Guest Post: Bad Dancer gives it the old college try

In my 1st, and only, post, I talked about how much fun pre-term was and how I was getting fat from drinking so much beer. Well, needless to say, 1st semester wasn’t quite the same party as pre-term, at least for her.

Now don’t get me wrong, the social scene at Wharton has been fantastic - between half-dressed pub crawls, happy hours, Thursday night parties and the Wharton Prom (at least I called it that), I had a great time. The major difference was how freakin’ hard Tiny worked, day-in and day-out. Not only was the rigor of schoolwork quite overwhelming, but between extracurriculars (Tiny has joined an MBA record 38 clubs), applications for internships, a variety of other random activities…man she worked her a$% off.

For example, Tiny and I are die-hard Phillies fans and we’ve been waiting for a season like this past one for almost 30 years. During our World Series run in October, it took everything in her power to take a 3 hour break from studying to watch each game. Tiny was even studying at a local bar before game 3, with dozens of other hammered Phillies fans around screaming and yelling and carrying-on! (note: she did take a few extra hours off to drink champagne on Broad Street when we won).

So, let’s get to me. Even though Tiny was working herself into a frenzy, I had a great 4 months. I played football with her Cohort and felt really welcomed by her classmates, we went to some great parties, had couples dinners with a lot of really interesting old, married people like ourselves, and I even started hanging out with a few of Tiny’s friends, even while she was home studying.

My experience was so good, I decided to apply. Last Wednesday, I hit submit and sent in my application for Fall 2009 admittance. Of all the great things I witnessed about Wharton these past few months, I’m not totally sure what made me decide to apply. Of all the excellent aspects of Wharton I’ve seen, #1 has to be the quality of people that Tiny is in school with. The amazing variety of personalities and diverse backgrounds, the good nature and intense bonding between classmates and how ridiculously brilliant most of them are, were all inspiring reasons to try and be a part of that culture (disclaimer: I am geographically challenged since Tiny will be in Philly for at least 1.5 more years and our long term plans are to stay in Philly, I couldn’t exactly explore the similarities of other great programs).

Now unfortunately, my GMAT score is nowhere near what Tiny’s was and falls slightly outside the Wharton middle-80th percent. Maybe I have a 5, 10, 15% chance of getting in? But I’m not worried – If I get in, amazing. If not, I’ll still get to share another year and change at Wharton with wifey and personally get a ton out of it.

By the way, the other reason I want to get in is so I can go on the Antarctica trek. I don’t give a crap about Finance, I want to hike across our southern pole and bring home a penguin as a pet. I’m sure it’d do well in the bathtub of our Center City apartment