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Continued from previous page
Wharton was also an eye-opener
for Tom Leavitt, WG'82, who is senior
vice president of Merchants Bank in
Burlington, VT, and president of
Wharton's Vermont Club. Like Barrie,
Leavitt arrived at Wharton the same
year he graduated from the University
of New Hampshire.
Everything about Wharton, smack in
the heart of a big city, was different from
Leavitt's experience in college. At New
Hampshire, Leavitt was the star quarterback
on the football team. At Wharton,
he was just one of hundreds of new students.
All of them were at the top of
their game academically, and more than
a few were prominent: one of Leavitt's
classmates was Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.,
son of the former Philippines leader.
"As I dug into the curriculum, I
could see clearly that, in contrast to
a state university, which had been my
experience in a more provincial region,
Wharton would open the world to me,"
Leavitt says. "The fact that the curriculum
offered international business,
along with the diversity of the student
body, meant that I was not only going
to get exposure to an urban setting but
also a global perspective, and that was
most exciting to me. I was intimidated
by that also."
Hey, kids, let's put on a show
Wharton students have never
succumbed to the temptation of all
work and no play. Charles Seymour,
Jr., WG'75, was a key figure in
bringing out the artistic side of his
classmates. He oversaw a series
of theatrical productions – The
Fantasticks, Jacques Brel Is Alive
and Well and Living in Paris, and
Company – as part of a program
called Wharton and the Arts.
Seymour directed all three plays
and appeared in two of them.
Seymour once sold real estate
in Europe and the U.S. for a living,
but says he really wanted to be an
entrepreneur in
a field he loves.
"I'm the
fourth generation
of
my family to
work in the
same community
theater
[the Players
Club in Swarthmore, PA]," says
Seymour, the owner of Cloche d'Or
Productions in Wallingford, PA, a
film, video and still-photography
company. "I'm not necessarily a guy
who's going to be on the cover of a
magazine as a great corporate leader."
While at Wharton, Seymour says
people frequently asked him how he
found time for both theater and his
rigorous coursework. "I would say,
'How do you find time to breathe?'
It is what you need to keep going,"
he says.
Seymour's productions are considered
by many to have laid the foundation
for the Wharton Follies, which
debuted in 1976 and recently
celebrated its silver anniversary.
This year, the musical review drew
more than 2,200 audience members
at performances in Philadelphia
and New York.
An international
perspective
"In the late 1960s, most Wharton students
were interested in finance and
accounting," says Bellace. "And there
always were people who were going
into their parents' business."
Nowadays, though, "the School is so
international, both MBA and undergraduate,"
Bellace says. "It's just
changed dramatically. The students,
in being interested in what's going on
in whole world, compel the faculty
to be much broader. One of my students
asked me, 'How would this
policy work in
Morocco?'"
Tien Shang (Sam) Chang, WG'77,
was here during the transition years
between a domestically oriented
Wharton and today's global flavor.
A finance major, he saw the need for
more international emphasis in the
business community at large while
working as an investment banker in
New York in the 1980s. Conducting
financial analysis of loans being made
in Mexico and Brazil, he advised that
there was no way those loans would
be paid back. Despite his sound
analysis, the company's competitors
were investing in the region, and so it,
too, blindly joined the fray, to disastrous
results. Around the same time
in 1983, Wharton founded the Joseph
H. Lauder Institute of Management
and International Studies and initiated
the joint MBA/MA in international
relations. "Wharton has moved in
the right direction," says Chang, now
based in Moraga, CA, with CYHT
Corp. "Business leaders now need to
apply international perspectives to
every transaction."
"I think the curriculum was
extremely international," says Gautam
Chand, WG'92, chairman and CEO
of Instanex Capital Consultants in
Mumbai (Bombay), India, a financial
services consultancy that owns the
Skindia GDR Index, a depositary
receipt index. "I don't remember a
single day when I felt what I was
learning was not applicable in other
parts of the world."
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