And then there were three

My financing deals class ended on Monday when we handed in our final projects. The sales class ended yesterday when I met with my group for the last time on how to finish the last quarter of our sales simulation. I said earlier that there is a final for sales but fortunately I was mistaken, it’s only a final class on Thursday to debrief the results of how different teams did on the simulation. What else …. pricing class does not have a final exam so that leaves us with a paper due tonight in strategic innovation, a decisions, data, and tools exam tomorrow, and an entrepreneurial marketing paper due Friday morning.

 

I cannot wait for this Mod to end so I can go back to living like a normal human being again.

Still not back to 100%

Looks like I spoke too soon on Thursday when I said the fever had dissipated. By Friday, I was back to 101 degrees and the fever didn’t completely go way until Sunday morning.

 

The doctor said I have strep throat and gave me antibiotics to keep me from becoming a walking biohazard to those around me. Needless to say, I didn’t get much done this past weekend, I spent most of it sleeping and eating spaghetti. I spent today attending classes very strategically, did not attend my 8am pricing class, attended the two other classes in the morning and went home to sleep while my 2pm entrepreneurial marketing class met for the last time. Woke up tonight in time to go see economist Walter Williams speak to the UNC College Republicans at the Law School.

 

If on an ordinary day I am “Jack Bauer,” then today I was more like “Edgar.” Hopefully I will get better before my final exams and final assignments later this week.

My lifestyle catching up on me

Today was not a good day. I have not been feeling too well since Tuesday when I fell asleep while watching NBC Nightly News and woke up feeling a mild sore throat. The soreness continued and by the time my sales class ended today, I knew for certain I had caught something.

 

I got home after my strategic innovation class, slept for three hours, and when I woke up my thermometer clocked close to 101 degrees. The good news is that the fever has almost completely dissipated but the bad news is this is the worst time in the calendar for me to get sick. I have a ton of assignments due between now and next Thursday when I have a final exam for my data, decisions, and tools class and one for my sales class.

 

In some strange way, I think this may be my body’s way of yelling “uncle!”  It may be telling me that taking six classes, staying up until 4am, showing up to class with not enough sleep, and jam packing my schedule with little things like running off to main campus to see the C-SPAN truck is taking a toll on me. When Mod 4 begins, I am going to take it easy and take no more than four classes. Hopefully I can cut it down to three.

Playing hooky

I saw on this morning’s Daily Tar Heel that C-SPAN’s Road to the White House tour bus was paying a visit to UNC today. During the ten minutes between the end of my data tools, and decision class and the beginning of my financing deals class, I ran to the garage and drove to the student union building where I parked illegally behind the bus and spent five minutes talking to a producer of my favorite television program. He said his team wasn’t in town to cover any event in particular but to educate viewers and potential viewers about the network’s election coverage. I jokingly suggested that he should drive over to Old Greensboro Road and shoot footage of John Edwards’ new mansion which I said looks like the Southfork Ranch from the TV show Dallas. I got to see the “living room” in the back where Presidents Clinton and Bush have been interviewed and left with a Road to the White House t-shirt.

On my way back to McColl, I saw a different tour bus parked in front of the Dean Smith Center, one that I am not as thrilled out. I will post the picture so that McCoy can get all giddy over it.



I managed to get back in time to have missed only the first ten minutes of my financing deals class. And from looking at the slides that the professor handed out, looks like I hadn’t missed much.

Knowing when to fold

The pricing class is turning out to be a real pain in the rear. I have two items due tomorrow, a “short analysis” worth 5% of my grades and a “major individual assignment” worth 15%. Both are pretty challenging but my main problem is I don’t feel the professor has adequately prepared us on how to do this. I think I got at least half of the “major individual assignment” and at most 20% of the ”short analysis” figured out.

 

If this had been during first year, I’d be spending the next two hours reading the case over and over again. But one of the benefits of being second year is the ability to recognize when you’ve been dealt a bad hand of cards and the best response is to walk away from the table.

 

In the meantime, I found out that a software company in Durham that I am interested in is having an open house tomorrow.  I first heard about this company last semester when I was at a UVA happy hour. I met someone who works there who also happens to be a Kenan-Flagler MBA alum. He mentioned the name of the company to me and I filed it in the back of my mind as one of the companies I may want to hit up somewhere down the line. Two hours ago, I saw a note from the Career Management Center on the job fair and did some quick research. I had forgotten the guy’s name and went to Hoosonline to try to look it up and was shocked to learn that he is one of the founders.

 

Goes to show you the importance of networking.

Less than 90 days

I looked at the calendar over the weekend and noticed that I am less than three months away from graduation. That’s quite a compelling piece of information. It means I have less than 90 days to learn about interesting topics that will (hopefully) be of use to me down the line, less than 13 weeks to randomly make friends with students from other programs, and less than three months to enjoy the fine atmosphere at UNC. 

 

During lunch today, we had a guest speaker for the pricing class. I ran into a classmate of mine and we decided to go to lunch on Franklin Street. I figured I can catch up on what I missed in class on Wednesday. Besides, the last time we had a guest speaker in pricing class was two weeks ago when someone from a major consulting firm came to speak about pricing issues and I cannot for the life of me remember anything he talked about.

“Stay hungry, stay foolish”

I interviewed with two companies in the past week. One was an internet content company I very much want to work for. The other was a construction equipment rental company I am not particularly interested in. Both companies emailed me yesterday afternoon informing me that they have decided to continue their search with other applicants.

 

Just as I was not particularly disappointed at being rejected by the construction equipment rental company, I was not particularly surprised that I did not make it to the next round with the internet content company. From the conversations I have had with first years who interviewed with it for an internship, I got the impression it has extremely high expectations for its employees. One student told me “when asked a normal question, do not give a normal answer.” And the company can afford to be picky because of the enormous amount of job seekers it attracts. I guess everyone wants to work for you when you’re Fortune Magazine’s number one best company to work for (hint).

 

So the question now is, what next. I have been steadily sending my resume to companies I am interested in. My experience this past week has only strengthened my conviction that I do not want to work for a company that is outside of the technology industry. Nothing illustrated this more vividly than the way I reacted to my two interviews. I spent hours preparing for my interview with Fortune Magazine’s number one best company to work for and spent the moments right before my interview with the construction equipment rental company sitting in the Kenan-Flagler waiting room almost wishing I had not signed up for it.

 

Right before I got the rejection emails yesterday, I was in strategic innovation class and the professor showed the video of Steve Jobs speaking at the 2005 Stanford University commencement. He talked about the importance of doing work that you love.

 

(Start watching at around the nine minute mark)

 

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you will know when you find it.”

 

Later today, I will be keeping those words in mind as I drive up to Durham for the Carolina MBA Connection job fair.

The new justification for higher education

I came across this about an hour ago while watching a story on the CNN web page. It’s about a dating service in New York that matches wealthy men with attractive women. Interested men have to submit bank statements demonstrating their salaries and net worth while women applicants have to merely submit a picture.

 

When I went to the service’s web site and played the video, a crowd of classmates started gathering around me. So I figure I might as well put it up here so you can all have a look at it. At UVA, the bookstore used to sell a poster with a picture of an oceanfront mansion with a garage filled with luxury sports cars under the title “justification for higher education.” I used to laugh everytime I saw that poster but I can think something like this might be more effective as a motivator.

 

(I am unable to embed the video, so I am going to post the links instead)

 

Natural Selection I

Natural Selection II

The second shift continues

At lunch yesterday a classmate asked what time I went to sleep the night before. When I gave her the answer, she commented that she was amazed at how fresh and alert I looked. I then told her my little secret, that I take naps after I get home before proceeding to have dinner and beginning what I call my second shift.

 

And this has been a week of long and late second shifts. Every year the week of Valentine’s Day is always the week when major assignments are due and this year is no different. Later today I will be handing in a group assignment for pricing, another one for data decisions and tools, and an individual write up for entrepreneurial marketing.

 

When I got out of my group meeting yesterday for one of the assignments that’s due today, I looked at my watch and realized we had been sitting in that little room for three hours. I barely had time for a one hour nap at home before having to drag myself out of bed, get dinner, and get myself to the library to get the remainder of my work done. I had wanted to go to the basketball game (Virginia Tech won by one point in overtime) but gave my ticket to two exchange students. I figured they should see at least one game while they are at UNC. Right before I left the library, I was writing up my entrepreneurial marketing assignment and kept hitting Alt-E-L (select all) followed by Ctrl+2 (double space) until I was able to achieve the satisfactory number of pages.

 

It’s now past 4am and the time reminds me of Frank Sinatra singing about “the wee small hours of the morning when the whole wide world is fast asleep.”  I know I really should be getting ready for bed instead of watching the West Wing on DVD and writing my blog posting. After all Wednesday is one of my more packed days. But I realize the time will soon come when I will no longer have the luxury of being able to stay up until 4am without risking getting fired and I need to enjoy this perk while I still can.

 

There will be plenty of opportunities to sleep when I rejoin the “the whole wide world” that Sinatra sings about.

“I look forward to hearing from you soon”

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS OF MONDAY'S EPISODE OF 24. IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN IT YET, SKIP THE FIRST PARAGRAPH.

 

Before I tell you about my day yesterday, I just want to say that I am watching Monday’s two hour episode of 24 right now and it’s pretty clear where this show is headed. At sometime during this season, Jack will kill his father.

 

After the phone interview on Friday, I emailed the recruiter reporting to her that we had a good conversation and asked her to pass my gratitude to the interviewer (I did not get the his contact information). She wrote back today saying “I am glad the conversation went well, (name of the head recruiter) will be in touch shortly about the next steps.”

 

I am not sure what to make of it. It sounded pretty positive but I don’t want to get my hopes up too high. If you think about it, me receiving an email saying “thanks for getting your hopes up for nothing, best of luck finding a job anywhere but here” is also a next step. Isn’t it? 

 

In the meantime, I had an interview yesterday at Kenan-Flagler with the construction equipment rental company that came for a presentation two weeks ago. I must have spent at least six hours preparing for the phone interview on Friday, compared to only one for the one yesterday. Yet I didn’t do seven times better during Friday’s phone interview. This really goes to underscore the frustrating part about these interviews, that they are really hard to prepare for. At the interview suite yesterday, I was surprised that the interviewer kept asking how I arrived at the quantitative claims on myresume’s bullet points such as “realized savings of $X via new process.” Unfortunately I did not have my laptop with me in the interview room and therefore was unable to pull up the spreadsheet file where I listed my assumptions and made the calculations. But thanks to my impeccable memory, I was able to recall most of the details of how I arrived at those numbers even if I could not remember the exact numbers.

 

I am just glad that when I updated my resume this past summer, I resisted the urge to mention that me and Al Gore invented the internet together.

The phone call

On Friday, I had the phone interview that I have been anticipating for the past two and a half weeks. This was the interview with an internet content company that I very much want to work for.

 

It went relatively well. It was suppose to begin at 1:15 and last anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes. One of the career counselors at the Career Management Center was nice enough to let me use his office, which was where I was starting at 1pm. The phone didn't ring until 1:20. The interviewer began by telling me his experience at the company (he's been there for 5 months), talked about what my role would entail, and asked me to do my resume walk. He stopped at about five minutes into the phone call and said he had to vacate the conference room he was in and would call me back from a new location.

 

He called me back pretty quickly and allowed me to finish my resume walk. His first question was to talk about a product that I have used that is designed poorly. I was asked almost the exact same question a year ago when I had my phone interview for a finance internship with the world’s largest software company. Yet for whatever reason, I didn’t anticipate it and took me quite a while to come up with a product to talk about. His second question was one I had anticipated but yet had no way to prepare for. It was a brain teaser question.

 

I had no clue as to how to begin to answer the brain teaser question. I thought about how ironic my situation was, that I had spent hours reading blogs about this industry, read up on everything I could find about the company, even looked at the PowerPoint deck of the presentation its chief financial officer gave at a recent analyst meeting, yet I was going to blow the interview because of a stupid brain teaser question. But I quickly regained my composure and began to verbalize my logic and thinking. By the time I was done answering it, I would say I got anywhere from 60 to 85% of the puzzle, good enough for a P (pass).

 

The interviewer then allowed me to ask two questions before he ended the interview. He said he would give his feedback and I will hear something this week. The phone call (not including the time when he had to switch rooms) lasted a bit more than 30 minutes. I walked away thinking I did well enough to get the next round but it was by no means a slam dunk. The more I think about it, the more I don’t like the way I answered the “‘poorly designed” question. My answer was not so much about anything that was poorly designed but more about what I don’t like about the product and how I would change it.

 

Even though this phone interview is probably the most exciting thing that has happened to my job search this school year, I still haven’t told too many people about it. I don’t particularly want a bunch of well meaning people constantly coming up to me and asking for updates. I am also going to continue to refrain from hinting on this blog as to what company this is. But have no fear, when the time is right (which I define as either I get invited to a company visit or receive a rejection email) I will adequately leave enough hints for you to figure out what company this is. Perhaps then you will understand why this phone interview was such a big deal.

Celebration on Franklin Street

If a picture of worth a thousand words, the above video must have been worth an entire novel. This was the scene at the corner of Franklin and Columbia Streets at about 11:20 last night after Carolina’s come-from-behind 79 to 73 victory over Duke. I filmed this while standing on a flowerbed on the southeast corner of the intersection, right in front of Top of the Hill.

Later on this shirtless student climbed onto the tree above me and started shaking it, causing leaves and all kind of stuff to fall upon me and fellow bystanders.

He quickly attracted the attention of one of Chapel Hill’s finest who came by and took him into custody.

On way back to the car I saw a WRAL camera on the southwest corner of the intersection and a bunch of students posing for what may have been a live shot. If you look in the left corner, you can see WRAL reporter Dan Bowens.

Learning to give up

This past Sunday in my church’s young adults Sunday school group, the topic was prayers of relinquishment, how to give up control over certain areas of your life and allow God to insert his sovereignty. It’s a tough topic for many people, especially for me.

 

I blogged two weeks ago about receiving an email from a particular company asking for a phone interview. Because this is a company I very much want to work for, I spent the next day in delirium over the possibility of me actually getting an interview with this company. But the week following has been pure torture with me waiting by the computer and constantly checking my Microsoft Office Outlook client waiting for an email from the recruiter confirming the actual time of this interview. I gave the recruiter a list of times for the following Tuesday only to see those time slots arrive and depart without receiving any email or phone calls. Then at 5pm an email from a second recruiter announcing that she was going to be my new point of contact and once again asking me for a list of times. I gave her a list of times for the following Thursday and Friday only to see those days come and go without receiving a reply.

 

By Sunday morning I was beginning to think that maybe I wasn’t going to be getting an interview. I thought maybe the recruiter looked at my undergraduate transcript (yes I was asked for that information) and laughed. So the talk at the Sunday school group was helpful. It reminded me of something I have known all along but I have always managed to forget; that my goal is not necessarily to get the job but to do my best in any situation that God presents to me so that if it is His will for me to become friends with a particular group of people, get into a certain program, or get into a particular job, that I have adequately prepared myself to realistically meet that challenge. It is something that I periodically needto be reminded of and Sunday was a good time for my spiritual reality check.

 

After church, I got home and received an email from the recruiter with a time and a phone number.

Note to self

Part of an ongoing series.

 

Hi, it’s me again, you know the voice in your head that mocks you everytime you do something stupid. That was real good going in financing deals class today. The professor talked about the financial problems of Ford Motor Company, asked if anyone knew how much it recently cost Ford to borrow money, and you raised your hand and said 6%.

 

I am willing to bet that even some of your classmates who have job offers in investment banking cannot walk into the local bank on Franklin Street, ask for a 30 year mortgage, and receive a rate as low as 6%. Yet, somehow, you think a company with a credit rating of CCC minus can get that good of a rate. Makes me wonder if you understand the difference between innovative thinking and wishful thinking.

 

And what about time in September when you were at that presentation for that telecom company you wanted to work for and one alum from Atlanta asked for an estimate of the number of Americans with cell phones and you guessed 400 million? Not a bad guess, except our population is only 300 million. So in order for your answer to be valid, we would have to give cell phones to everyone on a student Visa, every tech worker with an H-1B Visa, and to the twelve million illegal aliens currently running around doing jobs that supposedly “ordinary Americans refuse to do.”

 

I will even bet that if every Al Qaeda lowlife in America were to sign up for ten cell phones (to keep from being detected by using a cell phone no more than once), we wouldn’t come close to 400 million. And two years from now when President Hillary Clinton decides to issue every enemy combatant at Guantanamo Bay his own cell phone to call his lawyer and to report allegations of prisoner abuse to the American Civil Liberties Union, we still won’t come remotely close to 400 million.

 

Ah yea, so in the future, it’s probably better for you to remain silent and have others assume you’re a moron than to open your mouth, and remove all doubt. You need to remember that, and hey, it rhymes too! Open your mouth, you’ll remove all doubt.

Best Super Bowl ad ever

I was happy to see this full page ad in yesterday’s USA Today. It’s good to see an attempt to spread the gospel that doesn’t get blocked by the NFL. For more information, please go here.

“The phone rings in the middle of the night, my father yells “what you gonna do with your life?””

The MBA Student Association Eighties Party at Players last night was awesome. What I wore was not particularly elaborate, a suit jacket and underneath a white polo shirt and jeans. It may not have been vintage 80s but it was probably what I would have wore back then had I been born twenty years earlier. But some of my classmates were pretty elaborate and creative. A group went as the A-Team with Hannibal, Murdoch, Mr. T, and the A-Team van, and another classmate went as a giant rubik’s cube. My personal favorites were a first year with a picture of the greatest American president of my lifetime and another dressed in a yellow tie and pants held up by suspenders, whom I correctly guessed as Gordon Gekko.

 

But the real excitement of the evening was not the 80s music or the cuties on the dance floor, but all the television sets at the bar tuned to action unfolding at the John Paul Jones Arena where the UVA overcame a 13 point deficit to defeat Duke in an overtime nail-biter. When Sean Singletary scored in the last five seconds of the overtime period, ensuing a 68-66 win against one of the best basketball programs in the country, everyone in the bar area cheered. For a moment, we were all wahoos.

Let it snow!

There was about a dusting on the ground this morning as I made my way to Kenan-Flagler. It dawned on me that during my time at UNC, I have yet to see any significant snowfall or experience any type of adverse weather condition here. I remember hearing someone say that a couple of years ago we had a hurricane that led to a massive blackout and faculty members brought their family members into McColl where the electricity was running thanks to a backup generator.

I was hoping that classes would be canceled today. I can use some time off to do some preparation for my phone interview. I am also beginning to feel behind in at least one of my six classes. But the good part about not having class canceled was I got to hear the guest speaker in our sales class this morning. He is a Kenan-Flagler (undergrad) and Harvard Business School alum who is a vice president at a major financial firm where he leads the firm’s private wealth management efforts for North America.

It snowed this morning and is continuing to snow right now. Later today the snow is expected to turn into rain and sleet and the afternoon commute will get significantly trickier. Just now, I ran into a professor in the hallway and he asked if I have noticed any significant absences in my morning classes and expressed concern there may not be too many students attending his afternoon class. He said there is still a chance the university will cancel classes to send everyone home early.

That would be fantastic. I can get an early start to my weekend and try to put together a semi-respectable costume for the Eighties Party tonight at Players.