Another Thursday night at the Martini Bar

After going to a forum sponsored by the General Alumni Association on the situation in the Middle East, I went to the Davis Library to work on a project for my internship. When the library closed at 10, my instinct was to head home but I couldn’t get over the fact that it was a nice Thursday night during the summer in a college town. I ended up going to the Martini Bar instead.

 

I didn’t see too many people there and was planning to head home after my martini but five minutes later a classmate of mine came in with a group of first years. Over the next hour, the place began to get progressively filled up with more first years. I ended up staying for almost two hours. At about 11, as my classmate was leaving, I was trying to get him to stay for the group was going to go to Lucy’s for 80’s night. He said “I can’t, I have work tomorrow.”

 

Bummer.

Tags: MBA experience, Lucy's, Martini Bar, socializing

“You don’t understand, I have an MBA”

A couple of my co-workers were teasing me yesterday about the FedEx ad which came out a few years back. It features an MBA graduate on his first day in the office. A supervisor asked him to help her with mailing out packages and when he explained that he had an MBA, she responded by saying “well in that case, I will have to show you how to do it.”

 

The ad illustrates the expectations that many MBA students have about their future jobs and their summer internships. When I started my internship, I had similar expectations and remember commenting to someone during my first week that I was surprised at how little MBA skills my internship involved. I have since gathered from further conversations with others that, with the exception of finance jobs, many MBA jobs do not involve a heavy utilization of concepts learned in the classroom.

This surprises me even though it shouldn’t. When I was at AOL, I did not do anything that required using anything I have learned in college. The closest I came to applying microeconomics concepts in the office was using the efficient market theory to explain to a co-worker why guys flock to certain bars (they tend to flock to bars that have a favorable ratio of girls, thus immediately extinguishing the very opportunity they set out to exploit). I even remember the most popular professor at UVA telling a story in class about him doing consulting at a law firm and an attorney saying to him “a high school graduate can do what I do.” The attorney went on to tell him that the only reason a high school graduate could not get hired for his job (which was to read contracts) was because the high school graduate would not take it seriously enough.

I am beginning to understand that most of higher education is not about what you learn but getting the appropriate letters stamped onto your resume so that you can be taken seriously in the job market. As one Kenan-Flagler alum told me at a happy hour at Tyler’s Taproom in Durham two weeks ago when I brought up this topic, an MBA is “the dues you pay to join the club.”

Tags: MBA experience, MBA stereotypes, UVA, economics

Getting out of harm’s way

Like many Americans, I have been watching the video footage from Lebanon showing civilians trying to escape the Israeli bombings. The reportage reminds me of something I heard when I was kid.

 

When I was young both my parents worked and they would hire a full time maid to watch me during the day and help out with dinner and the dishes at night. Among the different maids who worked for my family when I was between the ages of three and six, one was an old Chinese woman who used to tell me stories about different things she experience when she was younger. One of her stories was about civilians fleeing from the path of the invading Japanese army during World War II. She said some parents would buy their children a popsicle and use it as a distraction to abandon them on the side of the road.

 

Her story was one of those very disturbing things you heard when you were a kid that stays with you forever. I would love to find out whether it actually happened or not, although the likelihood of me finding a reliable answer either way is remote.

 

It goes without saying that I became extremely suspicious every time my parents offered to buy me a popsicle.

Tags: Childhood memories

Yahoo! versus Google

Today’s New York Times has an article comparing the two internet companies’ approaches to marketing their products to users. While many Yahoo! features are linked together, Google features are more likely to be “separate islands.” There is a more consistent and predictable feel across different parts of the Yahoo! service while Google’s products have more of a “wow” factor.

The graphics above shows how the two internet giants’ audience share in various internet services. I was very surprised to see that AOL News has a bigger monthly U.S. audience than CNN and that AOL email has a bigger share of U.S. users than Hotmail.

Tags: Media industry, aol

Course selection

Last week I began bidding for classes for Mods I and II. I have noticed that most of the classes I have taken during my first year fall into three categories. The first is classes that teach you hard skills such as finance or accounting. These tend to be classes where every question has a right and a wrong answer. The second is classes that test your ability to be creative. These tend to be soft skill classes such as ethics and leading and managing where your performance depends on your ability to “bull you know what” on an assignment. The last category is classes in between, where you show you understand the material by applying a framework to a particular situation. Marketing and strategery are good examples of these classes.

 

My next two mods will contain a good combination of classes from the three categories. When I looked at the list of classes, I noticed immediately that Mod I not only offers more classes but more classes I am interested in. Even though I did not get into all the classes I wanted but I am relatively happy with the outcome. Originally I was going to use this post to write about some of the tricks I successfully bid for the classes I wanted but I think I am better off keeping keep that information to myself for the time being. But have no fear, my dear readers, I will try to revisit this topic in January after I am done bidding for the last classes I am ever going to take at Kenan-Flagler.

Tags: MBA experience

Remembering to count my blessings

Recently I received a letter that made me realize I should spend more time feeling grateful for the things that I have instead of complaining about some of the things in my life that I feel are not going right. One of the things I have always wanted to change about myself is the way I work. I have noticed since college that I don’t get work done as quickly as my counterparts do. A good example is I tend to spend more time studying and doing assignments than my classmates to get the same results. This deficiency carries to other parts of my life, such as getting work done in the office and doing personal errands. I am not sure why I have this problem but I suspect the main culprit is my inability to focus and my vulnerability to distractions.

 

The letter was written by a man name Matt and was forwarded to me in an email on the young professionals mailing list of the church he used to attend. I have never met Matt but I know he is in his mid 20s. In the letter he described his struggles over the past seven years with obsessive compulsive and sensory integration disorder. Overnight he turned from a college student with a 4.0 average to one who has lost 95% of his ability to focus and to concentrate. It began to take him three to four times as long to do anything from reading a paragraph, writing a textbook, doing personal errands, to getting dressed. As the years went by, his condition got worse. His disorder created an itch that made him uncomfortable from the moment he woke up to the moment he went to sleep.

 

Eventually it got to the point where his inability to concentrate and the physical discomfort from the itching rendered him unable to function. It became difficult for him to communicate with friends and loved ones. He gave up his dream of becoming a doctor and was unable to hold on to seven different jobs in the past twelve months.

 

Matt Cress died a week ago today. The letter that was forwarded to me was his suicide letter.

Dell’s exploding laptop

This New York Times article made me chuckle this morning. At a conference last month in Japan, a Dell laptop burst into flames and the explosion was witnessed by several participants and captured on video tape.

Wouldn’t it be funny if one of these laptops with the faulty lithium ion battery ends up in the hands of an MBA student and in the middle of class one day as the professor is walking through the students on hopping through fifteen different worksheets on an Excel file to correctly approximate the stock valuation for Dell and the laptop spontaneously explodes. As long as no one gets hurt, the incident would be quite hilarious.

Perhaps this is part of the reason Kenan-Flagler stopped offering Dell laptops this year.

Free AOL forever

This was mentioned earlier tonight on Nightly Business Report. For years AOL has been hawking the BYOA (bring your own access) service plan on the premise that customers who already have broadband internet access will continue to stay with the service by paying anywhere from $10 to $15 per month (depending on the latest promo plans). But the more I look at the way the AOL service has evolved (the helpful chaps at Dulles have rolled out a new email form so that now AOL members can multitask every time they read an email by being forced to look at an ad on the same screen) and how it compares to other offerings (such as those available from Google) available, the more I doubt anyone who already has internet access would pay AOL regardless of how slick its market messaging is. 

 

The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that the folks at AOL HQ are considering just that, turning AOL into a free service for members who do not use the dialup portion of the service.

 

“In what would mark a dramatic shift in strategy, Time Warner Inc.'s AOL unit is considering offering its entire menu of services, including email, free of charge to anyone with a high-speed Internet connection, people familiar with the matter said.”

 

According to the article this move can result in AOL losing up to $2 billion in revenue every year, compared to the $8.3 billion in total revenue it received last year. But this is a move that AOL must make to keep itself competitive in the post-dialup internet arena.

Tags: AOL, media industry

One year mark and does anyone remember who Laura Palmer is

A year ago tomorrow I drove to North Carolina and began the ASW II summer session at Kenan-Flagler. Earlier tonight I went to the welcome happy hour at La Rez to meet up with this year’s ASW II participants, many of whom have only arrived in town within the past couple of days.

We left La Rez to go to Spany’s for dinner and conversation. Somewhere along the way I mentioned the television show Dallas and a student asked if any of us could remember who killed Laura Palmer. I correctly gave the answer and went on to spend the next two minutes talking to him about the most memorable lines and scenes from the television show Twin Peaks.

One thing I noticed almost immediately about the students tonight is that there has been a substantial improvement in the women to guy ratio compared to their Class of 2007 counterparts. I talked to one cute girl who lives in my apartment complex. She remembered that I had wished her a happy Fourth of July as I walked by her yesterday on my way to the trash dump. There was someone else whom I recognized but never got the chance to talk to. I met him at the MBA Experience Weekend in 2005. Yes, I said 2005. He paid his deposits that but ended up not enrolling. Since it is Kenan-Flagler's policy to not offer deferrals, he must have applied a second time before deciding to come here. Someone should put a picture of him in the Visa television commercial that ends with the caption "Life Takes Determination."

And in case any of you cares, Laura Palmer was killed by a demon name Bob who had possessed her father.

Tags: MBA experience