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SATs and GMATs
By Robbie Shell
Yes, their test scores are terrific, but this year's entering
students have also raised money for a school in India, managed an
orchestra and won an international math olympiad. Meet some members
of W'02 and WG'00
Interested in BMX racing? Ichthyology research? Medieval literature? Health
care reform in Kenya? We know people who are, and they can be found among
members of the undergraduate class of W’02 and the MBA class of WG’00.
Statistics tell us that the 459 entering Wharton undergraduates had an average
SAT score of 1426, that 38 percent are women and that they were chosen from an
applicant pool of 3,855. The 765-member first-year MBA class had an average
GMAT score of 678; 32 percent are international; and 30 percent say they want to
major in finance, 20 percent in entrepreneurial management. Behind statistics
like these are individuals who have brought with them an intriguing array of
experiences and accomplishments, and above all, a focus on excellence. Meet
some of the newer faces on campus.
Class of W'02
Pranav Gupta
Pranav Gupta’s high school
years were busy. Some highlights:
He was student director of
In-site, an interactive online
teen magazine run jointly by
his high school — the Academy
for the Advancement of
Science and Technology —
and a Bergen County, N.J.,
newspaper called The Record. As director, he managed a
team of 60 students from the Academy and 100 students
from other schools, helped in the feature magazine’s weekly
production and took part in a conference, attended by
newspaper executives from around the country, on how to
manage electronic media.
Under the auspices of his school’s biology department he
conducted two ichthyology research projects. The first one
— which studied the effects of sound on dopamine levels in
the brains of fish and how that relates to Parkinson’s Disease
— was reported on two years ago by the New York Times.
And last year he wrote a proposal — which eventually generated
a donation of $4,800 — to establish a school for children
working in the stone quarries of Harayana, a state in India. The
money will be used to rent a school room, hire a teacher, provide
food and give incentives to children who attend. Gupta,
a native of India who moved with his family to the U.S. in
1984, visited a similar school last summer in New Delhi.
He is in the middle of his freshman year in the Jerome
Fisher Program in Management & Technology, has joined the
Student Committee on Undergraduate Education (SCUE)
and works part-time with the School of Arts and Sciences’
Workstation Services division. “Although I got a lot of satisfaction
out of doing research in high school, the results
can’t really be used for the immediate benefit of people,” he
says, explaining his decision to attend Wharton. “You don’t
see the effects of your research for years to come. In engineering
and business, the knowledge you gain can be
immediately applied to something useful.”
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