Geoffrey Garrett, Former Dean and Reliance Professor of Management and Private Enterprise, The Wharton School

Why should you do research as an undergraduate? Doing academic research can change your life—and immensely for the better. It certainly did mine. I was a decent student. But not a highly motivated one. Then I literally “fell in love” with research. Instead of returning to Australia to be a bureaucrat like my father, brother, and sister, I went to Oxford where I taught Rhodes and Marshall scholars. And now I am dean of the Wharton School. And it is all because of research.

Of course, you don’t have to want to be a professor to get enormous value out of research. In any high-skill job, the core facets of independent research are invaluable—formulate an important question, find the information you need to answer it, analyze the information in a way that sorts out the wheat from the chaff, and communicate what you’ve learned in a way that will persuade others you are right. And there is no better place to do research than at Wharton, the world’s preeminent research-led business school.