“Let’s all join hands and give a yell for dear old UVA”

I went to the UVA Duke game this afternoon with the UVA Club of the Triangle. And what a great game it was. We ran up a higher score in fifteen minutes than we have in any other game this year so far.

There was something odd about watching the game this afternoon. It wasn’t because it was my first time watching Virginia play in person in almost three years. It had something to do with the atmosphere at Duke’s Wade Wallace Stadium. The entire event felt more like a high school football game than a game at a major university.

At the end it was Virginia 37, Duke 0.

People in every direction

Greetings from the National Black MBA Association job fair in Atlanta. Earlier today me and a classmate flew down here from RDU, took a thirty minute ride on the Marta to the Georgia World Congress Center, and spent the next six hours hoping from booth to booth, isle to isle, talking to different companies about job prospects, and networked with folks from MBA schools around the country.

As I methodically worked the isles, with my portfolio and package of printed resumes, I once again began to notice just what a difference one year makes. If I had attended this a year ago, I would have stopped at every booth and tried to talk to every recruiter possible. Today I mostly concentrated my efforts on companies in industries that I have worked in such as telecommunications services and equipment providers, internet services and software companies. There were three companies that I was especially interested in and if all I did was talk to these three companies, it would have made the trip worthwhile.

The first is the world’s largest software company and a company that recruits at Kenan-Flagler. It had a very noticeable presence at the fair. I got on line and waited for about five minutes and gave the recruiter my well rehearsed schtick. I then mentioned that I had already dropped my resume last week and was waiting to hear as to whether I have made the closed interview list. I then asked if there was anything I could do at the fair to secure an interview via a different route. He then told me that there was nothing I could do (which was contrary to what I was told by a Kenan-Flagler alum who showed up at the presentation last week) and the resume that I had just handed him was going to be given to the same recruiter who is responsible for recruiting from Kenan-Flagler. I walked away feeling a bit disappointed, that was until I turned the corner and saw the second company.

I did not know that the second company was going to be at the job fair. It does not recruit at Kenan-Flagler. It is one of the (if not the) biggest player in the field I am trying to get into. I was telling a classmate yesterday that if this company were to come to Kenan-Flagler for a presentation, it would have received three times the number of people who showed up for the world’s largest software company two weeks ago. Surprisingly this company does not have as commanding of a presence at the fair as the world’s largest software company. Perhaps this is consistent with its “keep everything simple” approach. I spoke to someone at the booth and the conversation did not proceed as smoothly as I had hoped. At the point when I told him why I wanted to work at his company, I felt he was laughing at me. He then looked at my resume, pulled out a booklet, flipped to a certain page, and circled two positions that he felt I would qualify for. He wrote his name and email address on the booklet and told me to look over the job descriptions before emailing him on how to our next step. He announced that he was writing down a plus sign on the resume to increase the odds that someone would give me a call.

The third company is an online retailer. I spoke to a recruiter who said I would be perfect for a particular position and referred me to another representative from that company who actually currently works in that position. He asked me about some of the methods I used during my internship to find out information about the company’s competitors to write the competitive analysis report that I handed in. Turns out this man’s is a new hire into that company. He was actually hired away from the world’s largest software company where all he did was write competitive analysis reports. His last question was for me to tell him what I knew about the company and after giving him my stellar answer, he smiled and said he is often surprised at how little research some students have done prior to walking up to the booth. He told me I might be expecting a phone call.

As the day went on the bag I was carrying got heavier and heavier. Companies were giving away stuff left and right. One top tier investment banking firm gave away a square shaped digital clock that displays temperature, calendar, or time of day, depending on which side of the square is facing up. Three car companies were present and each brought along display vehicles. There were also booths representing business schools such as Wharton, Darden, Kenan-Flagler, the University of Maryland, to name a few. I spotted the directors of admissions from Kenan-Flagler and Darden at their respective tables.

Later on today I am hanging out with the boyfriend of a Kenan-Flagler student whom I met during the summer. He works in Atlanta. I also plan to show my face at a Kenan-Flagler alumni reception at the CNN Center before returning to the airport to catch the last flight back to RDU. I am personally hoping that I will get bumped from that flight so that the airline will pay for me to stay the night and give me a free voucher I can use to come back to Atlanta again in the future. I even packed a change of clothes and my toiletries just in case.

Outsmarted

One of the more useful soft skills you learn in an MBA program is the ability to keep a straight face and calmly react to whatever unusual circumstance unfolds in front of you.  I needed this skill pretty desperately earlier tonight at a company presentation.

 

Two recruiters came down today from a telecom equipment manufacturer to talk to us about summer and full time opportunities available in its New Jersey office. During the presentation, I was trying to come up with an intelligent, witty, and memorable question to differentiate myself from the roomful of students who were present. I noticed that one of the presenters was wearing a Carolina blue (Carolina blue is a term we use when describing the light shade of blue that is the school’s color) tie. I had planned to ask a question about how that company was facing the latest challenge from the world’s largest software company, which plans to roll out telephones combined with its internet messaging service. I had scripted my question, I was going to begin by saying “Hi (name of recruiter), first of all, I want to thank you for wearing that color on your tie” pause to gauge the reaction, and then proceed with my question. I was going to come across as so smart, or so I thought.

 

When the presentation ended and it was time for questions, I decided to do something I don’t normally do. I decided to hold off my query and reconsider. I hesitated because I didn’t want to come across as too eager in trying to impress the recruiter, even though the implied purposes of these events is to do just that. The recruiter proceeded to field the first question from a first year student sitting in the center of the room.

 

The student opened his mouth and said “Hi (name of recruiter), first of all, I want to thank you for …” I thought “oh this smart aleck is going to point out the Carolina blue tie and steal my thunder.” But boy was I wrong. The student pointed at my direction, proceeded to say “thank you for inviting the actor who appeared on the video to this presentation tonight,” as every eye in my field of vision stared right at me. Some people in the room immediately realized that he was pointing out that I looked like the main character in one of the videos, which was about a bald guy in sunglasses conducting his business using the company’s VOIP telephone.

 

A couple of people got the joke and laughed, some didn’t. This all unfolded so fast that I didn’t know what to do. I jokingly turned around as though I didn’t know who he was pointing at and when faced the front of the room the eyes were still me. As the awkwardness continued to mount, I decided to say something, “ah yea, hopefully this will help me get on the closed list for the interview.” It wasn’t until after I said those words that I realized just how unfunny that was. I looked at the recruiter and his Carolina blue tie and said “by the way (name of recruiter), thanks for wearing that color on your tie today.” He then picked up from there and talked about his tie.

 

I don’t remember what this student’s question was, or whether he even got around to asking it. Later on during the question and answer session I decided to not ask the question for I had received enough attention for one night and wrote the words “kill (name of student)” on my notepad, right between “send resume” and “thank you emails.”

Hmmm hmmm good

At the job fair yesterday at the Carolina Club, I spoke to recruiters from seven out of the fifty-one companies that were represented (20% more companies came to the fair compared to last year). Out of those seven, I got a warm lead from about four of them.

 

One of the things that I have noticed about this year’s job search is that, compared to last year’s, I have gotten a lot better at identifying which companies and positions I have a realistic chance at getting an interview at. And this has saved me a lot of time and legwork in the process. The companies that I approached yesterday were mostly technology or technology-related companies. One company that I spoke to however was not technology related at all. I approached the table because I saw that the recruiter was giving away chocolate candy bars (almost every table was giving away either company branded stationery or products made by the company) and I wanted to shoot the breeze with him a bit before helping myself to some confection. The conversation turned to my work experience and after having seen my resume, he asked me some questions about what I did during the summer. He then said he was going to pass my resume along to the marketing department and I might be invited to visit the company for an interview. After shaking hands with him, I walked away with chocolate and a can of soup.

 

You can say I got much more out of that conversation than I had expected.

Start of another week

This is shaping up to be an interesting week. There are no classes tomorrow because of a Kenan-Flagler career fair that will be taking place at the Sheraton and no classes on Thursday so that students can have time to tend to our job searches. I will be using that extra time off to attend a national MBA job fair out of town on Friday.

 

I woke up early this morning and attended the 8am fixed income class instead of the 11am class. This will also allow me to attend the earlier mergers & acquisitions class and be done with classes by 11. This works out well because the building custodian sent out an email this morning informing us that the air conditioning in one half of McColl is not working. One thing that has always bothered me about the early fixed income class is that sometimes when the professor is explaining something to the 11am class, he would pause and say “hmm .. I hadn’t thought of this at the 8am but another way to look at convexity is ….. blah blah blah.” Kind of makes me wonder if the 8am is really a practice run for the 11 am class.

The ethics of MBA students

I wrote something yesterday about how to objectively look at the rankings of business programs and mentioned in passing my opinion that a student’s ethical behavior is something that will not be influenced by his two years in an MBA program. An article I came across today helps illustrate my point.

 

“MBA students were more likely to cheat than students in other faculties, he (Donald McCabe, lead researcher and business strategy professor at Rutgers University) said, because MBA students were focused on "getting the job done versus how they got it done. They will suggest in the business world the emphasis is on getting the job done at any cost."

 

I have my own explanation as to why this is. MBA students are just more self interested than those in other programs. In almost every MBA program students are required to take an ethics class. I took one during my first year. In the class we discussed cases such as how to allocate a scarce, life saving, resource among tons of people who are dying from a disease. My problem with the class is that very rarely did we discuss anything that a typical MBA student will actually encounter during the tenure of his career. A good example is … let’s say your business school buddy who now works on Wall Street gives you some inside information about a merger that will very likely take place … what do you do with the information? Would you use it to make money via inside trading? And if you were to go ahead and do it, who gets hurt in this situation?

 

Judging from another article that I read a month ago, it looks like a lot of folks with MBA’s have been choosing to go ahead and use the inside information to benefit themselves. Once again self interest trumps ethics.

A little bit of objectivity, please

You know something big has happened when the dean sends out a mass email 10pm at night. On Tuesday night he alerted us to the latest rankings from the WSJ, published in the newspaper’s Wednesday edition. It ranked Kenan-Flagler at number 8 among all MBA programs in the country, up from number 9 last year.

 

Last week I was at the House Undergraduate Library when I came across a copy of the Wall Street Journal Guide to the Top Business Schools (not sure what edition it was). This book bears no mention of the WSJ rankings and looking through it, it’s hard to believe both the book and the WSJ rankings were published by the same company. The book’s write up of Kenan-Flagler was favorable, but not any more favorable than what it has written about other schools. Each school has a write up with a paragraph toward the end describing what recruiters like and dislike about the program. For many of the schools that I looked up, including Kenan-Flagler, the list of positives include soft skills like ability to work in teams, ethical behavior, likeability. The problem with this is that these are not the skills one would take two years off from work to learn in an MBA program. Most of these soft skills (a good example is ethical behavior) are things that either you have or don’t have, and spending two years in any MBA program will do very little to change it. The write up on Fuqua, on the other hand, was excellent. It listed the ability to think strategically and good analytical skills as traits recruiters see in Fuqua students. And these are skills one would most like to get from earning an MBA.

 

The WSJ rankings is a good example of how rankings are important only for the people who wish to assign importance onto them. Because this set of rankings places our school most favorably, it is the one most mentioned by Kenan-Flagler students. I personally am suspicious of it because of its continued practice of placing Harvard and Stanford in the mid teens. I have heard classmates say that the WSJ rankings are the more reliable set of rankings because it surveys attitudes among recruiters. To which my response is, if recruiters think more highly of Kenan-Flagler students than those from Harvard and Stanford, then why is the average starting salary at Harvard and Stanford so much higher than that at Kenan-Flagler. (insert mischievous laugh)