Shabat Shalom from Wharton

Posted by Dealbreaker, Sep 05, 2008, 4:11pm

My name is Mordechai Chang* and I'm a sophomore at this wonderful business school. In what I hope is more or less a weekly blog post, I'll be complaining about a lot of shit and recapping amusing events from the past school week. The beginning of sophomore year here is also the beginning of "core" Wharton classes where we begin corrupting our soul.

So let's begin.


*Clearly not my real name. Just representing the two biggest groups here. Jews and Asians. And don't worry, I got that yellow fever.

I moved in about two weeks ago and arrived to an apartment I share with 3 others. I live in one of the "high rises," the Penn owned apartment shitholes. Of course, Penn decided to renovate floors 10 and up over the summer, and we were assigned an apartment below the10th floor.

At check-in, Penn Housing and Conference Services handed me a form that said, "Your room should be clean, in good repair, and contain furniture as listed in the inventory below."

Bullshit.

The refrigerator had a few cockroaches crawling around in it. It was incapable of being cold. I resorted to storing my milk, orange juice, and water in the "freezer." To no surprise, the stove and oven did not work either.

After putting in work orders to get all these appliances fixed, I went home for a few days since the campus was dead. While I was gone, they replaced the fridge; however, instead of moving the drinks from the old freezer to the new refrigerator, the geniuses left them out to spoil.

With the Daily Pennsylvanian running a four-part series about the price of college textbooks, let me take the time out to add my two cents.

Wharton freshmen are required to take Operations and Information Management 101, one of the hardest, most frustrating, and ridiculous classes at the school. The required textbook was about $80 and written by the three OPIM professors.

Let's be honest. It was the most useless piece of crap. It was not helpful in the second half of the semester. Why? The material we were being taught for half a semester was not covered in the book. Of course, it was non-refundable at the Barnes & Nobles owned Penn bookstore.

The solution to high textbook prices is quite simple. Publishers need to convert all textbooks to e-books, eliminating paper, printing, transportation, and college store operations and personnel costs.

The next step can be done in a few different ways. Either our universities should make a bulk, reduced price purchase of Kindles and then hand them out free to students or, in a partnership with Amazon, offer discounted Kindles to students to buy.

This way, students don't have to worry about high prices and as an added plus, do not have to lug around 20 lbs of books to the library to study.

While class did start Wednesday, very little went on. For those wondering, my four Wharton classes are: Accounting 101, Finance 100, Statistics 101, and Management 101.

You'll hear more about that next week.

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