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Read Part 2: Students already walk the plugged-in talk. Can Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton catch up?

In late July, an empty U-Haul truck will leave Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square bound for suburban Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania and the giant IKEA store at the mall there. On board: nine incoming graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania. The mission: score furniture and housewares for lackluster apartments and dorm rooms, and do a little team bonding before "math camp" starts in August.

The excursion isn't so different from what enterprising students have always done when faced with a common problem and the energy to fix it. But few such groups are recruited via an international virtual call to shopping, nor organized courtesy of an electronic spreadsheet, cross-matched by date, address, and skill at operating a manual transmission.

Given the nature of this band of shoppers, a supply-chain logistics approach to the dilemma of not having a comfy chair is hardly surprising. The students are all fledgling MBAs at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania -- which means that networking, problem solving, team building, and spreadsheets are already second nature.

Yann Pavie, head of the investment-banking operations in the Middle East for National Bank of Kuwait, says that he hopes to buy all the furniture he needs for his new one-bedroom apartment next to Philadelphia's city hall. "When I say everything, I mean everything -- from a bed, desk, sofa and chairs, to plates, glasses and forks," he writes in email from Lebanon. "Apparently, years have shown that I am the kind of guy who likes one-stop shopping solutions!!!"

Welcome, Class of 2003

What distinguishes the IKEA sofa seekers and their peers at other top-flight business schools from their predecessors is the velocity at which they've already begun meeting, greeting, swapping virtual business cards, striking group deals, organizing exotic team-building trips, and mapping business plans -- long before they've even shown up for the orientation picnic.

This is the incoming Class of 2003, most of whom have yet to meet each other. But thanks to the B-schools' password-protected Web portals for admitted students, they started networking months in advance of their arrival on campus. "When I started as an undergrad at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill nine years ago, I didn't know anybody," says Amy Gura, who will enter the University of Michigan Business School in September. "But I feel as if I know all these people from Michigan already, and I haven't even been there yet."

Gura, a former project manager at Wells Fargo's online brokerage group, will be perfecting her organizational-behavior skills by detouring through Machu Picchu before heading to Ann Arbor. She'll be hiking the Inca Trail with a dozen other future Michigan MBAs in an outdoor adventure trip organized via the Web and led by a second-year student.

Meanwhile, at Harvard Business School (HBS), a group of pre-MBAs is spending the summer planning a book on how to navigate the business-school admissions process. With the savvy of crack New York literary agents, they've already vetted several concepts (a "bible" treatment that would include tips on surviving the first year versus a simple admissions guide), tossed around potential titles, divided up the work (from interviewing to writing to marketing), and debated potential beneficiaries of royalties (fund a new dorm or scholarships for underprivileged children?).