Two Penn students in the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management founded the Investments committee within the Wharton Undergraduate Healthcare Club, aiming to provide students practical skills in the intersection between biotechnology and business.
WUHC, which was founded in 2008 and explores a variety of topics related to healthcare, hosts the largest undergraduate healthcare conference in the nation and publishes a bi-semesterly journal called the Penn Healthcare Review. The Investment committee marks the club’s eleventh committee, which recruits members each semester and often focuses on pre-professional activities.
College and Wharton juniors Kyne Wang and Parthiv Patel, who co-founded the committee, said that it focuses on investment banking and financial analysis, providing members with practical skills and industry connections.
“[Patel and I] both went through the healthcare investment banking recruiting process, and we found that it was a very unique and niche area of focus that isn’t seen often with finance recruiting. We wanted to really address this unmet need that neither the healthcare management, finance, or biology department covers at Penn,” Wang said.
Patel said that students often don't receive exposure to the industry in their first three years at Penn.
“We thought to ourselves, why not just create a platform where we can have those conversations and be able to gauge that sort of interest within students, both LSM and non-LSM?” Patel said.
Committee activities focus on equipping students with skills and knowledge relevant to industry careers. Weekly meetings consist of lectures about the industry, including topics such as the drug development process, and practical collaborative activities, such as evaluating companies by looking at balance sheets.
“Something [club leaders] do a really, really good job of is integrating their real-world experiences and the gaps that they recognize from their classes," College and Wharton first-year and returning analyst Rima Chavali said. "They really, really care about bringing that to the students and early on,”
The committee also prioritizes fostering direct connections to leading firms in the industry. On April 19, members traveled to New York to tour the offices of F-Prime Capital, New Enterprise Associates, TD Cowen, and PSP Investments. The committee plans to host a similar event in the fall to visit firms that were unavailable or had to be skipped due to time constraints.
“The knowledge that I would gain through conversing with the people that work in this industry is something that I can't get through a classroom,” College first-year and analyst Erin Choi said. “So I feel like it’s [such a different experience], learning in a classroom versus me actually being able to visit these companies and learn more about this industry.”
Wang and Patel have also planned activities like a committee dinner and go-karting, which aim to build a sense of community between members.
“It's probably my favorite community here,” Chavali said. “For example, we had someone who is DJing for Metro. And we all went to go support him at his DJ battle.”
While Wang and Patel are both in the LSM program, students from all four undergraduate schools are represented in the committee, and the club has a no-questions-asked financial aid policy.
“One of our biggest, biggest emphases when we created the program is to really democratize this program for a bunch of different demographics, a bunch of different students from different backgrounds,” Wang said.
Looking to the future, College and Wharton junior and board member Rosie Bui expressed hope that the club’s higher funding would allow the Investments committee to expand its scope.
“I would love for our impact to spread to more students…[and] for more students to be able to learn from [Wang and Patel],” Bui said.
Wang and Patel expressed optimism for the community’s growth and future as a student-led committee.
“What we're doing…is letting a few students from our committee come on as instructors, teach a class every now and then, and understand what it's like to be the teacher rather than the student, so that we can start to ease these students into becoming the future leaders of this committee,” Patel said.
The Daily Pennsylvanian is an independent, student-run newspaper. Please consider making a donation to support the coverage that shapes the University. Your generosity ensures a future of strong journalism at Penn.
Donate