Wharton
What Wharton Amounts To
A $50,000 fellowship and an incubator.
At a Glance
- Courses
- 3 named courses, below.
- Club
- A Wharton ETA Club, established in 2019, whose stated mission is to train students who want to acquire, own, and operate their own businesses.
- Money
- The Perlman ETA Fellowship, an award of up to $50,000 made competitively, and only to Penn and Wharton master's and doctoral students in their final year of study.
- Conference
- The annual Wharton ETA Summit, held on campus each spring; the April 2026 edition sold out. It gathers students, searchers, investors, and faculty.
Its Conference, Dated
Wharton ETA Summit Last held April 2 to 3, 2026, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with the way in and the price the host publishes.
The Classes
- Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (MGMT 8110)
- Search Fund Entrepreneurship (MGMT 8140)Taught by Jim Vesterman, who raised a search fund and ran the company he bought.
- Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (undergraduate) (MGMT 2130)
Who teaches and leads it
- Jim Vesterman, a searcher who acquired and led a company before teaching the class
What Else It Runs
- A competitive, hybrid, cohort-based ETA incubator for graduate students past the introductory stage, aimed at making them search-ready, plus a standing workshop series and office hours.
Open to readers outside the school
- A workshop and events series the venture lab opens to every student at the university, not to the business school alone.
Where to Look
Other Schools
Harvard Business School
Chicago Booth
Kellogg
Dartmouth Tuck
MIT Sloan
Columbia Business School
All schools
The Intern & Job Board carries the programs that pay a salary to search, and Investors the firms that fund one. What a student group runs on is in the materials for ETA clubs.