Reunion 2001!
Matti Gershenfeld, WG'51, Juggling Home and Work
Charles Benson, WG'96, Tuning in to Interactive TV
Paulette Kish, WG'86, The Snack Sleuth
Ed Wax, WG'61, An Ad Man With a Heart
Julio de Quesada, WG'76, Shaping Citibank in Mexico
A largely sunny spring weekend
greeted the more than 1,000 returning
alumni and guests – an attendance
record – during MBA Reunion 2001,
held May 18-20. Ten MBA reunion years
– WG'96, WG'91, WG'86, WG'81, WG'76,
WG'71, WG'66, WG'61, WG'56, WG'51 –
returned to campus, the third time 10
MBA reunion years have celebrated at
once. Look for people you know enjoying
the weekend in the pages that
follow, and read profiles about alums
from several of these classes. Check out the virtual reunion.
The Juggling Act
Matti Gershenfeld, WG'51, Making it Work at Home and Work
Late-night office meetings, juggling class
and work with babysitters'schedules, long
business trips out of town – all are routine
for many of today's working parents. As
she calmly sips her morning decaf, Matti
Gershenfeld, WG'51, doesn't exactly look
like a weathered pioneer, but she's been
down this road before.
She even missed one son's high school
graduation because she had to lecture in
France, but that's another story.
Gershenfeld, a Philadelphia-based psychologist and author of eight books, has
spent a career redefining her own role as
a working mother and researching how
men and women are shaped by the lightning-fast changes splintering America's
social landscape.
Couples today, she says, are working
longer and that may have a bleak impact at
home. "Mom and Dad don't just work anymore, they have careers now," says
Gershenfeld, president of the International
Council of Psychologists. "People work more
hours, not less, and the result is everybody's
tired and frazzled."
A sincere commitment to 'making it work'
may be the first steppingstone, she says, for
families struggling to be successful at work
and at home. "Look, people change at different stages
in their lives," she says, gently
raising her shoulders. "Marriage can last
only if a couple really wants it to last."
Gershenfeld didn't begin her career
as a social scientist. She was accepted to
Wharton after receiving her bachelor's
degree in economics in 1946 from Penn.
As the only woman in her class at Wharton,
she often felt isolated. It was her time at the
school, she says, that sparked her interest
in studying the role of women in the work-
place. Attending Wharton while working for
the Philadelphia City Planning Commission
meant splitting her time between the two,
making sure to keep the full-time hours she
needed and meet the class requirements.
It also meant dealing with the reality that
some professors were anything but encouraging to female
students. "It was not easy,
let me tell you," she says. Despite a grueling
final oral exam, Gershenfeld graduated
with a degree in government administration
and made up her mind to study ways organizations
could improve internally.
She was 26 and working as a TV host for
a local broadcast called "Citizen in Action"
when she became pregnant with her first
child. "In those days, they wouldn't allow
a pregnant woman on television. But they
didn't want me to leave either, so I did the
whole show sitting behind a desk and no
one knew the difference," she laughs. "I
never thought I'd work again after I had
babies." But she soon realized that as uch
as she loved spending time with her children,
she missed the stimulation of working
outside the home. "There was an attitude
then that you got married, had children and
stayed home and that didn't do it for me.
I don't look at the world like other people.
I'm into changing the world."
Her husband, the late Marvin Gershenfeld, M.D.,
supported her goals and
her ambition, she says. Besides, Matti
Gershenfeld was used to a fast pace and
making the best of challenging circumstances.
"I decided I wanted to be a psychologist
so that I could help people who
are stuck," says Gershenfeld, the mother
of four sons, who enrolled at Temple
University for her doctorate in social psychology
in the early 1960s.
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