Two days in Manhattan

This past Monday and Tuesday were pretty grueling. We visited ten banks in two days. The first night ended in an alumni reception at the Universty club where Dean Steve Jones gave a talk and introduced our guest speaker, a Vice President at Krafts Food. The speaker majored in economics at UVA before attending the MBA program at Kenan-Flagler (sound familiar?). In his introduction, Dean Jones jokingly referred UVA as "the finest University in Virginia." I snuck out of the reception to have drinks with a college buddy of mine at a bar down the block called Faces & Names.

The next day was another day of back to back bank visits as we hopped back and forth between locations in midtown and lower Manhattan. Tuesday ended around 7:30 when I met up with a UVA grad from college in Times Square and we had dinner at a Thai restaurant by Grand Central Terminal.

During the two days, I couldn't help comparing this trip to another one almost ten years ago when I visited many of these same banks with other UVA students. One bank hosted us at its location on Wall Street but this time around, the visit took place in its midtown office by Park Avenue. This was probably due to a recent merger it has completed. At one of the banks, we had a run in with our counterparts from Durham. As the presentation came to a close, the caterers began cleaning up the back of the room and replacing the cookies and fruit with food that is of much better and more expensive variety. We were told we had to leave earlier than the scheduled time because another group was coming in. When we exited out of the lobby and into the nearby Times Square area, another group of students walked into the building. The students looked almost exactly like our group except their name tags identify bear the logo of the other business school in North Carolina up the street from us.