Discover what opportunities the Wharton Lauder MBA program offers [Show Summary]

Kara Keenan Sweeney, Director of Admissions Marketing and Financial Aid at the Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and Penn Law School shares how the program continues to offer global opportunities during a COVID influenced world.

[Show Notes]

Welcome to the 465th episode of Admissions Straight Talk. Thanks for joining me today and whenever you’re able to tune in. The featured resource for today's show is Fitting in and Standing Out: The Paradox at the Heart of Admissions. Your application needs to show that you're going to do both, and that's the difficult paradox at the heart of admissions. Master that paradox, and you are well on your way to acceptance. Download the free guide.

It gives me great pleasure to introduce Kara Keenan Sweeney, Director of Admissions Marketing and Financial Aid at the Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and Penn Law School. Kara has an extensive background in graduate admissions, starting with her master's in higher administration at Columbia, and then moving onto admissions positions at INSEAD, the University of Pennsylvania, Penn State, and now the Lauder Institute. 

Can you give us an overview of the Wharton Lauder program for those listeners who aren't that familiar with it? [1:45]

The Lauder program was founded in the mid-1980s by the Lauder family to work with Wharton to help educate and generate a new, globally-minded group of business leaders. When students come to the Lauder Institute, they're earning a Master of Arts in International Studies at the same time, they're getting their MBA from Wharton. Basically, it's an MA/MBA joint degree fully integrated into the MBA program. 

When students come to Lauder, they focus on one of our six programs of concentration. Five of those programs are regionally focused. We have a program on Africa, East and Southeast Asia, Europe, Latin America, and then what we call the SAMENA region or South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. That's our fifth regional program. We also have a global program for our students who have already had fairly significant global experience.

In our regional program students are almost in every case also focused on a language. We have 10 languages of instruction at Lauder. When they come to Lauder they're already speaking a language at an advanced level, and then they'll continue to work on that language until they get to the superior or the fluent level over the two years as part of their studies at Lauder. It’s a fully integrated joint degree. We have a small program with about 70 to 80 students a year. It’s a really international community and just an amazing group to be a part of.

Are you also a joint program with the law school? [3:22]

That's right. Thanks for highlighting that. We do have a joint agreement with the law school as well. Each year we have a handful of students that do it. It's not really by design; it's a little bit by default.