.
In the sense that you have a lot of academic programs
that do both things.
For example, there's the M&T program that does,
it's a dual degree between Wharton and
computer science engineering.
There's the Huntsman Program which is between
international studies and Wharton.
So there's a lot of cross-cutting.
I think Penn really provides that place
where you can explore a bunch of things,
but also be good at those things at the same time.
My advice is really kinda if you wanna do something,
pursue business, or something like that,
just if you see something that's interesting,
try to pursue it and try to do it,
and then you'll fail but then you'll learn from it right?
So yeah.
(upbeat jazz-funk music)
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