Smith Soc Featured Member

Questions and Answers with Adam Smith Society Members

Zoe Hoster | Penn Wharton Chapter

Zoe Hoster completed her MBA at Wharton in May 2017, where she was co-president of her Adam Smith Society chapter. She is now at General Motors in Detroit, where she works in business strategy for Maven, GM's car-sharing and urban mobility company. Zoe earned her bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Princeton, and she hails from Palo Alto, CA.

What’s the most interesting thing about you that we wouldn’t learn from your resume alone?

I play the trombone. I have an electronic silencer so I can practice in my apartment without driving my neighbors crazy.

How do you curate your intellectual diet? What blogs, publications, etc. do you ready daily?

I get my day-to-day news from Twitter. I follow transportation people (@EricPaulDennis, @MarketUrbanism), Silicon Valley people (@semil, @BenedictEvans), and liberal and conservative political commentators (@mattyglesias, @Chris_arnade, @DavidFrum). Curating this list has been an ongoing project for years. On Saturdays, I read the FT Weekend, and on Sundays, I read the NYT, starting with the Style section.

Name something you’ve gained from your membership in the Adam Smith Society that you feel like you could not have gotten elsewhere in your MBA program.

Leading our Adam Smith chapter was the most meaningful experience I had at Wharton. In an environment where deviation from left-wing orthodoxy brought suspicion, Adam Smith gave me and my classmates a platform to broaden the points of view spoken publicly on campus, and to demonstrate that capitalist and conservative ideas deserve respect.