Investment Banker Wins $851,000 in MBA Scholarships… But Turns Them All Down for Wharton!
- 14 hours ago
- 20 min read
Mario B spent years building a career in banking before deciding it was time to go back to school. With a background in finance and a stint running his family business, he knew exactly what he wanted from an MBA.
So, Mario applied to 15 schools, secured over $850,000 in scholarship offers, and ultimately chose to turn down a full-ride to attend Wharton. Now a first-year MBA, he's already locked in a summer internship at Bank of America Merrill Lynch on the leveraged finance team.
We sat down with Mario to talk about what Wharton is really like on the inside, how the investment banking recruiting process works from campus, and what it means to bet on yourself when a full scholarship is sitting on the table.
Watch the full interview below.
Q: How has your first year of the MBA at Wharton been?
Mario: You always hear that the MBA is a marathon, not a sprint. But at Wharton, it's a marathon and a sprint at the same time! It’s being engaged on all thrusters all the time. It's everything from the social piece – clubs, travel, parties – all the things that you would expect from the MBA process, but it's also very academically rigorous. And then you also have the third component, which is the recruiting piece, which takes a lot of time and is very engaging. You get access to a lot of different companies and people at the top of their fields.
Those three things keep me very involved on campus. It's been a lot, but it's been very rewarding.
Q: Is the Wharton MBA curriculum as difficult as people expect?
Mario: When I started going to all the different campuses I’d been admitted to, I asked the students I was meeting this same question. A lot of people told me that it's not really that difficult. They were considering the MBA from a more social angle.
So, it was a surprise when I started at school in Fall last year, and I found that it was very academically rigorous. You have to show up on campus. There are certain metrics that you have to fulfill from a participation-grading standpoint. At Wharton, we have core classes during the first year, and then we start getting into electives in the spring semester and second year.
It’s a change from what MBAs have done in the past. Friends at Columbia and NYU have also had the same perspective from their experience currently, versus what they heard from the previous years.
Sam: People say the hard part's getting in. But you're saying it's hard when you're on the program too!
Mario: Well, yeah, from a work standpoint, the perspective for most MBAs is that the focus should be on making networking connections, and then growing as a professional. That means your grades don’t necessarily have to be stellar, so we have grade non-disclosure at Wharton. It's a policy that we, as a class, vote on every year. This year, again, we voted for grade non-disclosure. The perspective there is that if we focus on more of the other things rather than just the grade, we will get the learning to grow as professionals, and not overextend ourselves.
Part of the idea of stretching yourself in the Wharton community is putting yourself in events or in circumstances that you might not be fully comfortable with. But they allow you to just grow as a professional. So, for instance, if you didn't know anything about AI or tech, you can take a class on Python, or you can take a class on R, or other statistics or quantitative-focused heavy classes.
Sam: Because you're not worried about having a bad grade that's going to impact you further down the line.
Mario: Correct. For example, in law school, the grades in your first semester (L1) are important to determine if you're going to get a summer internship. And so people really hunker down and study for that. That doesn't mean that you're not going to study at the MBA level, but it means you can take some risks and really put yourself out there. For instance, if you don't know anything about coding, you can go into a class from zero, then build up that experience and skills to get that stretch experience down the line.
Q: Is Wharton’s MBA curriculum as finance-focused as people make out?
Mario: In some ways it is, based on the alumni, speakers, and organizations that we get on campus. Wharton is probably one of the premier schools in terms of attracting PE and investment banks to engage with us, so that's great.
But there is also opportunity for other subgroups within the MBA community. There is a big focus on entrepreneurship and tech. From the class perspective, there is a focus on quantitative applications, similar to other MBAs, like statistics and microeconomics. The marketing classes are also very quant-heavy or quant-focused. That doesn't mean GRE or GMAT level math. It's more about applying statistical concepts of looking at real-world data, which is something I appreciate and like! Because our cases are not just hypotheticals or management discussions on the qualitative aspect of things, but analyzing data and applying statistical concepts into what you think you could do, and how you would test it.
That's maybe where the idea that it's a quant-heavy school comes from. But having been a professional prior to coming to school, I can see that it's honestly the way things are done out there in the workforce — taking data and then getting actionable solutions from it.
Sam: This shift towards becoming more data-driven and analytical is something we’re seeing a lot of in Wharton’s marketing material.
Mario: It really is happening. I can't say how much more versus other schools — I only have this experience — but one thing I've noticed this year is the applicability of how much that data analytics piece is being angled towards the AI boom, and how to use AI to analyze different sets of data.
In the past, for instance, I had a marketing class that applied marketing dynamics. This semester, the professor said he would have taught us how to code on R or different statistical software to analyze the data. Nowadays, he just shows us how to prompt the AI and get the output, with the basic understanding of what you're asking and looking for. It’s about how you can use these AI agents to do a lot of the work for you, and how you can verify that data. There definitely is a big focus on improving the quant-heavy focus of the MBA with AI and different technologies.
Q. How is the Wharton MBA program adapting to a world of AI?
Mario: We got a major this year that's all about AI, “AI for Business”, and a lot of the classes, even if they're not AI-related, are incorporating AI elements. Even within my recruiting this past semester, a lot of the employers were asking about how I use AI, how I prompt AI, how I see it impacting the business.
I see the value-add of going into an MBA nowadays a little like in the 2000s, when there was a tech boom. From the workforce perspective, a lot of managers are looking at AI and thinking: how can we apply it into our business? And being an MBA coming into the workforce now, that's what I feel a lot of recruiters are looking for — that know-how and capacity to come in as an employee and readjust their work processes into enabling or enhancing AI applicability.
Sam: You could make the argument that if an MBA successfully positions you for an AI world, then it's the best investment of your career.
Mario: Yeah, it is, but I'll also be very sober and say there's obviously some level of perceived risk that some jobs won't be there because of AI. Personally, that’s why I'm investing in my MBA at the moment. I want to be able to review and repurpose myself for this change that's inevitably coming.
Q: What's the MBA experience like outside of class? I've heard that Wharton has quite a strong pub tradition, for example. Is that true?
Mario: Yeah, it is extremely social, and that hasn't changed at all. The class size is bigger than some other MBAs, with around 900 people in each class. So you have a lot of chances to meet different people and make connections through social events, club organizations, and travel as well. We go to class from Monday to Thursday, so a lot of people travel over the weekend, or just have more social events. It's super active all the time. We use campus groups, and you can see events every week, or even everyday, for different things.
Q: There's Fight Night happening tomorrow. Tell me about that.
Mario: Each school has its own traditions and its own set of particular events.
At Wharton, I would say two things that set it apart are hockey — we have a hockey beer league, and a lot of students participate in that throughout the whole year (I'm a participant) — and then Fight Night, which is a unique, annual event.
It's a charitable fundraiser where MBA students that are part of a Boxing Club box against students from the UPenn graduate community. That might be the law school, the medicine school, or just the graduate school in general. Everybody wears black tux at the event, and then we have a fun after-party. It'll be my first year attending tomorrow!
Edit: Mario sent us this photo after the event!
And the event itself is on YouTube here.
Q: Have you been involved in any Wharton Leadership Ventures?
Mario: We have a department called the McNulty Leadership Venture department that hosts varying activities for students.
For anyone that's not heard of them, the Wharton Leadership Ventures include Treks, where beyond the external and physical nature of it, the purpose is to develop your leadership skills out in the open.
I'm scheduled to participate in what they call an Intensive in the next few weeks. My intensive is a marine training core course in Quantico. There's another one where the Fire Department of New York does a similar training.
Some of the other leadership ventures — continuing this idea of the stretch experience — place you in environments where you're not necessarily an expert or can control every single aspect of it. The goal is to get from point A to point B, and they assess how you lead your whole Venture team towards that goal. At the end, you have a brief discussion with your team about what went wrong, what went right, and get feedback on that. So it's really leadership training at the extreme. They go to great places like Patagonia, some involve sailing, some are in the Atacama Desert. There's even one in Antarctica that happens every other year.
Sam: Are they quite expensive?
Mario: They can be expensive, but it depends on the location. It is extra to the MBA program, so that's important to consider from a budgeting standpoint, alongside other activities like trips and club events.
But I think they're worth it in terms of what you gain from it. Every second-year I know has done it. They could be quite gruesome for some people given the physical activity, but everybody has had a very positive experience. It's a true differentiator of the school.
Now, having said that, there are other ways to participate in these outdoor activities at a cheaper price tag. You could explore the Outdoors club which many of these treks, like, for example, scaling Kilimanjaro or going to Patagonia.
Q: Wharton has a satellite campus in San Francisco. Have you heard of anyone going? What's the story there?
Mario: In San Francisco, there is naturally a lot of tech-focused recruiting or tech-focused coursework. You can apply for a full semester there.
For me, it doesn't make a lot of sense. My objective is not really moving to the West Coast. But I do know of people that have done it. Like the dual track MBAs like Lauder+MBA or HCM+MBA, or the JDMA that have really cohesive, close-knit communities, the San Francisco semester cohort also tends to mesh and form a quite unique group.
Having said that, there are other opportunities to go to the San Francisco campus, like block week courses that happen during the Fall break and the Spring break where you have the option to take a week-long intensive course at the San Francisco campus.
Q: What about being in Philadelphia generally? How has it been studying, living, and recruiting out of Philly?
Mario: I lived in New York for a long time in my career. But I never lived in Philly. I found the city to be quite unique and charming, and the food scene is great here. As a student, not to diss any of the New York schools, one thing that concerned me was the cost of living, especially if I had to attend school in New York. But as a student at Wharton, everything is very affordable in Philly and more generally, Chicago. I love the city.
One thing that has been quite helpful has been on the recruiting side of things. The proximity to New York, without being in New York, has been quite helpful. I recruited for investment banking and had to go back and forth to New York a lot, so I was taking the Amtrak, which takes an hour and a half. If I had been in the Midwest, it would have been very hard to be taking 2-3 hour plane rides in and out of New York, and then having to get a hotel. That's an extra cost and time commitment that I wasn't really thinking about when I was making my selection for schools, but I'm really glad that it ended up being Philly. The West Coast would have been insane.
As a plug for anybody going into Wharton, there are passes that you can get on Amtrak: 10 passes for 2 months for a flat fare. That ended up being my best friend.
Q: How many times would you estimate you went from Philly to New York to secure your MBA internship?
Mario: It was a lot, probably 25-plus trips back and forth. The recruiting process is quite intense. Officially, you start in October, and it runs all the way to December. Some schools do start earlier.
At Wharton, we have a focused period where we're protected from companies contacting us from August to October, so we can focus on building community and our coursework. Starting October, it's open season. We start going to information sessions, which is a fancy way of saying the banks or companies come on campus and talk to us about current opportunities and their culture.
After that, you start filling in interest forms and applying to get coffee chats, which — to my surprise — there's no coffee involved. It's just talking to people for 20-30 minutes on informational interviews, where you're getting more information from them, and they're getting to meet and know you.
One to two weeks after that, you start going to New York every single week. We only have classes on Friday, so I was there every weekend, either for more coffee chats or for events that the firms are hosting for us as Wharton students or as part of a larger MBA event with different schools. It's quite intense.
Q: How many companies would you typically apply to in the finance world as an MBA student?
Mario: I'd say it was 15-20 companies that came to campus. I applied to all of them initially, just to get those coffee chats in. From there, you start getting more and more funneled, and meeting more with the teams that connect best with.
So I started with those 15-20 companies, initially applying for the general MBA internship role and not anything team-specific or product-specific. Those companies know from a back-end HR recruiting perspective that you're coming in from Wharton, so it is dependent on the school. There are other opportunities that I was interested in – 5 or 6 banks that didn't come on campus – so I applied from outside of our normal bullpen of companies.
When you start getting more and more involved with the teams and the specific groups within the banks, you continue the process with them. That includes networking events where you go to New York or they come to Philly. The bank or group hosts you, and you make more connections with the different MDs, associates, and analysts on the team.
Q: What does the next part of the MBA recruitment interview process look like?
Mario: From October to December, there is a series of cuts from these informational interviews. It can get quite despairing, because you might have started with 15, and then by December, when the actual hard part begins — the interview process — you might have 2 or 3 or 4 banks, depending on how successful you were during the process.
So it is quite nerve-wracking as the process starts getting to the point where you get the final interview. The final interview will be very binary on how you do, because that's more of a hard skills test.
To put it in perspective: you start in October, go through coffee chats, networking events, and more soft skill buildup, up to December. And then in December, you actually get invited into the first round interview process.
The first round interviews happen in early to mid-December. If you're successful in that technical, formal interview (which might be just a single round or it could be multiple rounds depending on the bank and the team), you get an invite to the Super Day process.
The Super Day process at Wharton works like this: when we come back from break for the January spring semester, we have a concentrated recruiting timeline of about a week, which is quite intense. In that week, you fit all the formal Superday interviews that you got from all the banks. So it could be a full week of back-to-back interviews with different companies in the beginning of January to secure your summer internship.
Sam: When do you find out?
Mario: I found out in mid-January.
Q: You got an internship at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Are you going to be rotating at all? What does an MBA internship at a bank look like?
Mario: It really depends on the bank. Some banks have rotational-like general program internships where you're coming in as an intern and you can be staffed in many different groups, depending on what the need is. So you might end up working in an industrials case, and then you might work with the financial institutions group during that same internship.
It’s typically based on how the bank runs its analyst and associate program. They don't necessarily align an associate with a specific team for the first year or year-and-half. That's not the case everywhere. Banks like Jefferies and Centerview — I may be wrong — have that model.
For the majority of the other banks like BoA, JP Morgan, Goldman, Citi, you recruit specifically for the team that you want to work in, whether that is a product group or a coverage group, from October to December, which is when you'll meet that team. That's the team that extends you an invitation to interview, and then the offer if you're successful.
Sam: Which team are you going to be part of?
Mario: I'm going to be in the leveraged finance team.
Sam: Could you explain broadly what that means to people who are coming into this from a pre-MBA background?
Mario: Sure. It's a capital markets group within banking. The quickest way to describe it: it's a team that provides debt financing for high-yield companies, which are companies more on the speculative grade of things. It’s a little bit riskier than full investment grade.
What it's been mostly used for over the past few decades is leveraged buyout transactions, where private equity companies want to tack on debt in order to acquire target companies. It's also syndicating some of those loans afterwards. Syndicating just means selling parts of the loan out to investors on the debt side of things.
Q: It sounds like it's been a difficult job market out there at the moment for MBA graduates. What's your read of that?
Mario: I think it is difficult. And not just at Wharton.
Anecdotally, what I've heard from my team and friends in other schools throughout the Northeast is that it's been harder for the normal banking and consulting tracks this year versus last year. It feels like only around 60% of internship offers were given out — these are not official numbers, just my pulse on the situation — versus what was given out last year.
It also feels like more people at Wharton were interested in recruiting for banking this year. For banking and consulting, we follow the more “structured” recruiting process, which happens as soon as you're on campus, and even before. The consulting process is very similar in terms of timeline to what I discussed for banking — from September to December, you're meeting with companies, and then you have your interview in January.
Traditionally, I feel like people that were more open to risk, would not go through this process at the beginning of the school year. They would wait for just-in-time recruiting, which happens in Spring, or look to do their own entrepreneurial venture. But this year, it's interesting that a lot of people, relative to last year, decided to do these two recruiting tracks. Maybe they’re looking more for safety and to lock in an internship.
There's still a lot of people involved in entrepreneurship, especially entrepreneurship through acquisition. But relative to prior years, it's waned off a little bit as people see more risk in the labor market post-MBA.
Sam: So more people are applying to the structured programs — banking and consulting in particular — because they want to ideally lock something in earlier in their MBA. And if that doesn’t work out, they follow the sort of DIY recruiting path. As a result, maybe the proportion of people who are getting offers in those early-stage pipeline recruiting processes is maybe down a bit.
Mario: Yeah, 100%, that is the case. And it is important — an extra component there is that just-in-time recruiting, which is PEs, private equities, tech, marketing, or general corporate development programs — they tend to happen when companies either are smaller in size or have less of a formal, structured process for interns. They recruit in March or April. Those processes, from my understanding, have not converted into full-time offers in the same degree as consulting and banking have. So that's another perspective on risk there.
Q: If you were to ballpark it, what proportion of people in consulting and banking internships convert their internships to full-time offers?
Mario: My understanding, having done banking prior to coming to Wharton and then working my family business for a little bit, is that when you get that offer, there is a genuine headcount projection from the company. If you network and perform well enough in the internship, you probably will get a return offer. Obviously nothing is safe or secure, ever. But there is a path to full-time offers in consulting and in banking.
It's not necessarily the case if you're interning in other types of roles, where they might just be looking for highly specialized or highly skilled labor for a 10-week period over the summer, and then they'll assess again if they have a need come next year.
Q: You're part of the Toigo Foundation and Management Leaders of Tomorrow. How have these played into your job hunt and MBA recruiting process?
Mario: They're two great organizations. Toigo is more on the finance side of things, and MLT is also finance, but it could also be consulting and generally tech as well.
I got admitted in Round 2, so there was a 4-6 month period where I’d done all this work, got admitted, and then nothing happened until August, a sort of a dead no-man's land in that time. That was when I found these two organizations that I knew people had participated in and benefitted from, so I applied and joined.
I'm very happy with the network and the opportunity that they provided for me. It's really about being able to tap into that pre-MBA market.
MLT has a conference (that they did in Washington prior to the start of my MBA), where they have a job fair. You can meet with consulting firms, banking firms, or general management firms to see if you can do a pre-MBA internship. I didn't end up doing any pre-MBA internships. There was a big shift from about 2 years ago with most of these incentives or programs being focused towards diversity hires, so a lot of banks, for instance, didn't participate anymore. Most consulting firms and MBBs were still there, and some of the general management companies as well, but there was a slight waning off in terms of that pre-MBA opportunity.
Those programs still exist, and if you qualify for those — either you're a woman, or you're a diversity hire, or you're associated with championing diversity opportunities — you can still apply. They give you training and coaching, and you get an opportunity to meet and network with people before school. I got the opportunity to not just meet people that were going to Wharton, but people that were going to other MBAs as well.
Q: You applied with the Consortium. Can you tell me about that application process, and whether you found the economies of scale that the Consortium promises to applicants?
Mario: The Consortium was a great opportunity that I found through a referral that had done the Consortium prior to their own MBA.
The mission of the Consortium is to champion access to the job market and higher education for diverse candidates or people pushing diversity in general terms. So it made a lot of sense for me. When I looked at the member organizations, a lot of them were the schools I wanted to go to. There were only 3 schools that I had to apply outside of the Consortium.
It turned out to be extremely beneficial for me. The economies of scale were there.
For a Consortium application, you have to do 3 essays specific to the Consortium — when I applied, these were about prior, during, and post your MBA: how do you intend to help them with their mission of championing diversity in the workforce, during the MBA process, and after.
It also allows you to use the same biographical information, educational history, work history, all of the information you have to fill again and again throughout your many different applications, just one time.
But the most important thing for me was my recommenders. When I sent the letters of recommendation, I really didn't want to have to send 7-10 different links to my recommenders, or ask multiple different recommenders. The benefit of applying through the Consortium was that they could submit just one, and it would serve for all the member schools. That was the most significant part of the economies of scale.
There are still school-specific essays you have to build. It’s not as though you can only write the 3 Consortium-specific essays and submit one letter of recommendation. But it allowed me to be super quick and focus more time on the more important aspect of the application process, which was letting myself come through in the school-specific essays.
Sam: I think one of your many scholarships was linked to Consortium as well.
Mario: Yeah, I'm not sure how the scholarship money is allocated by the schools, but there was definitely mention of a fellowship being granted to me when I got accepted into some of the schools, specifically tied into the Consortium. So I think that it definitely helped in terms of scholarship money.
Q: You ended up with $851,200 in total MBA scholarship money. How did you end up with that offer, and how much actually translated into your tuition bills?
Mario: I'll give you the breakdown in terms of the applications. I applied to 12 schools through the Consortium, and 3 schools outside of the Consortium.
Sam: So, 15 schools in total. That's the first thing; how do you get a lot of scholarship money? One: apply to a lot of schools.
Mario: Yeah, it helps. Out of those 15, I got 11 interview offers, and 2 waitlists. I eventually got 9 acceptances, with 8 offers for scholarship, and some of them were tied to Consortium fellowship offers.
In hindsight, when these offers were coming through, it was quite nerve-wracking. Prior to getting the interviews, I had had a couple rejections without interview invites, and I thought it was looking bad. But then they started flowing through from March to April. Given that the scholarships are merit-based, when you get the acceptance, you also get the information on the scholarship amount. I was fortunate enough to have all these scholarship offers. I think they were very much tied to that DEI effort and the signal that my Consortium application was sending through, and I'm very grateful for that.
In some instances, I got to negotiate a little bit at the end, when I had received all my acceptances. I made a shortlist of where I was really interested in going. I had an honest discussion with the admissions officers at 2-3 schools about the monetary package, both from a financial and merit standpoint, to potentially up the amount, given that I had received full tuition offers from some of the other schools.
To your question of how much that translated into the actual bill at the MBA — zero of it translated! The only school I didn't receive anything for was Wharton. It's unfortunate that none of it translated into the final bill, but I do not regret my decision.
Sam: While the M7 schools in general are open to negotiating to some degree — we’ve seen 50-100K come out of scholarship negotiations — but recently, Wharton has not been budging.
For those watching, if scholarship is a really big focus, Mario's story is really important. Diversify your applications. Sure, include those really high-ranked, competitive schools, but if you’re really dependent on scholarship money, diversify. Mario turned down a full-ride scholarship and went to Wharton. That is a big decision that a lot of people might not have made.
Q: Do you think you made the right decision?
Mario: I think I did. Obviously it'll depend on how things play out, and I can't see 20 years into the future, but I really like the program and the opportunities and access the school has given me to people at the top of their career, not only within finance, but in many different fields.
At the end of the day, to be very frank, most schools will offer people that connection and community, and it will depend on your personality. So go with your gut feeling of where you feel like you'll fit in and build that network, because that's the key aspect of the whole MBA process.
For me, it was Wharton. I'm very glad with the community I've built. Has it been worth it? We'll see. I've certainly learned a lot and have been able to get my internship for the summer. Maybe I would have been able to learn these things or join Bank of America without the MBA. But the long-term effects and the network that I'm building right now would not have been possible without the MBA. Let's talk in 40 years.
Sam: I'll hold you to that. We’ll have an interview on Sam Weeks Consulting when we're both in our 60s!
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