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Mary Ellen Overbay WG'70
Alumni Weekend was an especially meaningful experience for
Mary Ellen Overbay, who was in town for both her 35th reunion
and her daughter's graduation. Overbay, an economics
instructor at Seton Hall University, marched in the Alumni
Procession with Elizabeth, WG'05, on Sunday, May 15th.
In fact, many of Overbay's classmates were not in attendance—she originally matriculated with the class of 1971
but ended up graduating in December 1970. While she was
at Wharton, Overbay was president of Wharton Women,
whose total membership included 12 students. "We could
meet in somebody's living room," she said. At the time,
though, she took it for granted that she was the only woman
in most of her classes. She was simply pursuing a subject she
was interested in. Her minority status was no more remarkable
than the fact that her classmates wore jackets and ties to
the lecture hall.
In addition to Wharton Women, Overbay was active
in the International Business Club and held a seat on the
MBA Association. Overbay was also selected to be part of a
Harvard-Wharton exchange committee, where she worked
with 10 students to compare the two business schools' curricula.
At the time, case studies were not used frequently at
Wharton, and the exchange committee was instrumental in
bringing that teaching style to the program. Now case studies
are only one of the teaching tools faculty employ, with
Wharton's team-based projects, Leadership Ventures, and
technology-enabled simulations forming the new wave of
business learning methods.
The then-advanced technology used by Wharton students
in the late 1960s seems primitive by today's standards, but
the skills Overbay learned have stayed useful. "We didn't
have calculators—we used adding machines, while some
of the engineers used sliding rules. One of our requirements
was computer language, so if we wanted to do something
analytic, we wrote our own program," said Overbay. "We
used keypunch cards that could be read by the university system,
and we formatted the information into a spread sheet.
Essentially, we were making our own Excel documents, and
I'm not so sure it wasn't easier. It was time consuming, but
we had more control over what the computer actually did."
Overbay recalls that between classes, students would take
their meals from vending machines and wait in line to use a
single microwave—it was the first one she can remember
ever using.
At Wharton Overbay focused her studies on finance and
international business. After she completed her degree, she
worked for Citibank in corporate lending, and later left to
raise three children.
As a teacher and a mother of a recent MBA graduate,
Overbay has seen the way business
education has evolved.
She believes the current cohort
system at Wharton provides
better opportunities for student
interaction and group work, and
that the exposure to prominent
speakers is an added improvement
to the MBA program. Still,
Overbay knows her daughter
chose Wharton for the same reason
she did 30 years earlier. "It's
an excellent program with top
names. That hasn't changed."
Elisa Ludwig is a Philadelphia-based writer. She also covered the
2004 Alumni Weekend for the
Magazine.
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