First of all, I didn’t know Fred is a fellow Wharton MBA alum. Kinda cool since most of the OLDER Wharton alums end up on Wall Street (buy or sell-side) rather in the trenches. (I think of early stage VC’s as operators, later stage VC’s and buyout guys as bankers). Having graduated from Wharton not too long ago, I know that this is no longer the case. My class was as diverse as it can get (comparatively to HBS or Stanford atleast).

More importantly, Fred’s post:The Five Things I Learned in Business School got me thinking about how little people seem to learn at business school or value their MBA compared to my personal experience. I cannot speak for any other business school since I’m not sure what is taught there, but as for Wharton, it was an incredibly educational and intellectually challenging 2 year. Definitely worth my time (although I’ll have to back to you in about 10 years on the financial ROI on the 150K I spent).

Prior to Wharton, I wasn’t new to the business world. The “5 Things” Fred had talked about I was already quite familiar with due to the fact that 1) Stanford prepares their students well for the real world regardless of which major he/she ends up with 2) starting my career in banking & raising venture capital helped me scale up the learning curve rapidly. Thus, not being a newbie to business like some of my “PHD in ChemE” classmates, I needed to learn about business above and beyond the common MBA experience to justify my time. Wharton did not disappoint.

My current theory is that given 2 years of freedom to explore their passion (in this case business) in an environment with all the incredible resources (professors, conferences, PHD research, technology licensing office, etc) available to them at any the top MBA programs; ANYONE who say they did not learn anything from their MBA must not have the passion and drive for their chosen profession to go above and beyond the daily requirements of getting by. This is not about pedigree, it is about exploiting opportunities and succeeding, learning, growing regardless what hands we were dealt. MBA is a test of one’s character and ability to search out opportunities to make ourselves better. I might not have learned anything “useful”, but I did learn and grow for the sake of bettering myself.

So the million dollar question: what did I learn. I was surprise to find the Wharton MBA to be quantitatively and statistically as rigorous as my engineering degree. (of course this depended on the classes I took) To me, Wharton gave me an engineering degree in business. I found a way of looking at business decision making as a science rather than as art. (Very comforting for an guy with an engineering undergrad degree) To anyone that read Moneyball, Wharton is Moneyball for business (ironic analogy since Moneyball was about bringing sophisticated finance & management techniques and tools to an inefficient industry) The Wharton MBA attempts to systematically quantify business decision making from past history of business to help rapidly instill discipline in its students that otherwise would requires 30 years of experience to learn holistically.

Throwing out some buzzwords, I know how to use statistical clustering techniques to segment a seemingly homogenous customer base. I know how to use factor analysis to discover latent customer preferences. I know how to use probabilistic models to determine the most profitable customer profiles. I know how to predict profitability of new features and products using logistic regression models. I know how to quantify & model channel marketing decisions. The list goes on and on.

In the end, I recognize that most of these techniques are not applicable for the start-up world where there a little customer history and past results to mine insights from. But I hope one day, when I am running or helping to run a larger company, I can add value above and beyond the person I am before the MBA. At the very least, the Wharton MBA was an intellectually challenging experience; the student in me appreciates learning for the sake of “knowing” and the quest for “truth.”