Well it's the second week of January and I'm feverishly working on my Wharton essays.

 'Why Wharton?'
At any rate, this was certainly a learning process for me. I spent the last month revising the 1000 word Why Now/Why Wharton/How Wharton' essay, not that I enjoy the process but it gives me an opportunity to focus on my history and see a kind  of historical structure that naturally leads to the point where I KNOW that I need an MBA to progress. The 'Why Wharton' part is trickier  though. I think, it would be much easier to write a 'Why Drexel'/'Why Penn State' essay (no offence people! ) as these would have a certain limited set of merits you could list and be done with. With H/W/S it's quite different, your job is to tell a really great school, that :

a) YOU think it's really great.

b) It's a lot better/more suited than the other two schools.

And you have to do that without listing any of its obvious advantages(Brand Name, Alumni Network, Etc.) or specific strengths(e.g. Finance at Wharton, GM at Harvard & Stanford). To me this is akin to trying to prove  to a movie producer that their is the best movie of all times. I mean is it me trying to sell myself to them or the other way around ? I am facing a strange situation where I REALLY want to go to Wharton but anything I write makes it look as though I'm just reciting the standard accolades. Unfortunately much of those 'standard' accolades are the reason I really want to go, oh well.

'Why MBA?'
A general question most schools ask is why can't you achieve your goals without an MBA. Well, except for the case of consulting/IB industries where an MBA is usually required, there aren't that many jobs out there that you absolutely can't do without an MBA. So that this question is somewhat ill posed. It's not that you can't get there without an MBA, it's the time it would take you to get there and the amount of mistakes(read collateral damage) you'd inflict. I've seen plenty of good managers that got to where they did climbing the ladder one step at a time, but I also had the unpleasant opportunity of witnessing up and coming 'self-taughts' that used the business place as a kind of  training ground.

thanks for sharing!