Bittersweet

There is a classmate whom I am quite fond of. We have many things in common; we are both finance concentrators, we both have invested a great deal of effort into our internship search and have both gotten a low rate of return on our investments. We have one more thing in common, we both interviewed for the same position this past week.

 

I had mixed feelings last week when I saw his name on the list of interviewees. My initial thoughts were that since the offer could not go to both of us, at least one of us would have been disappointed. Then I decided that if I wasn’t going to be the offer, I’d like to see him have it. I emailed him several Morningstar research reports on the company over the weekend (oh …. this is my secret weapon on interviewing, I have an online account with a brokerage firm which gives me access to research reports from several research and broker firms, I have found these reports to be incredibly useful and current when it comes to learning about the company you’re interviewing with) and wished him luck on his interview.

 

When I got the news on Wednesday that I didn’t get an offer, I was disappointed. I take that back; when you are still interviewing in April, you are no longer disappointed when an interview does not result in an offer, you get pissed. Then when he told me yesterday that he got the offer, it was a bit awkward when I congratulated and I could sense he felt bad that I didn’t get it. Then later I thought  about it and realized it wasn’t so bad.

 

At least both of us didn’t walk away disappointed.

Some words of encouragement

Earlier this evening we had our annual faculty appreciation party where all the professors who taught first year students were invited to the plaza for food, conversation, and the handing out of awards to those who were voted the most popular among the students. Afterwards I went to the gym and when I returned from the gym I found myself once again in the all too familiar position of receiving an email telling me the company I was waiting to hear back from had decided to go hire another candidate.

I felt frustrated because I had spent all that time preparing for this particular interview and it got me nowhere. It was as if all the work that I had done was for nothing. During dinner, I thought about the situation a bit more and noticed a parallel between what I felt and something I had observed earlier at the party. There was a professor who teaches a custom core class who was there but did not receive an award. I am not sure if the organizers of the event did anything to smoothen out the awkwardness of professors attending and walking away empty handed but I felt bad for the guy. He’s not a bad instructor. It just happens that he’s not popular with students partly because he is shy, speaks with an accent, and tells jokes that may be funny in his own culture but most students just don’t find to be all that funny.

After dinner, I wrote him an email. I didn’t say anything about him not getting an award but mentioned that I saw him at the event and didn’t get the chance to talk to him because I left early. I told him I liked his class a lot and still remember his jokes and find them funny. I told him to tell more of them to next year’s incoming class.

Trading in my suit and tie for a cloak and dagger

I was a bit of a peculiarity yesterday (more than usual) when I walked into McColl wearing a suit and tie. The reason for the costume was an interview I had in school with three people from a local software company for a business development internship.

The questions asked were some of the more challenging and unusual ones I have gotten in an interview this year so far. The man from corporate recruiting asked about the best and the worst class I have taken at Kenan-Flagler. The Kenan-Flagler alum who currently works in marketing asked how I would go about evaluating whether the company should enter markets in Latin America, Russia, or China. He asked the risks and other considerations involved. The senior director of business development (a Fuqua grad) stopped me in the middle of my resume walk-through to ask why I believe AOL has lost its status as the leading internet company. He later asked for my opinion on where different countries around the world are heading economically. He then asked why I believe the United States is ahead economically than other countries and what these other countries would have to do to get to where the United States is currently. This is a good example of what I wrote about earlier about how difficult it is to prepare for interviews and that oftentimes I end up giving answers that don’t come from the work I did in preparation for the interview but from others news sources that I regularly consume.

I walked out of the interview feeling more like I have just interviewed for an analyst position with the Central Intelligence Agency than with a software company. I am hoping that maybe this whole “we are considering you for a business development position at (name of the company)” is just a cover story and that I am being recruited for a position as a spy for the government, think of Sydney Bristol in Alias or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in True Lies.

Sharing classroom space with undergrads

The investment banking class meets every Monday and Wednesday. On Mondays our instructor, who flies down from New York City, gives us a four-hour walk through on how to do valuation models and every Wednesday we have a guest speaker. Past speakers include Gary W. Parr (via teleconference) from Lazard Freres and Hugh McColl, for whom the building was named after. But the most interesting aspect of the class is that about 10 out of the 50 students are undergrads. These are juniors or seniors who have accepted a job offer from an investment bank and whom the school has deemed will benefit from the course.

The presence of undergrads makes for some interesting dynamics. Earlier today our instructor was talking about the difficulty one encounters with using the discounted cash flow method to predict the value of a company. He used AT&T as an example and said no one in 1984 would have predicted the path it would take in the years since the breakup. He then paused and asked who in the room was born after 1984 and all the undergrads raised their hands. Later on when we were putting together a discounted cash flow model on Excel, the undergrad cutie sitting next to me was having trouble with some formulas. I gallantly offered my services. But just as I was getting somewhere, the T.A. physically inserted his presence between us and said “perhaps I can be of assistance.”

 

At the end of class, we formed study groups to work on our assignment due next week. My study group consists of three MBA students and three male undergrads. I have been told that because the undergrads receive a letter grade for the course while the MBAs receive the standard pass/fail, the undergrads tend to outperform the MBAs on these assignments. It will be interesting to see if this is evident within our study group. And in case you are wondering, I asked the undergrad cutie if she was in a group and her response was “oh I am in a group already, thanks for asking.”

 

Bummer.

McColl speaks, He’s Not Here, and other business

Since I have no Thursday classes and today is a UNC holiday, I am in the mist of a four day weekend, hence the reason for not having posted in the past 48 hours. Hugh McColl spoke to my investment banking class Wednesday afternoon. The CEO of McColl Partners talked about how he found “a loophole” in 1981 that allowed NCNB to expand outside of North Carolina and by the time he retired in 2001 he had oversaw more than 1000 acquisition and NCNB was operating under the name Bank of America. One student asked how he judged whether a person could be trusted and he said he assumes that everyone he meets can be trusted unless that someone demonstrates otherwise.

 

We had a happy hour at He’s Not Here last night with free beer for Kenan-Flagler students. With the warm weather and a full moon, the night was almost perfect. Among the crowd from Kenan-Flagler that turned out, I spotted the real estate professor. It just happened that earlier this week I had a conversation where I wondered out loud why we almost never see professors come drink with us. I also ran into a couple of non-Kenan-Flagler folks whom I have not seen in a while. At around 1, people began scattering for Lucy’s while I went to I (heart) New York Pizza with a much smaller crowd.

 

With the disappointing news I received on Monday and McCoy pointing out on Wednesday that Money Magazine had named my old occupation as the best job in America, I was beginning to wonder why I left my old life to come to business school. Last night was a good reminder that business school is about more than just taking classes and getting an internship.

The latest figures from Office of Career Services

The following information was released this morning.

 

* about 33% of first years have yet to accept a summer offer

* about 25% of second years have yet to accept a full time offer

* compared to this time about a year ago, roughly 3% more second year students have had at least one offer.

* the mean base salary for second years who have accepted an offer is $91,603, roughly 3.9% higher than approximately at this point a year ago.

* the mean signing bonus for second years who have accepted an offer is $24,637, roughly 19% higher than approximately at this point a year ago.

Yet again

I cannot use in front of polite company the words that flashed through my mind at about 10:40 yesterday as I walked toward my car at the Kenan-Flagler parking deck. I went to school early to meet with another student on redesigning a particular club’s web site and was about to move my car to avoid getting a ticket when I checked my voice mail to see if there was any news regarding the interview I had in Atlanta. There was a message telling me that the company had decided to make an offer, to another applicant.

 

So once again I find myself back to square one. I keep hearing stories about how last year there were all those students who did not find internships until the very end of April or later and that there are still so many good jobs out there. Looks like I am going to find out how true that is. I was a bit upset afterwards in accounting. When class ended I went to talk to a professor in his office about my situation and he walked me through several options on what I can do this summer to strengthen my resume for next year’s job search.

 

The toughest part of today was forcing myself to confront the reality that I may be spending the summer in Chapel Hill. Instead of working for a corporation, I may be walking around McColl looking over faculty research projects, teaching next year’s class the basics of a discounted cash flow, or doing odd jobs for local companies. After spending the lunch hour thinking over this fate, I realized that while it’s not the most ideal situation, it’s not the end of the world.

 

This afternoon the associate director of academics sent out an email to first years on some administrative tasks we have to do before leaving for the summer. It included the dates of the summer pre-MBA workshop and the incoming class’ orientation along with a call for students who will be in town this summer to help out. It’s almost as though she was reading my mind. Or more likely, she’s been reading this blog.