Wharton Private Equity Certificate Program | Full Overview

If you're looking to break into private equity, I might have something that's for you. The prestigious University of Pennsylvania, my elma mater, where I got my master's degree from, is offering a private equity certificate program through their Wharton online in collaboration with Wall Street Prep. Now, this certificate represents an 8-week online course that should be about 10 hours per week to complete, but it's something that you can do at your own pace online. The total cost is $5,000, but you can get $300 off if you use my exclusive code, Ryan. And then you can also get an additional $200 off if you apply by one of the early deadlines. So, if you're watching this before this date, then if you apply before then, you can get that additional $200 off. Now, they run this program three times a year. So, if you miss this date, you could always wait for the next cohort of this program to get that early registration discount. So, of all the certificates and courses, why should you actually take this one seriously? Well, it's because it was actually developed in partnership with some of the top private equity firms that you've probably heard of. Blackstone, KKR, and Carlile have all said that they actually use this program to train their own analysts. To lend some credibility to that claim, we can see that there's some big names involved with the faculty and speakers, including the co-founder and co-chairman of the board of the Cargalilele group, Dave Rubenstein. Another big name that we can see is the head of North America private equity for Blackstone, Martin Brand. So all over this program, you can see that they've got teachers and speakers from some huge companies in important positions. To me, one of the biggest advantages of going for a certificate like this is just getting that Wharton and University of Pennsylvania name and logo on your resume, especially with all the AI bot screeners in HR now that are just looking for specific school names or it just chucks your resume before you even get to talk to anybody. And we can see that this program isn't just for people in the United States, as there's over 1,600 students in 40 different countries all over the world. Now, if we want to look at the meat and potatoes of this program, we can see basically it's broken into eight different modules that represent the eight different weeks. The first one is just getting into private equity as an asset class, which I've actually found myself getting more interested in my own investments lately. It can be a asset class that you can potentially get really high rewards in, but it also comes with high risk and I find there's a lot more work involved than just typical equity investments in the public market. And because there's less information, you end up having less data to work with and different types of valuation models and ways you need to think about company's values. So that's when you would get into module two where you're talking about the private equity investment framework. Then you'll move on to the third module which goes through that private equity deal process. So a lot of this would be uh figuring out what's the value of the company. Um what does the people who are trying to sell this company think it's worth? what do the people trying to invest or buy in this company uh think that it's worth and then going through that whole process where they're providing all the paperwork all the legal issues that come about this it's certainly a laborintensive area but I think that's also a huge reason why people get paid so much that work in this space then the next module is going to be the deal structure so getting into things like mergers and acquisitions accounting structuring the deal overall how's it going to be financed will it be leveraged uh who's providing the credit and by modules five and six you're going to get into the valuation. So how do you value a private company and the leveraged buyout modeling? So if you're going to buy out this company with a lot of debt then how do you model that? And we can see model 6 is just a continuation of these two topics. And then you finally wrap up with two weeks on how you will think like a private equity professional and then hopefully become one. And I would say the main reason that you might go for a program like this is just because you're trying to become a private equity professional. Or at least that's the main reason that I would take it if I was looking at the program. Another thing you may consider to be an advantage is just the networking events. So you'll basically be in a network with all the other people who have completed it. And so people who have completed in the past might land jobs at the type of firms that you want to work at. And then you'll have access to be able to reach out and talk to them. There's also in-person and virtual meetups. So, that can just be a good networking opportunity as it's a basically exclusive group of people that you're now able to discuss these things with and potentially network for job opportunities in this highly highly competitive space. So, I've been partnering with Wall Street Prep and the University of Pennsylvania through Wharton Online for a little while now, and they've been great partners to me. And you can use my code Ryan to get $300 off this program. Sign up before the deadline and get another 200 off and you can get a total of $500 off that way.