Back with a vengeance!

My second year of classes begins today. My schedule is not set yet but so far it looks like Mondays and Wednesdays will be my easy days, I have mergers and acquisitions which meets at three different times and I can attend any section. I also signed up for fixed income and negotiations, which I may or may not go through with. I definitely want to take negotiations and the class is offered in both Mods I and II. The Mod II section is taught by a very popular professor and the class is extremely hard to get into, I am currently on the wait list for it. I may decide to take it now with the other professor, whom I have been told is just as good. Tuesdays and Thursdays are more packed. I have two accounting classes (complex deal and topics in advanced financial reporting), introduction to derivatives, and customer relation management. I may drop derivatives depending on how much I like it.

 

For the past week, I have been feeling pretty excited about the beginning of my second year. There’s a lot of stuff I want to learn and I want to fine tune a couple of studying techniques/work habits that I have been toying with in my head. I also like many of the first years I have met so far at the receptions I attended this past summer.

 

And for all you first years whom I walked by upstairs this morning, welcome to the show that never ends (a line I borrowed from the West Wing).

Tags: MBA Experience, classes

The economics and statistics of bombing an airplane

This past week’s foiled terrorist plot reminded me of two jokes that I heard in class when I was at UVA. The first was told by an engineering professor I had during my first year. A statistician was going on vacation and brought a bomb with him onto the airplane. He explained that his biggest fear about air travel was that a terrorist might detonate a bomb while the plane was in flight even though he realized that the odds of a bomb making its way onto an airplane were one in a million. By bringing a bomb onto the plane, and making sure it doesn’t detonate, in order for the plane to blow up, there would have to be a second bomb on the plane. And the odds of a second bomb making its way onto the airplane was one in a million raised to the second power.

 

The second joke was told by a former-Wall-Street-big-shot-turned-economics-professor I had during my fourth year. He said that his daughters were worried about him because he was always flying around the country on business trips. His standard response was “don’t worry, I have insurance.”

 

So did you like any of these two jokes? Or did they both ….. bomb?

Tags: Economics, UVA

Email hoarders versus deleters

Today’s Wall Street Journal had an article about how the way you handle your email inbox is a reflection on your personality.

 

"If you keep your inbox full rather than empty, it may mean you keep your life cluttered in other ways," says psychologist Dave Greenfield, who founded the Center for Internet Behavior in West Hartford, Conn. "Do you cling to the past? Do you have a lot of unfinished business in your life?"

 

I wonder what Greenfield would say if I were to tell him that I spent the last hours at my internship last week backing up my Outlook mailbox so I could take with me every email I have ever received or sent during the entire internship experience?

Air America to move to the right?

The New York Post reports that starting September 1, the liberal talk radio network will switch its affiliate in the number one radio market from WLIB 1190 to WWRL 1600 on the AM dial.

 

Am I the only one who catches the cruel irony in this? That to tune in to their favorite talk shows, lefties will have to set their radio dials as far to the right as they can possibly go.

Tags: Media industry, talk radio

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six …..

I have one more hour until my internship comes to an end. It feels just like yesterday that I was sitting in front of Panera Bread waiting for my car to get worked on when I received the phone call with the offer and agreed to start the next day. I realized recently that one unintentional outcome of me having agreed to start so early is since my first day was May 31, when I update my resume I get to write down that I worked from May to August even though I was only here for under eleven weeks.

 

And what a quick ten and a half weeks it’s been. I have trouble believing that the time has gone by already, especially when you realize that an entire Mod at Kenan-Flagler lasts only a little bit more than seven weeks. For a good part of the last ten weeks I was a bit worried about a project I had to work on but I gave the presentation to my vice president on Wednesday and he liked it so much he asked me to give it again to his boss and to some members of the sales team. It’s pretty cool when you give recommendations that people actually listen to. I gave the presentation again earlier this afternoon and … let’s just say one particular sales executive was so impressed with it that he looked like he was either going to die of boredom of or fall asleep on the spot.

 

Consistent with my experience of being an MBA student, no sooner does one responsibility end does another one begin. Twenty minutes ago I received an email from an accounting professor informing us that we have reading to do for the first class. Actually, let me take that back. I should not say that he was “informing us” of our assignment because his exact words were “A reminder that there is a reading assignment for the first class.” Since he is an accounting professor and you all know how much attention accounting professors pay to detail, the fact that he was giving us a “reminder” must mean that he has given us this information before and that … well .. I must have been too busy drinking at the Martini Bar to notice it.

 

I am going to spend the next hour archiving my company Outlook mailbox so I will have it as a souvenir of my summer here.

Tags: Internship, MBA Experience, Martini Bar

And now the times are changing ….

A couple of interesting developments this past week at AOL. As many of you are either aware of or have been expecting, yesterday the company flipped the switch to change AOL into a free service for members who already have existing internet access. New members who join now get to choose between the free plan and an unlimited dialup plan that costs $9.99 per month.

 

What interest me are two things that have not been addressed by any of the articles I have read. First, will existing dialup customers who previously were paying $23.95 per month have their rates automatically discounted to $9.99 per month? Second, will AOL members who qualify for the free plan but are currently on a prepaid plan get the unused portion of their money back? But wait a minute, as I am typing this it dawned on me there is a third (and much more interesting) issue that has yet to be addressed. When AOL launched Netscape Online, Netscape Online was positioned as “the fighting brand” where the traditional AOL service remained as the premium brand. Now that the prices of the two services are at parity, does this spell the end of Netscape Online?

 

Hopefully this is a sign that AOL is finally beginning to make its decisions based on anticipating where the internet industry is heading. I was delighted to read that starting September, AIM and AOL members will get 5GB of free online storage at Xdrive, an online storage company AOL purchased last year. I remember when I worked at AOL I heard about a project called A-Disk, which I assumed was an online file storage system. I am curious as to what type of discussion took place that resulted in the decision to purchase the technology instead of developing it internally. One of the things that technology companies have to constantly deliberate is whether it’s best to acquire a technology by developing it internally from scratch, purchasing a company that already has it, or hiring the services of another company. Hopefully these are issues I will get to learn about at Kenan-Flagler next year because I am sure it’s something I have to deal with at some point in my career.

Tags: Media Industry, AOL

Walking tour of Kenan-Flagler, via YouTube

There is someone out there who obviously has way too much time on his hands. He has been making videos of the Kenan-Flagler facilities and uploading them onto YouTube. The videos are without narration and they actually make the McColl building pretty nice. I am going to link them at the bottom and include my comments.

Make the turn onto Skipper Bowles, see Dean Dome in the background (at around 0:20) and the final left turn onto Kenan Drive brings you right up onto the Kenan-Flagler garage.

 

 

From the garage, walk up the steps between McColl and the Kenan Center and find yourself at the courtyard.

The view from the opposite end of the same courtyard.

 

From the courtyard, walk into the second floor of McColl and you will find the main lobby and the grand circular staircase (first 4 seconds of clip).

 

 

Go down onto the first floor and find Café McColl, my least favorite part of the building.

Go up onto the fourth floor and find my favorite hiding spot in the entire building, the faculty study lounge. Outside is a balcony where you can see the top of the UNC Hospital (at about 41 seconds into the clip) where there a helicopter landing pad and in the last 4 seconds, you can actually see how close Kenan-Flagler is to the Dean Dome.