Learning to Lead | A crash course in teamwork

Part one in an occasional series

Ten Wharton freshmen sit in a circle in the basement of Steinberg-Dietrich.

They are, for the most part, soft-spoken and polite, to the point where they apologize for talking over one another - accidentally, of course.

It's hard to believe that the 10 etiquette-conscious members of this Management 100 team are most likely the future Donald Trumps of the world.

The ideas and opinions start to flow, and priorities become clear as they rank potential clients for an upcoming service project.

The students are 10 of 527 Wharton freshmen taking Management 100, the infamous class dubbed "Event Planning 101" that is required of all Wharton freshmen in their first semester at Penn.

The freshman class is divided into nine sections called "cohorts" that each hold 60 students, which comprise the class. They are then divided into management teams of 10 students.

The class, which brings together local businesses and business neophytes, was originally started in the early 1990s as a way to help Wharton undergraduates fulfill a communication requirement.

Management professor Anne Greenhalgh, who oversees the program, said it was created in the hopes that working with other Wharton freshmen would help improve students' "leadership, teamwork and communication skills through service."

In their recitation last Friday, students were charged with ranking eight different clients, each of whom had presented the class with projects earlier in the week.

The students in this particular group all agreed that they wanted liberal creative license with their project.

Many touted their high-school experience as the basis for their expertise while expressing a desire to learn new things.

"I was kind of looking to do something I wasn't doing a lot of in high school," Wharton freshman Douglas Eckhardt said.

Some had even more specific criteria.

"I don't want to travel really far," Wharton freshman Ruinan Wang said. "Something close to campus would be nice."

College sophomore Brittany Jones, who serves as the group's teaching assistant, told the students that their professor was working to make Philly Car Share available to the students for travel.

"I think the cause should be very secondary" to the project, Wharton freshman Jason Bernstein said. Each project involves some charitable component, like fundraising for disabled children or collecting food for the needy.

But the team shortly got down to business, focusing less on philanthropy and more on each project's feasibility.

"If a team has a challenging project in front of them and they also have some solid team dynamics," Greenhalgh said, "they will succeed."

"My hope is by the end of the semester, every student has had a hardy and worthwhile experience in which they learn a little bit more about themselves and their individual capacities," she added.

About this series:

Articles in this occasional series examine the progress of one group of first-year students enrolled in Wharton's mandatory Management 100 class. Part two of this series can be found here.

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