WORLD EXCLUSIVE, MUST CREDIT BUCKYHOO
Well placed sources inside the Pentagon have given me exclusive access to video footage taken by a coalition spy embedded in the lowest level of hell. The footage reveals that the former dictator of Iraq has adjusted quite well to his afterlife and perhaps we have not heard the last of him yet.
I decided against going to the West Coast Interview Forum. Of the four cover letters that I sent out, I received two rejections, one email telling me the company was no longer interested in hiring, and only one request for an interview. I am not going to spend $500 for a roundtrip airline ticket and at least $60-140 per night (depending if I can find someone to split the room with) for a hotel room for just one interview. Besides, if I want to get a rejection letter in the mail, I can write one myself.
Here it goes:
Dear Buckyhoo,
Thank you for your interest in (name of company) and your recent submission to our (name of position) position.
After careful review of your resume/CV and your personal interview we have decided to pursue other candidates who are better fits for this position. We encourage you to review other open positions at our career site www.lenovo.com. We wish you the best of success in your career search.
Sincerely,
(name of recruiter)
There. I just saved myself $560.
One of the more useful things I learned at UVA was the economic inefficiency of gift giving. The way to understand this concept is if I am buying you a present, what would you rather have me give you - a book that I think you’d like, a gift card for the bookstore, or the monetary equivalent of the book (or card) that I was going to buy you? If you are rational, you will probably list your preferences as cash, followed by the gift card, with the book (hopefully with a receipt) rounding out the bottom of the list.
Whether you realize it or not, what you are trying to do is to minimize the inefficiency caused by receiving a gift that you don’t want and being locked in on a preference that I have chosen for you. The way the most popular professor at UVA explains every year to his intro to microeconomics class, when he and his wife were dating, he would offer to minimize her inefficiency by giving her the choice between going out on a date with him, and receiving the monetary equivalent of the dinner and movie that he was planning on taking them to. “Most of the times, she would choose to spend the evening with me … but other times she would choose the cash,” as he said to the laughter of students in the packed Chemistry Auditorium. Saturday’s Wall Street Journal had an excellent article on just how inefficient this gift giving is.
“Economists aren't suggesting Christmas be abolished. Still, in the latest Wall Street Journal forecasting survey, more than two of three economists opined that if Christmas ceased to exist as a holiday, consumers would either spend more on themselves or spread their gift purchases more evenly across other events such as birthdays. That, in the view of some academics, would put more goods into the hands of people who truly value them and improve social welfare as a result.”
The article goes on to quote a Wharton School of Business professor who estimates this “deadweight loss” to be around $10 billion annually. I can tell you from experience that me and my cousins conduct an annual Christmas “white elephant” and in the more than ten years that we have been doing this, I have yet to receive a present I want. Just yesterday BuckySis and I were trying to figure out where to put the soothing comfort pillow and the electric ice scraper that we got this year when we opened a closet door and found something else I got three years ago from the same “white elephant” event. Earlier this afternoon, on my way back from shopping malls I tried to use up the Starbucks gift card that I won earlier this year at a Kenan-Flagler trivia contest by running into a Starbucks and waiting on line for four minutes to buy a copy of the New York Times.
Next year, my “white elephant” will be a wrapped envelope containing cash and a copy of the Wall Street Journal article.
I am sure many of you have seen the stories in the past two weeks about the record-shattering profits that financial firms have made this year and how this has affected the bonuses of finance professionals and created a trickle down effect on the businesses that cater to the consumer of ultra-luxury goods. Like a lot of Wall Street bankers who spend a good part of the year wondering about their bonuses and how they will spend it, many MBA students spend a lot of energy wondering about is how much wealth we will accumulate over the course of our careers and how we plan to do with it. I too have wondered about what my financial situation will look like once I graduate from Kenan-Flagler but what makes me different from my similarly situated classmates is that instead of thinking in terms of how more money will improve my life, I think in terms of how it results in the burden of responsible stewardship and increased obligation to society.
Even though I have more than enough money to live on for the foreseeable future and the median starting base salary for my class is expected to be in excess of $91,000 a year, I have no plans to visit the local Lexus dealership anytime soon to test drive the SC 420 that I like. I have always felt that wealth should serve a higher calling than merely increasing one’s consumption of other people’s services. Furthermore, I feel that those who are financially better off in America have an increased obligation to use their wealth (and in some cases, their fame) to influence society for the better.
What I have written so far may not seem like anything revolutionary. But if you look around our current culture today, very rarely do you see people living their lives in accordance to this creed. You are much more likely to see well off people using their money for hedonistic causes and their influence to achieve ends that benefit no more than themselves. If you don’t believe me you need to look no further than a Google News search on Paris Hilton. Just today I was reading about investment bankers using their bonuses to buy $250,000 Ferraris. This all reminds me of the scene from the movie Wall Street where Bud Fox asked Gordon Gekko “how many yachts can you water ski behind, how much is enough?”
As a believer in freedom, I believe people should be free to work as hard as they want, make as much money as they want, and spend their money however they wish. But I also believe that in a moral society, which I am interested in building, there should be self-imposed restraints on the excesses that such enormous wealth can produce. And in this holiday season of Christmas sharing and making resolutions for the new year, it’s something I’d like for all of us to keep in mind.
I don’t know when but sometime in the past ten years our society decided that the “C word” is no longer acceptable and you see everyone nowadays knocking themselves out to avoid using it. This is strange because I don’t remember participating in the decision making process. If a decision was made it had to have been made behind closed doors, most likely by the folks in upper management of the major broadcast, print, and cable outlets. And I suspect the folks who run most of America’s biggest business had something to do with it. I remember one time my boss at work accidentally uttered the “C word” at a team meeting and when he realized his error seconds later he immediately corrected himself and issued a humble apology.
Since I am not on the payroll of a major corporation (at least not yet) and what I write on this blog is accountable to no one except my conscience, God almighty, and AOL’s terms of service, I am going to go ahead and dare to use it. Get your tape recorders ready folks.
Merry Christmas everyone, merry Christmas.
I have blogged a while back that about one of my lifetime financial goals is to have enough money to have something at UVA named after me, preferably an academic building or the economics department. It just happens that UVA is in the process of renewing Rouss Hall. This is the building that used to house the economics department and where I had a lot of classes during my time there. I saw on the web a list of naming opportunities where you can have your name forever immortalized by donating a significant amount to the McIntire School of Commerce, which will occupy the building after its completion.
Looking at the list and the prices that the school is asking for, I am beginning to get a ballpark idea of what league I need to be in to make my contributions and secure my legacy at UVA. It also dawned on me that there really isn’t a big difference between a kid spraying his name in graffiti on the public school playground wall and a millionaire giving money to his school in return for the school naming a lobby or a study room after him.
I emailed BuckySis suggesting that instead of the usual Christmas gift, she makes a generous contribution to my bank account to start my savings effort toward the estimated $50 million that I will need to fulfill my endeavor. She replied, “why don’t you go find a rock and scratch your name on it.”
According to The Weather Channel, it’s 65 degrees in Chapel Hill right now but it feels much warmer. It’s hard to believe I am almost three quarters done with my MBA. This weekend I have to finish ateam project for leading organizational change class and a write up for brand strategy class, both due Monday. I then need to take care of a little bit of business that’s been outstanding for more than six months.
When I returned from India in May, I had to write up a response paper for the doing business in India class but between the final week of search for my internship, and actually starting that summer internship, I never got around to it. The professor was lenient and said he would give an IN (incomplete) to anyone who did not hand in the assignment by the due date but was willing to change the IN to, hopefully, a P (pass) when he finally receives a satisfactory deliverable. This has been dangling over me for the past six months, almost like an account payable, but I am going to finally get around to doing it this week so that in January when I check my grades to count how many H’s (high pass) I got for this Mod, I won’t feel guilty seeing the IN staring right back at me.
I am on the main campus right now, which is mainly deserted because most of the undergrads are gone. Their exams ended yesterday. There is a basketball game later this afternoon against UNC Ashville and there are a lot of visitors milling about. Hopefully I will be able to make some progress in the next four hours before the library closes.
Tomorrow is the last day of classes but for me my last class was yesterday when we had an in-class final exam for services marketing. There were four graded essay questions followed by two that I didn’t quite expect. The first was on a scale of one to four, how rigorous did we consider this class and the second was what grade did we expect to receive for it. Initially I began to answer by indicating that I consider the class slightly below average in rigor and expect to receive a P (pass) for it. Then I decided that since my grade has yet to be determined and the grading is such that I suspect there is a bit of subjectivity involved, it may be smarter to say that I find the material above average in rigor and I expect to receive an H (high pass) for the class. Before turning the paper in, I decided to give the “smart” answer instead of the honest answer. I hope this pays off and that I will remember to keep this “skill” in mind when I talk to potential employers and recruiters.
I came to school today for a Career Management Center workshop on how to conduct an off-campus second year job search. As I said before, from this point forward, less of the job search effort will be on the part of recruiter coming to campus and more on the part of students looking off campus. The counselor said that “unofficially” the CMC believes that approximately 47% of the second year class has an offer, I am not sure whether this number represents the number of students who have received an offer or have accepted one. I was out in the hallway earlier talking on the phone with a friend of mine, one who would kill me if he ever finds out that I blog about him but I have no worry about that because as he has said many times “I stopped reading your blog long ago because it sucks, you should delete the darn thing.” I was telling him my next steps in the job search process and he said “well, sounds like you are in the driver’s seat.” To which I replied, “no more like I am in the passenger seat but at least I am enjoying the ride.”
As we were talking out in the hallway, I paced around looking into several classrooms where there was a class was in session (the classroom doors have a small glass window that you can look through). I saw the fixed income professor teaching the advanced derivatives class, the first year finance professor lecturing about stock options, and saw a lot of faces that I have not seen in a while. It dawned on me that since I had only Monday and Wednesday afternoon classes this year (except for the negotiations class which met an entire day on three Fridays), I had missed out on a large part of the daily life at Kenan-Flagler and had almost become a stranger in my own building.
Hopefully the next two Mods will let me spend more time during the day at Kenan-Flagler and still allow me to go to the main campus at least twice a week to enjoy the festive atmosphere there.
I was a bit disappointed I didn’t have my camera on me Thursday night when I was at the House Undergraduate Library and the streakers came by. But I knew somewhere out there was a video and it was only a matter of time before someone caught put it on YouTube.
Here it is! (The video's owner has disabled the embedding option.) Turn the sound up and if you are in an office, you may want to use a set of headphones.
Some of you who are home today may want to try to catch Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC at 5pm eastern. The show will be broadcasting from UNC’s Memorial Hall as part of the Hardball College Tour. Today’s guests include former U.S Senator John Edwards and yours truly will be in the audience.
The show repeats at 3am eastern.
I made a tax move today that was so smart I am tempted to tell the professor who teaches taxes in finance and ask for extra credit when I take his class in Mod IV.
When I worked at AOL, I participated in the employee stock purchasing plan. This means that every six months I purchased a chunk of stock at a 15% discount from the market price. Normally I would sell all the ESPP shares the next day because I didn’t want to invest too much money in my employer. But there was one time when I kept a couple of hundred shares. Those shares have been lying around my brokerage account until this morning, when I sold.
This is a good move for three reasons. First, the stock is trading at a four year high. Second, the sale qualifies for the lower long term capital gains tax rate instead of the higher short term rate in the event I sell within one year. Thirdly, the difference between the discounted price you purchase the stock at and the market price on the day you receive the stock is taxed as ordinary income but that portion is not incurred until you actually sell the shares. So by waiting until now to sell the shares, I deferred their associated income taxes into 2006 and since I am in a very low tax bracket this year, it works out very well for me.
It’s kind of late and normally I would hold off writing this until later today but I need to write this now while it’s still fresh in my mind and I am still giddy over it. Earlier tonight I witnessed the most unusual things I have seen in my entire life, a group of students streaking through the House Undergraduate Library in front of nearly a hundred cheering classmates.
I spend a lot of weeknights at the Undergraduate Library. The library is open all hours but between midnight and 6am, there is a police officer stationed by the front door who makes sure that everyone has a valid student identification. Tonight was not different than any other nights, except that exams begin tomorrow (for undergrads) and there are much more students here than usual.
At around five minutes before midnight I trying to finish a reading assignment when I started hearing a lot of commotions outside in the main foyer. Immediately the girls in the next table began giggling, looked at one another, and ran out. Others followed. Ten seconds later, the only ones remaining in the room were myself, a couple of freshmen who looked like they were international students, and one other grad student. Not wanting to miss anything, we too went outside.
In the foyer there was an atmosphere of anticipation and confusion. Some students were asking “what’s going on” and others were just looking around waiting. The foyer is two floors high and when I looked up I could see students gathering around the railing on the second floor, many of them were looking down on the ground floor as though the were expecting something to happen. I asked the library clerk, who looked like there was nothing out of the ordinary happening around him, what was up. “They streak the library the night before the first exam.”
Oh.
As we got closer to midnight, more and more people began looking at their watches, looking around, taking out their cell phones. There were more people running into the library. The police officer was pacing around and talking into his radio.
Then it started.
It began with the people on the second floor screaming, everyone looked up and saw legs running around. After having completed the “square” on the second floor, the streakers came down the stairs. There were about seven of them, at least one was a woman, and they all had their faces covered with something. By the time they got to the foyer, there were about three rows of students on either side and between the rows the students had opened up a path of about fifteen feet wide. The cheering continued but soon there was a loud gasp coming from spectators on the second when they realized what was about to ensue.
The police officer was attempting to make an arrest.
The officer, who was coming from the opposite direction as the streakers, ran up into the direct path of the streakers, stopped, straddled, and tried to grab a streaker by wrapping both his arms around him (I assume it was a “him”). That streaker got away. The officer then grab the next streaker. He had a firmer grip on this second streaker but the streaker kept moving and both fell onto the ground, falling two feet in front of me and taking down with them four spectators. Both men broke free of one another, and both ran for the entrance. I believe what happened next was the police officer found a clear path to the entrance while the streaker ran into a cloud of spectators who did not get out of the way quick enough but the officer beat the streaker to the front door and the last many of us saw was the officer standing between the double doors and the metal detectors, blocking the streaker’s exit out of the building, and earning his pay for the evening.
The crowd began closing in toward the duo, chanting “let him go, let him go!” Not wanting to contribute to a mob scene, I returned to my books but it was hard to get any reading done. Others in the room were pressing their faces against the windows to see if they could make out what was going on. Others were on the phone. One student said “I have never laughed so hard in my entire life.” Another said "their clothes must be nearby, it's freezing outside." We heard booing from those who had remained to witness the spectacle followed by cheering two minutes later. Some students said they felt sorry for the streaker who was apprehended, there was talk that he got caught because he fell or he was the last streaker and was significantly later than the others.
I finally finished my reading and left the library at around fifteen past midnight. In the main foyer, I saw that two additional officers have since arrived. One was debriefing the arresting officer while the other was standing by the door, exactly where I last saw the apprehended streaker. Next to this officer was a student lying on the ground in fetal position, clothed, hands unhandcuffed and his eyes were closed. As I walked by, I looked at him and said, “have a good night.”
Neither man responded.
I took this picture yesterday at a parking lot on the corner of Franklin (which I found out recently was named after Benjamin Franklin, who died three years before the founding of UNC) and Graham Streets. If this is what conservatives mean when they talk about reverse discrimination, then not only am I all for it, I think it should be instituted in every parking lot at UNC, starting with the Kenan-Flagler garage.
I think “return to ‘square one’” sounds much more positive than “back to ‘square one.’” I got the news earlier today via email that I will not be receiving an offer from the credit card division of the major financial firm.
While I am a disappointed, it’s not the end of the world. In preparing for the interview, I finally got around to flipping through a particular book I have been meaning to look at on how to do well on interviews. I will spend a part of my Christmas break drilling down on a couple of chapters that I found to be particularly useful.
It’s safe to say at this point that the majority of companies that will be coming to campus have already made their visits. This means from now on, my search will shift from me going to companies that come to Kenan-Flagler to me contacting companies that I want to work for. There is an event the first week of January in San Francisco sponsored by Kenan-Flagler and three other business schools. The West Coast Forum is an opportunity for west coast companies to interview business school students. Unlike the “black MBA” or the National Society of Hispanic MBA (pronounced nar-SHIMMM-bar) events that I attended, this is not a job fair but an event for interviewers to interview students they have selected ahead of time. I was not planning on going but this past weekend I saw that the companies that will be interviewing there include the two of the bigger names in the internet industry.
On a lighter note, I was driving through campus earlier today and spotted a fellow Virginian who felt the need to broadcast to the entire world his feelings about one of the finest schools in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Ironically, this picture was taken in almost the exact same spot where I took the other picture last month.
Monday is normally my busiest day with three classes between 2 and 8pm. But today is turning out to be a very good day because there are no classes today and tomorrow. All MBA students get today and tomorrow off so that first years who are looking to go into investment banking can spend these two days going to New York City for their informational interviews.
I went to the gym this morning before meeting with some people for lunch at this place called Hector’s. Hector’s located on Henderson Street at where Off Franklin used to be. As I was putting in my order for a double cheeseburger with large fries, it was hard to not notice the contrast that a year ago, this was the same spot where I would go on Thursday or Friday nights to order a beer and hang out with the post-docs who work at the Linenberger Cancer Center.
Earlier this morning I was feeling kind of bad that my four day weekend was about to come to an end. That was until I realized that since my all day negotiations class met for the last time on Friday, all I have this week are two Wednesday classes followed by another four day weekend.
One thing I have noticed about American society today is that very rarely do people offer valuable and honest feedback. There are several reasons for this. One is we live in a society where we value not offending someone. Another is that we place a high value on making people feel good or better about themselves. A third reason is fear of retribution. will give you a good example of how I have seen this in my MBA experience. When a recruiter comes to Kenan-Flagler to interview students, the recruiter is given the opportunity to provide the Career Management Center with feedback on how specific interviewees have done during the interview. Even though the recruiters know that students will not be penalized by the Career Management Center for any negative (or positive) feedback and such feedback can only be used to help the students become better interviewees, I have been told that very rarely do recruiters given such feedback.
Yesterday morning I was still getting over the euphoria of the interview the day before in Long Island City when I received an email from one of my interviewers. This was a reply to the “thank you” email I sent out an hour ago. The email reads (paraphrasing) as follows:
“Hello (my first name), it was very nice meeting you too. I hope this helps you with your interview but in an interview, it helps to hear the actual question that is asked and phrase your answer in response to that question. Best of luck on your job search.”
While I have never had any delusions of grandeur about my interviewing skills, I never expected an interviewer to be so blunt with me. Even though a friend who read the email commented that it was rude, I have no doubt her intentions were good because I got the impression during the interview that she liked me personally. She was probably disappointed at how poorly I phrased my answers.
Obviously this has significantly deflated the excitement that I felt coming out of the interview. It’s the political equivalent (there I go again with my political analogies) of the exit polls showing that the constituents in polling districts that are friendly to you are not turning out with as much enthusiasm as you had expected and your pollster changed the race from “tossup” to “leaning (political party you don’t like).” I am really curious as to whether she wrote that email before or after meeting with my other interviewers. If before, it could be that she just didn’t like my answers and maybe I did better with the other two. In addition, this interviewer was half an hour late to a one hour interview. If she wrote the email after having met with them, it’s likely that one other interviewer commented on the same thing and I am dead in the water.
After I have had the chance to further digest the information, it dawned on me that her email was shocking because it was the type feedback recruiters don’t give anymore. It’s the type of honesty that is rooted in good intentions and yet our society and its legal system today no longer allow. Where some recruiters resort to not sending out rejection letters in an attempt to avoid lawsuits (the logic being that if a candidate has not yet been rejected, he cannot sue for discrimination), this interviewer took risk to help me become a better interviewee and I appreciate the gesture.
I just wish it didn’t come at such expense.
My deepest apologies for keeping all of you in suspense about yesterday’s second round interview at the credit card division of a major financial firm. I usually try to update this blog as soon as possible while the information is still fresh in my head but oftentimes this proves difficult and I have to resort to blogging about it the next day which is not nearly as exciting as blogging about it while I am still “in the moment.”
I landed at LaGuardia Airport two hours early, met up with a classmate who was on the same flight and we took a cab together to the tallest building Queens. We got there at noon and met up with two other classmates and one student from Kellogg who were all interviewing on the same day. The afternoon’s program began with lunch being served in a conference room. This lunch was really a warm up for the three hours of behavioral interviews ahead. As the five of us chowed down on sandwiches and cookies, one of the three people from the management associate program began firing away by asking “so what do you folks do for fun?” As the five of us began to go around the table to give our answers, the question quickly became "how do you get people aboard a project you are working on?" When it got to my turn I tried my best to be suave and answer the question while holding a ham sandwich on my right hand. This reminded me of the dinner at the Sienna Hotel the night before the first round interview where the representatives from the company were totally trying to use the informal event as yet another opportunity to try to feel us out.
The three interviews went pretty well. Each interviewer was given sheets of paper, each sheet representing a different skill set the interviewer was to ask us about with two to three possible questions to use. The one surprise was that noneof the interviewers were either current or former participants of the management associate program for which we were applying for. One interviewer was a manager responsible for the web offerings and another worked in risk management responsible for mitigating the bank’s risk on the portfolio of outstanding balances held by its cards’ customers.
Me and my three classmates left shortly after 4 and took a quick subway ride across the East River into Manhattan where we proceeded to dine on fillet mignon before hopping into a cab back to LaGuardia.
I got a big day tomorrow. The credit card division of a major financial firm is flying me to New York for an interview in its Long Island City office. I am suppose to get there at noon for lunch followed by three one hour behavioral interviews. When I made my arrangements last week, the company was willing to fly me up the day before and pay for one night’s stay at a fine Manhattan hotel. But I turned it down because I had classes today until 8pm. Besides, there is no point in getting there the night before if I don’t have to get there until noon.
Hmm … come to think of it, the next time a potential suitor is offering to lavish hospitality upon me, I should not be so hesitant and just accept its offer. After all, I got a reputation to keep around here and I wouldn’t want the other fellas to think of me as a cheap date.
This past Sunday, my church’s young adults group hosted a Thanksgiving dinner and each place setting had four kernels of corn, three white and one black. Our instructions were to use the kernels to discuss three things we are grateful for in our lives and one thing we are not so grateful for but will agree to trust God with.
The exercise reminded me of the post I wrote last Thanksgiving about the things in my life that I am grateful for. If I were to put together another list for this year, it would include items like the much easier pace of life during my second year in the program, the happy ending to the internship search last year, the Christian professors that I have become friends with, and the active job market that my mergers and acquisitions professor said is the best she’s seen in five years. But the one thing that I find most satisfying of all is that for the first time in my life, I now have male Christian friends that I can discuss certain issues with. and what a difference this has made in my life. I was talking to a friend two weeks ago - a friend who would kill me if he ever finds out I am blogging about our conversation but as he said to me many times “I stopped reading your blog ages ago because it sucks, you should delete the darn thing” - and he said “I have noticed you don’t talk about your women situation now as much as you did during your first year, why is that?” I didn’t know what to tell him, except that somehow the Lord has give me a sense of peace in the matter.
By the end of the dinner Sunday night, I had used the three white kernels and had to come up with something to use the black kernel. We went around the table sharing things about our lives that we wish weren’t the case and when it was my turn I said “I wish I didn’t have to leave Chapel Hill after I graduate in May” as I tossed the black kernel of corn into the dish.
What a fabulous weekend. I went up to UVA and attended the Miami game on Saturday. It’s been about three years since I have been to a home game and throughout the game, I saw several reminders of how the atmosphere at Scott Stadium has changed and yet still remained the same. The pep band is gone now, replaced by the new marching band. The team does not play as well as it did before, and this was reflected in the lower turnout than the one I was used to.
One thing I like about going to these games is that the athletic department always tries to keep things entertaining. Ever since 2000, the games would begin with an video intro showing an animated Cav Man mascot destroying the opposing team’s mascot before cutting away to a live shot of an actual rider (dressed in the Cav Man full body costume) riding out of the tunnel and into the field. This time around the athletic department outdone itself by having the Cav Man entered the field in a way that’s quite unexpected and dramatic (hint, watch the video).
The game ended as incredibly as it began with UVA beating Miami 17-7.
This came out just a few minutes ago. I was doing some reading just now for marketing class when I looked up at the refreshed WSJ.com front page and saw the news. I am going to write something quick before my carpool partner shows up.
Updated 4:14pm: To those familiar with his work, Milton Friedman espoused the classic free market idea, which is that in a free market, people (and companies) are free to choose. He wrote a book with the same name. What I like about the concept of freedom of choice is that it applies to every area of life, not just economics. For example, we are all free to choose when it comes to choices over our careers, friends, God, politics, right down to the companies and products we support with our consumer spending.
I find a striking parallel between this concept of free choice to the Christian concept of free will. Before I became a Christian, I once asked someone about God’s admonition to Adam and Eve at the Garden of Eden. I could not understand why He told them to not eat the apple when He had to know full well that they were going to do it anyway. The answer that came back was that He did it because He wanted them to exercise their free will; that instead of assuming they were going to eat the apple, He gave them not only the choice but also the information on that choice. Just yesterday I read Steve Forbes’ column in Forbes Magazine in which he recommended a book on how Christianity is responsible in no small part for the capitalistic societies we have in most of the Western world.
The last article Friedman wrote for the WSJ in October sums up his views on people and government very nicely:
“It had to happen. Hong Kong's policy of "positive noninterventionism" was too good to last. It went against all the instincts of government officials, paid to spend other people's money and meddle in other people's affairs. That's why it was sadly unsurprising to see Hong Kong's current leader, Donald Tsang, last month declare the death of the policy on which the territory's prosperity was built.”
Thanks Milton, for showing millions around the world that we are all free to choose.
With James Bond returning to the big screen on Friday and Jack Bauer (I suggest it is not a coincidence that both characters have the same initials) returning to once again save our country in January, the next two months will be almost too much to bear.
I just viewed the trailer to 24’s sixth season. The identity of the new President is revealed and you get to see which of your favorite (and one not so favorite) government employees from the Counter Terrorist Unit will return.
Just a few moments ago, I walked into the Career Management Library and a classmate said he almost didn’t recognize me without my suit on. I have had an interview in school every week for the past four weeks. Yesterday I had one with a computer hardware manufacturer that is in the process of moving its company to the Research Triangle Park area. I struggle a lot through these behavioral interviews and oftentimes I find myself walking out of one with the feeling as though I have just been beaten up. Yesterday was no different.
I mentioned last week that I am going to tell you about the two types of people you will meet in an interview. When a company sends representatives to Kenan-Flagler for an interview, the people they send will be either from human resources or from the actual department the company is hiring for. It is to your utmost advantage to find out before hand who your interviewer will be because your strategy will vary depending. Someone from human resources will ask you only behavioral questions while someone from the department may ask you questions pertaining to the actual position or the industry. Usually I prefer someone form the department because I can attempt to impress the interviewer by asking questions to show that I have done research on the industry and have thought about some of the issues the company has to deal with.
Last week when I interviewed with the credit cards division of a major financial firm, the firm divided the interviewees into two interview schedules, one was with someone from a vice president of the department and the other with someone from human resources. The night before, both representatives hosted the interviewees for a reception and dinner at the Sienna Hotel. The meal was fabulous but I found the conversation to be a bit intimidating. When I got to the hotel fifteen minutes into the reception, all the interviewees andthe two representatives were standing in the giant circle in the hotel lobby. It looked and felt like a mass interview where the representatives would ask questions such as “what do you do for fun” and “who did Carolina play last week in football?” During the dinner, there were two tables and I sat at the table with the vice president and during the entire meal I felt as though I was under the gun, being interviewed. The most bizarre moment hadto have been five minutes into the dinner when he asked me to talk about my summer internship and I noticed that as I prepared to launch into my schpeel about online marketing and minimizing our clients’ cost per click, I folded my hands on the table in front as though I was going through an actual interview. I had this great question that I wanted to ask about which electronic network was used to process the credit card transactions incurred by that company’s private label credit cards but I decided to hold off and save the question for the actual interview.
The next day was the interview and it went well. I was interviewed by the woman from human resources. When I asked my question about the electronic network that processes the transactions, she gave exactly the answer I had expected, which was to email the vice president and ask him. That’s another thing, by the way, asking someone from human resources a question about the company’s business will sometimes result in the interviewer not giving you an answer.
The end of the interview season is nowhere in sight. I have been invited to a second round interview with the credit cards division of the major financial firm. I will have three one-hour interviews back to back, all behavioral.
I was McColl the entire day on Friday’s for negotiations class. It meets for an entire day on Friday and for three Fridays. The class consists mainly of lecture and negotiations exercises. On Friday’s afternoon exercise, we were divided into teams of three, each team consisted of a buyer, a seller, and an observer. The buyer was to approach the seller with an offer to purchase his ranch. Unknown to the seller, the buyer was purchasing on behalf of an oil company which had determined that the land was sitting on an oil field and had already purchased three other ranches adjacent to the location. The seller had similar information about his land that was unknown to the buyer and affected his reservation price. It was the job of the buyer and the seller to spend forty five minutes questioning one another and negotiate a mutually agreed upon price in front of the observer, who had access to information on both sides and whose job it was to take notes and critique the players. The only rule governing the players was that we were not allowed to lie, but were encouraged to be creative in answering any question that would weaken our positions.
My role on Friday was that of a buyer and spent the first ten minutes answering the seller’s questions as to why I was approaching him out of the blue to buy his ranch. But I managed to turn the tables when I started negotiating and began by low balling my seller with a very low offer of $950 an acre. We eventually agreed upon a price of $2999, which later turned out to be the lowest price among all the negotiators in my class.
So imagine my shock I got home that evening and read an article in the Wall Street Journal about a scenario almost identical to the one we acted out in class that afternoon. A millionaire sent his representatives to a small town in Texas to discreetly purchase large tracts of land. Only in this scenario it is not an oil company interested in building an oil field but the founder of the world’s largest online retailer wanting to build a landing strip for space flights.
One of the things I really like about UNC is how the main campus comes to life on a nice day like today. I really think Kenan-Flagler got screwed when it decided to move out of Carroll Hall and the powers that be decided to build the new facilities on south campus by the Dean Dome instead of on the more centrally located location near the Bell Tower.
Since I have no classes today, I woke up, packed up a day’s worth of reading, and took the bus to main campus where I took a position (now why did I just say that, “took a position” as though I am Bud Fox buying up blocks of stocks for Gordon Gekko?) at the House Undergraduate Library.
On my way to Lenoir for lunch earlier I walked by the Pit where I saw a preacher debating with a group of students who were sitting and standing in front of him. After I got my lunch, I returned to the Pit and sat on the steps to listen to this guy while I digested my shrimp lo mein and two cans of Coke. The main theme of the day is science and there was a lot of back and forth between him and the students on topics such as creationism versus evolution, how God created the universe in seven days, the big bang, etc. When I was at UVA, we would get a couple of these preachers every semester who would show up and start talking at the amphitheater while waiting for an audience to gather. I used to really enjoy hearing those guys before I became a Christian. While I recognize that some of them purposely come across as sensational, “over the top,” and even hateful, I think their work for the most part is virtuous for it gets students thinking about topics they otherwise would not think about. I am not sure where these preachers come from, whether they are from a local church, out of town, or how they decide what campus to go to, but I am certainly glad this guy came to UNC today .
Oops. I almost went an entire day without blogging. Since nothing interesting has happened in the last 24 hours (no, I don’t want to talk about the election results), I think I will give everyone an update on my interviews.
I had an interview with a major oil company on Thursday. The interview didn’t go very well. I didn’t particularly feel articulate and I didn’t get the impression that the interviewer was interested in interviewing me. It was almost as though she had decided before the interview whether I was going to get a second round or not and seeing me in person was just a formality. Where I really messed up was when she asked about my least favorite class. In finance parlance, this is one of those questions that has very limited upside and unlimited downside. In other words, there are very few good answers and way too many bad answers that can take you out of the running. In response, I talked about a particular class where the professor had stringent rules and made students feel as though we were treated like undergrads rather than students in a professional school. After the interview, it took me a total of ten minutes to realize I had given a very bad answer. I got an email Monday night telling me to not expect a second interview.
There were two companies I interviewed with yesterday. The one in the morning was with a tire company. I always get to the waiting room about ten minutes early, double check my name, and if possible find out the name of the interviewer. I thought I was being quite clever when the interviewer came in, called out my name, and during the handshake I addressed her by her first name before she had the chance to give it. But the interview that followed didn’t go as well. I just didn’t feel from her response that I was getting through to her or that she was impressed with me.
After this interview, I had some time to gather my thoughts for my afternoon interview with the credit card division of major bank. I had purposely arranged the more important interview for the afternoon so that I could use the morning interview as preparation and it worked. Even though both interview asked me behavioral questions, I did substantially better in the afternoon interview than in the morning interview.
Later this week I will blog about the two type of people who come to campus to conduct interviews and how you can get a leg up in the process by finding out ahead of time what type your interviewer falls into.
I am one of these civics fanatics who thinks there is something very exciting and uniquely American about election day. One time when I was in high school I was listening to Rush Limbaugh on election day and he ended his radio program by saying, “by tomorrow we will know whether the country will become more conservative or more commie lib.” You may disagree with his characterization of the two sides but he sums up the point that in America, the people get to decide.
On most election days, I normally go to the polls the first thing in the morning. I didn’t do that today because it was raining and I had to prepare for my morning interview. But I fully plan on stopping by my polling place to vote later this afternoon when hopefully the rain would have stopped. There are no closely contested elections in North Carolina this year. My choices for Congress consist of the incumbent and the older brother of the pastor of my church. Mike Nifong, the Durham County district attorney who prosecuted the Duke lacrosse players, is in my district and on the ballot. Not sure if I will vote for him, his opponent (who wants you to vote for him even though he will not serve if elected), write in the name of the candidate endorsed by the Republicans, or write in something clever like Colin Finnerty. I am peeved that my home state is having the most exciting Senatorial election since Ollie North ran in 1994 and I am not there to participate (damn … if I had only gotten in to Dard … nevermind). This race has really been a big surprise. If you had gone to Las Vegas (or an online political futures web site) a year ago and made a bet that Senator George Allen would lose today, you’d make a five to tenfold return on your money.
Most of my classmates at Kenan-Flagler are either unaware or apathetic about today’s election. This morning I reminded a couple of my classmates that they had until 7pm to vote. One classmate jokingly said that if I was only going to encourage those who agree with me to vote perhaps I should send an email to the MBA Finance Club. Not a bad idea. And while I am at it, I should email Net Impact suggesting that its members stay home today and vote tomorrow when the weather will be much nicer.
Update: Oops ... I almost forgot to include my predictions. Comes January 1, I believe the makeup of the Congress will be 51-52 Republicans in the Senate and the Democrats will control the House by no more than 4-5 seats. And Buckyhoo will still not have accepted a full time employment offer.
Yesterday’s New York Times had an article about online obituaries. Specifically, it talks about the enormous effort by Legacy.com to screen out certain not nice things people may write on its web sites about the dead.
“Legacy is paid by more than 300 newspapers, including The New York Times, to publish their death notices and obituaries, and mourners can pay a fee to keep the guest books up longer. By attaching a publicly accessible guest book to most of the obituaries, the site has provided a new way to grieve, and in the process has all but cornered the market.
The company dedicates at least 30 percent of its budget, and 45 of its 75 employees, to catching the personal attacks and other inappropriate comments, nearly 200,000 in all, submitted each year.”
Personally I don’t know what all this uproar is. The purpose of these web sites is to give the living an outlet for their grief. And someone writing something like “you were a jerk in business school and your blog sucks” is his way of expressing his grief and he should be allowed to do that. After reading the article, I went onto the web page and typed in the names of a couple of a couple of deans, professors, and administrators I knew at UVA whom I suspect are close to their expiration dates. I was unable to find them listed but it gave me an excellent idea. Legacy.com should offer a subscription service where for a fee, I can create an account and enter the names of a number of people I want to keep a “watch” on and be alerted via email when an entry for them shows up. Better yet, I should be able to keep a “watch” on people with certain last names.
This reminds me of something. When I was at UVA I knew someone – I wasn’t friends with him but friends with his apartment mates – who once read in the paper about a student dying in a fire and sent her an email saying “I am glad you are where you are right now.” He didn’t know her but did it for the thrill of it. On another occasion, I was in the apartment and when the topic came up about another student who committed suicide, he sarcastically asked “what’s his email address?” I don’t know if he was joking or if he had gotten into the habit of emailing dead students.
A graduate student in the library science program told me about this last night at the Intervarsity meeting. This web site tracks the speeches given by American presidents over the last 200 years and, very much like certain web sites, has a “tag cloud” feature that shows you how often certain key words show up.
Enjoy!
Earlier today I overheard a classmate talking to a recruiter saying “I am a second year in business school, life doesn’t get much better than this.” To which the recruiter responded, “it’ll be all downhill after you graduate.”
The exchange illustrates something I am keenly aware of, that life as a second year is a significant and substantial improvement over life as a first year and that this big party all comes to an end once we rejoin the workforce. Much of this has to do with the classes and schedule most second years have. To illustrate, I am only taking four classes this Mod, services marketing, brand strategy, leading organizational change, and negotiations. Negotiations meets only three times for an entire day on Friday. I have no classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. My current “weekend” began when my services marketing class ended at 5pm yesterday and will not end until my leading organizational change class begins Monday at 2pm. This four and a half day “weekend” is longer than the work week of some people I know, especially those who work for the national government. I was having dinner with a friend of mine after class on Monday and when I mentioned this incredible schedule that I have, he said “you will never it this good again.”
Tonight me and a friend from my life prior to the Kenan-Flagler program went out to Franklin Street for the biggest Halloween party in North Carolina. An entire stretch of Franklin was shut down to vehicular traffic and filled with revelers dressed in the most creative costumes I have ever seen. I saw guys dressed up as Bill Clinton, girls dressed up as bumblebees, Dick Cheney, a giant penis, George W. Bush (if I have more time I would insert a very funny joke here linking the last three items), women in short skirts, the camera crew from Girls Gone Wild, an iPod, Hare Krishna followers parading down Franklin Street (oh wait … I think they were actual Hare Krishna followers), women in extremely short skirts, Adam and Eve.
I went as Uncle Sam and my friend went as (one of many) Johnny Cash. After tonight’s Halloween party I can finally say I have seen everything.
Update: Here is the link to the newspaper article in the Daily Tar Heel about the party.
Did anyone see Game 7 of the National League Championship Series when Scott Rolen of the New York Mets thought he had hit a two run homerun only to see his ball caught by outfielder Endy Chavez of the Detroit Tigers? That is how I would describe this morning’s interview with a telecom company.
The interview began with the predictable softball questions about my past work experience. The lead interviewer was a Kenan-Flagler grad who currently works in the management leadership program and the other was a human resource personnel. The next question was about what strategy I would pursue to deploy the company’s new television service. I listed my strategy into three bullet points which demonstrated my understanding of the industry, its challenges, and where it was going. I even referenced an article in the Wall Street Journal last year about a Verizon executive whose job it was to negotiate deals with content providers to appear on its FIOS television service. The lead interviewer was familiar with the article and was impressed that I had read it.
I was beginning to think I had hit a homerun until I glanced at the clock and realized the interview was nowhere near the halfway point. Then the real questions came in. There were three behavioral questions in a row about situations I have been in where I showed leadership, changed other people’s point of view, or had to prepare for a meeting. I struggled with answering them and it showed. The truth of the matter is during the years when I was working, 99% of the time I went into the office, sat at my desk, and waited for work to appear. I know what I just wrote is shocking (except perhaps to my former co-workers who no doubt are giggling as they read this) for it is something you almost never hear an MBA student say but hey …. the subtitle of this blog is “a place for me to share my hopes and thoughts” and not “a place for me to brag about how smart I am to a potential employer.” Some of my answers were about situations with working in groups at Kenan-Flagler, which I have been told are not as impressive as examples from actual work experience. I could tell from the lead interviewer’s response that while he tried to be positive and encouraging, that he was not as impressed with my behavioral answers as he was with my earlier answers.
When the interview ended, we performed our obligatory handshakes and the interviewer said “good luck.” It was the same “good luck” I have heard so many times during my first year, the “good luck” which tells me that I would not be getting a second round.
Hey, looks like someone was trying to make a political statement around Chapel Hill last Thursday by driving her (if I remember correctly, I think it was a woman) Celica through main campus by the well. This reminds me of a joke that my Advanced Placement American history teacher told in high school, that when God made this country, he tilted it and all the nuts rolled to the left (geographically, not politically) and landed in California.
Greetings from Cincinnati where I am attending the National Society of Hispanic MBA (pronounced nar-SHIM-bar) job fair. I woke up early yesterday morning and took a irect flight from to Cincinnati where I got a free cab ride to the Duke Convention Energy courtesy a recruiter who gave a presentation at Kenan-Flagler the night before and was on my flight also on his way to NSHMBA.
At the event yesterday, it was wall to wall recruiters and nonstop networking with them. I hit up the three companies that I talked to at the Atlanta job fair a month ago. I made yet another attempt to score with the world’s largest software company, and the attempt once again failed to result in success. I had more success with a couple of companies that I have been trying to get into including the online retailer, a wireless phone company from the Midwest, and a newspaper company that owns a portfolio of internet content web sites.
When the career fair ended, I went back to my hotel room to change into something only slightly more casual and returned to the area around the convention center for the receptions and parties. I went to the reception for the world’s largest software company where someone confirmed my suspicions that the company is hiring in its online division, and that the recruiter I interviewed with on Tuesday was blowing me off by telling me otherwise. I also went to a reception for a company that I will be interviewing with at Kenan-Flagler later on this month. But the main event was a dance party organized by a major retailer and major sponsor of NSHMBA. The entire Hyatt ballroom was decorated with items that bore the company’s red and white logo, which is a circle within another circle. Guests were given round magnets that they wore on their clothes that blink a red light. I met a girl from another business school who had on a tight red turtleneck and she strategically placed two magnets on each end of her breast. As we were talking,I found her “dots” to be quite distracting and at one point she said “hello my eyes are up here.” There were other guys coming up to her and offering to shake her hand, have their pictures taken with her, and one recruiter even gave her his business card jokingly told her to email her resume and write on the subject line “I am the girl with the blinking (expletive deleted).”
I returned to the job fair today to hit some of the companies that I did not talk to yesterday. I went up to a restaurant company from Orlando and while talking to the recruiters about a marketing position, I decided to take a gamble by disclosing that I had second round interview in March for a finance internship with the company. The gamble paid off; instead of coming across as unfocused, the recruiters were impressed at how much I already know about the firm. The recruiters gave me the email address of someone they want me to talk to (recruiters are usually reluctant to disclose contact information so getting an email address is usually a good sign) and a $5 gift card.
When I get around to it, hopefully later today, I will give a full wrap up of the National Society of Hispanic MBA (pronounced nar-SHIM-bar) job fair. But I saw this article last night on the internets, politicians from the Vice President to Senator Barack Obama are carrying around bottles of hand sanitizers and using the product after every event that involves massive hand shakings.
Not only do I think this is a great idea, I think most MBA students should consider doing something similar, especially at networking events like job fairs which requires a massive number of handshakes.
These have got to be the most beautiful eight words that can possibly greet me when I check my email the first thing in the morning. I have just been added to the closed interview list for a credit card marketing position of a major financial firm.
I am not exactly sure why the rate of return on my cover letters has improved so much this year. It could be that I am not longer targeting finance jobs, it could also be that a friend helped me rewrite many of the bullet points on my resume.
Now if only this friend can walk into the interview room with me and help me craft the answer to every question before it comes out of my mouth, then I’d be golden.
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