Life at Wharton is in perpetual motion, from first-years just arriving at their home in Philadelphia for the first time to graduating seniors finishing up their last remaining classes.
For those of us who remain behind, life post-graduation may seem mysterious, with freshly minted Wharton alumni disappearing into a vast expanse of unknowns. We caught up with three alumni previously featured in student profiles, asking about what has changed (and what hasn’t) since their last steps on Locust Walk, coffee at Pret, and lectures in Steinberg-Dietrich Hall.
Jake of All Trades
Jake Rodin, W’23, no longer needs the winter coat he first bought for Penn.
Four years ago, we explored how the Arizona native adapted to the Philadelphia cold and found community through serving as a Wharton Undergraduate Cohorts co-chair and Riepe College House residential advisor.
Today, Rodin has returned to the dry heat of Arizona. First, he joined Axon, a leading public-safety technology company headquartered in northern Scottsdale, and now settling in with a private equity startup focused primarily on local real estate.
While he may no longer be cow cutting or heading to the Montana mountain ranges, the former College House RA still draws heavily from his formative experiences deep in the Wild West.
“I loved feeling like the world was yours,” Rodin recalls. “You take [yourself] wherever you want. And I think that definitely lends itself more to the startup side, where the work that we’re doing now is directly going to influence how the firm ends up.”
Like the pioneers first arriving in the remote Western territories, Rodin sees himself as a jack of all trades, capable of nuanced insights into finance, operations, marketing, accounting, and ethics, thanks to Wharton’s business fundamentals curriculum. He credits his professional success to the comprehensive nature of his Wharton education.
“That set me apart from, honestly, everyone with business backgrounds where they just majored in finance or management,” Rodin says. “I was able to speak the accounting language, [and] I could speak on the management side. I concentrated in finance and OID. And so, really what my team prided themselves on was hiring Swiss Army knives who could do a lot of different things.”
Read Jake’s 2022 student profile.
The Gourmet Gourmand
In April 2021, Maggie Tang, W’22, was working on “Gourmand” — a podcast she cofounded at Penn, focusing on the restaurant industry — and two senior theses on restaurant operations and management.
Today, Tang is still heavily involved in the hospitality scene, launching Loyalist, a marketing and customer relationship management (CRM) automation software.
“The last two years at Penn were all focused on hospitality-related projects and initiatives,” she explains. “Through those independent studies at Penn, I had the opportunity to meet hundreds of chefs of the best restaurants across the world, which led me to start Loyalist.”
For the new founder, every day can look drastically different. While her Penn schedule was structured around academic and extracurricular commitments, Tang’s new calendar is entirely dependent on her: She now decides what she spends her time on and at what pace she goes.
Tang points out that her time at Wharton allowed her to gain experience building ventures from the ground up: whether through “Gourmand,” the podcast she expanded into a community spanning ten universities that continues today, or a management-training course for chefs she designed with Wharton professors.
“I’m super grateful that I got to do all of those things at Wharton,” she says, reminiscent. “It’s shaped a lot of who I am today and the company that I’m building.”
Read Maggie’s 2021 student profile.
From Buongiorno to BCG
What do Italian and consulting have in common? It turns out, more than you might think.
Zöe Patterson, W’23, originally featured in February 2022, has been at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in New York City, where she enjoys keeping up her Italian fluency through language-specific happy hours.
“There’s a lot of good language meetups here,” she says. “One example is like a happy hour, but you put a flag on your shirt for the languages that you want to practice that day, and then you go around and find other people with the same flags.”
Patterson, who minored in Italian at Penn, describes learning a language like being tossed into the unknown, “where you [know nothing] and are trying to pick up on it quickly.” She has found the experience similar to her work in consulting, where she doesn’t necessarily have a preselected practice area, and projects might not immediately resonate with her prior experience.
“Language [and consulting] can be the same way,” she explains. “Both are kind of like getting access to a world and a culture that you didn’t previously have experience in. That has definitely been the theme of my experience at BCG.”
Looking back on her time at Wharton, Patterson emphasizes the prevalence of group projects and how they taught her to work with diverse groups in competitive environments.
“You have to know what you want,” she says. “The real skills that I was building were learning what was important to me and really being able to multitask my involvement.”
Read Zöe’s 2022 student profile.
— Alan Li, W’28
Posted: March 23, 2026
