The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is the #1-ranked undergraduate business program in the country, the place where Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, Revlon CEO Ron Perelman, real-estate magnate Donald Trump, and hundreds of other Wall Street titans and Fortune 500 tycoons got their start. Each year five hundred of the best students from around the world are culled from thousands of applicants to join the school and begin a rigorous, four-year curriculum that many in the world of finance consider the equivalent of an MBA. And in the autumn of their senior year, they will begin a ten- week, tension-packed recruiting process where they will put their $150,000 educations to the test, vying for a precious position with the world’s elite investment banking and consulting firms like Goldman Sachs or McKinsey—with the potential of a six-figure income and a $10,000 signing bonus on the line.

The Running of the Bulls tells the inside story of this process, and the fascinating institution behind it, through the experiences of seven Wharton students from the class of 2004, including a son of a manufacturing magnate in Bombay, a cheerleader from Texas determined to be a top investment banker, and a first-generation Indian American from Seattle who begins to question whether the Wall Street world is the right place for him. Financial reporter Nicole Ridgway follows each of them through the intensity of recruiting season, when candidates schmooze with employers at lavish presentations— then get bombarded with questions at grueling day-long interviews designed to test their will as much as their intellect.

In the tradition of Scott Turow’s One L and Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker, The Running of the Bulls is fast-paced and provocative, a rollicking portrait of the high-stakes game of how Wall Street chooses its next generation.