Biography | Sundar Pichai — The Walnut Street Hall That Made Him a Palmer Scholar

People treat Wharton as a finishing school for bankers.

For Sundar Pichai the MBA was the third degree, taken after metallurgy at IIT Kharagpur and materials science at Stanford.

The Wharton School records him as WG'02.

He finished the MBA in 2002 as a Siebel Scholar and a Palmer Scholar.

Palmer Scholar is the school's name for the top band of the graduating class.

A later profile put that band at the top five percent.

Siebel Scholar is a separately funded honor for students in business and computing programs.

The pin is Jon M. Huntsman Hall at 3730 Walnut Street in University City.

The hall opened in 2002, the same year as his class.

It is the public face of the MBA program on the University of Pennsylvania campus.

Before Wharton he had already worked as an engineer in Silicon Valley, including at Applied Materials.

After Wharton he spent a short period at McKinsey and Company.

Google hired him in 2004 as a product manager.

The path is three degrees and two employers, then a product job, not a straight line from a computer-science department to a chief-executive suite.

The building in the photograph is Huntsman Hall in June 2021.

The classrooms of 2002 are not separately marked for a pilgrimage.

Pichai is a living executive.

This memory marks a dated degree and two named academic honors at a public campus hall.

It does not mark a current workplace or a private address.

Photo: Huntsman Hall by Bitcollector2, 8 June 2021, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait: Sundar Pichai, 26 February 2014, Maurizio Pesce, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.