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

Guest Post: Three's a Crowd?

Just call me BadDancer - Tiny Dancer's 'partner'

Nine months ago, when Wifey got into Wharton, I had a bunch of comments thrown my way by friends and family that gave me pause:

From my brother - "Ohhhh, now you'll have a Sugar Momma"
My friends - "You going to be a stay at home Dad?"
My grandmother - "What about grandkids? I'm not going to be around forever"
My parents - "How are you going to pay for this???"

While TinyD's post-Wharton salary would certainly surpass mine, I was totally cool not being the breadwinner. I also liked the thought of stay at home Husband, raising TinyDancer, Jr., with days full of watching SportsCenter, teaching TinyDancer, Jr. the minutia of a curve ball and learning to cook. (Just replace Sports Center with Oprah and I figured that's what stay at home Mom's do).

But as the start of pre-term at Wharton drew near and I learned more about our next 2 years of B-School, I got a little nervous. Move from our 2,000 sq ft house into an 850 sq ft apartment in Center City, full days of classes, hours and hours of group work and studying, tons of extracurricular clubs, interviewing for internships and full-time jobs, guest speakers, learning team retreat, winter break global treks, etc. etc, etc.

Holy crap. When again was I supposed to see my wife? Would she ever be home for dinner? How many frozen burritos could I possibly take? Would I be included in any of this stuff or would I want to be involved? How in the hell would we be able to afford $150G's in just two years??? It was a little scary.

I was beginning to think that three's a crowd. Wifey and I had a great life together and Wharton was going to be the third wheel. Yeah, long term benefits aside...the next two years might really suck and we'd be in major debt to boot. Then after graduation, Wifey would get some crazy cool job and we'd be up and moving again to a far away place and I'd just be along for the ride. Maybe I'd be the third wheel since she'd be spending most of her time with Wharton.

Now don't get me wrong, TinyD and I talked about this quite a bit. She told me it wasn't going to be that bad, she'd try and come home and make dinner, I could be involved in some of the fun stuff and she wanted to stay near Philly after graduation. I also was told about the Wharton Partner's Club and I could make friends with some of the other 'partners' (that word gives me chills, probably the subject of a future guest post if TinyD lets me write again). But going into pre-term, I wasn't convinced.

Well, I can say, Wharton passed the 1st test. I know pre-term is much less of a time commitment than the 1st Semester, but I had an absolute blast. TinyD worked really hard, but we went out and partied with her classmates ALOT, met some great people, did some really fun activities and loved living in the city. Honestly, I haven't drank this much or stayed up this late since College...and overall, it was great. It actually got to the point where I needed Friday or Saturday night to recover from parties from Tuesday through Thursday.

I'm sure my opinion would be different if I was a partner moving to Philly from far away or internationally, but not all that much.

To all potential future Wharton husbands - don't spend too much time feeling bad for yourselves that your wives are smarter, going to be more successful, etc. Enjoy the next two years for all that they are...and try and meet a really smart Wharton grad to hook you up with a sweet job and maybe Philadelphia Eagles club box seats.

Sidenote - I do need to start going to the gym. I'm going to get a major beer gut unless I start working off the extra liquid carbs.