As the newly minted editor of Wharton Magazine, my plan was to uncover one extremely relevant news item with a Wharton angle and deliver it to you along with a dollop of perspicacious insight.
Yet what I have learned in my short time here is that nearly everything going on in the world has a Wharton angle, making my task of isolating just one event more arduous than I had imagined.
Take, for instance, the inordinate amount of end-of-the-world chatter about our current economic predicament. On this topic, you can hear and read Wharton professors do their best to make sense of it all for the rest of us. Russell E. Palmer Professor of Finance Jeremy J. Siegel, one of the more eminent finance professors at the School, has been driving home the point that we should continue to look for the sunnier side, including how U.S. companies are still highly profitable and that many of their stocks are now cheap buys. (See Siegel’s piece in Kiplinger for an example of this, as well as this MarketWatch story.)
On the flip side, we have the buzz about a “lost decade.” Here, too, we find Wharton clarity. Turn to Marketplace’s recent interview with Associate Professor of Business and Public Policy Justin Wolfers, titled “Are we in a lost decade?” (Warning: you might not like his answer.)
The beauty of the breadth of Wharton’s influence, though, is that we don’t need to focus on the “big issues” of the day to see it. One of my favorite recent mentions of an alumnus came in the Miami Herald and its story about Vikram Chatwal, W’94, who opened the new Dream boutique hotel on South Beach. I am putting in now to do a profile of him for the magazine if only for the chance to stay at this place. Then we have Guy Friedman, WG’10, a fresh-faced alumnus on a mission to help other business degree holders prove that they know their stuff. Check out this BusinessWeek blog on his new Certified Business Laureate Exam, soon to be on resumes of young finance job applicants near you.
It’s difficult to isolate just five Wharton highlights, let alone one. As a new arrival on Wharton’s shores, I feel much like the settlers did when they first reached America. They wrote letters back home talking of flocks of birds so large they darkened the sky, or fish so plentiful they could walk across rivers on their backs. I’m looking forward to the chance to explore the Wharton universe, and to share it with you here in the blog and within the Wharton Magazine.
