WANT A CONSULTING JOB? GET A BLOG I Was Born To Look At Things Carefully. If You Were Born To Consult Read This Article I've been wondering for a while when blogging will become a necessary component of the serious MBA students recruiting strategy. Well I believe that moment has arrived.
I got a really interesting email in my inbox today after classes. Apparently Deloitte has a new ad campaign going out to MBA students and they are spreading the word (and an offer to forward my resume directly to a special Deloitte group handling the ad campaign) through bloggers like myself.
Now, even assuming that my resume just goes in a pile somewhere that someone just looks at once before throwing away, this still belies a deeper understanding of the influence of bloggers and the value they bring to the table. From the special package I got in the mail from BCG to the phone call I got from McKinsey, to the phone calls I regularly receive from random periodicals, and now this ad campaign from Deloitte, it seems clear that running a blog is a sure-fire way to differentiate yourself from other students by showing a higher degree of thoughtfulness than everyone else.
Even if I don't manage to land a job offer from my blog (I can dream can't I), it still seems apparent that a well-written blog can't hurt and provides recruiters with more than just background information. Thoughtful, interesting information about potential hires is always valuable and gives interviewers more than the basic 30 minute interview allows for.
At the end of the day, any MBA student who is serious about consulting needs every edge they can get in the current recruiting environment.
Now... just the fact that the Mega-Huge Deloitte somehow found it in their heart to hire Feed Company to contact B-School bloggers, who then found my blog and sent me an email to show off Deloitte's new initiative is interesting, but the fact that they also feature a customized Darden Page within their video page here is what really pushed me over the edge to write about this campaign.
Yesterday was my first day back to school at Darden and with it came many crazy feelings, impressions,misconceptions, and... even a few epiphanies.
My general strategy for this year is to get in over my head and wait for "the process" to save my life. We are often told around here to "trust the process" and so, after surviving a monumentally challenging first year relatively intact, I have decided to up the ante a bit and take the majority of my classes this year in accounting and finance. This is in full knowledge of the fact that I still have huge holes in my knowledge base there, and that I will probably have to put in much more effort than the average Darden student just to keep up.
This quarter though, things start off fairly balanced. I am enrolled in Financial Reporting and Analysis (which comes with a super-awesome $250 textbook), Operations Consulting (covering Lean and Six Sigma in detail), Marketing Intelligence (a quantitative approach to marketing research), Entrepreneurial Thinking (a rigorous class built around cases from start-up businesses), and the Jefferson Reading Seminar (which basically means reading one book per week, plus writing a paper each week as well) on leadership lessons from the life of T.J. in the Founding of America). This last class is my only "fun" class but will also be very time-consuming.
In addition to all the normal coursework, I am also very involved in campus life. I am a
Vice-President of the Darden Christian Fellowship,
Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the Jefferson Society,
Chairman of the Darden Marketing Management Team, and
Organizer of a speaker-series called "Unsolved Business Mysteries" featuring presentations by prominent faculty members on their current research.
All in all, I feel very busy, but... c'est la vie! carpe diem! and I'll rest when I'm dead.
Finally, I'll just say that it's been great seeing all the First Years around Darden. I am no longer a Darden "newbie", but I certainly don't feel like I am their superior - in fact I actually envy them in some ways. They have a twinkle in their eye and an excitement that is as palpable... as it is fleeting.
But, I am already up to my ears in homework so I need to go, but it should suffice to say that I am excited to get going and look forward to another CRAZY YEAR in the Darden full-contact sport of learning business skills for the world of practical affairs.
WORKING FOR A LIVING Hasn't Happened to Me Yet... I am currently hanging out with my brother-in-law in Charlottesville working on my blog. I would rather be enjoying the beautiful Virginia countryside in my 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee but, alas, it is broken and in the shop...
My soul, thus, waiteth for the mechanics phone call, like the uh... desert waiteth for the rain - insert your favorite allusion to natural waiting annoyance.
Be on the lookout for lots of really cool improvements in the next few days.
Hopefully.
In the meantime, please enjoy this quality picture of a butterfly. Posted August 18, 2008 COMMENTS: (2)
THE BEST USE OF THOREAU YET Finding Trees in Manhattan and the Joys of a Long Walk "I went into the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life...to put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
~Henry David Thoreau
Well, I guess that some friends of mine will laugh - because I always give Thoreau such a hard time. He's led around by his passions, incoherent at times, extremely self-absorbed, but witty. And, at times, totally right.
So many people in New York seem completely absent. They go from their houses to their jobs to their restaurants and then leave. I was falling into this trap over the past two weeks and so, this weekend, I set out to try and learn more about New York.
I went down (Torrey alert) to Riverside Park this weekend where they have trees (real trees!) but I also went to a Yankees game. I walked everywhere and ate a hot dog on the street and talked to everyone who looked like they were actually from this town and it was good for my soul. I needed to clear my head to make some time to hear myself think. My time at Lehman is so interesting and distracting that I often forget to listen to the world around me, being completely absorbed in the world of Wall Street and Powerpoint and formulae and statistics.
This past week has taught me much. I've made mistakes at work -to be sure- but I've also had some successes. I enjoy almost everything I do here, but I've been slowly "diminishing" as Tolkien has it (when referring to the elves who won't cross over the sea like they're meant to). Unlike the elves, however, I've been losing the spark of life because I haven't been in "God's great cathedral under the sky" enough (thank you John Muir for the terrific analogy).
On Saturday I sat in the sun at Yankee stadium and drank beer, had a hot dog, complained about the hot weather, and talked to an old friend. So I guess I really felt like a resident of the city I've been living in for over two months now. Then on Sunday I wandered around.
"Wandering" just doesn't get the respect it deserves. For, when I think about "wandering", I think of something exciting and a little bit adventurous -being led around by nothing in particular and just seeing where I end up. Yesterday (Sunday), after church, I didn't have any work to do, and so I packed up my camera, bought a sandwich and walked West. I hit Riverside park and then headed South. I think I walked down every side street West of Broadway and took pictures of everything interesting.
It was great.
It reminded me of how I used to take vacations when I still lived in Europe. Just get on a train, going somewhere, and occasionally pitch a tent and stay for a while. I once went through France to Oostende, caught a ferry to Dover and , arriving just a dusk, ended up pitching my campsite right in the middle of an old World War 2 era army base.
Randomness...
Anyway, yesterday took me down the West side and I eventually found a little street fair and bought a hot dog and a beer in honor of my previous day's lunch and took some pictures. The photo above is of the Hudson river with New Jersey in the background.
All in all, I walked for around 7 hours and didn't even get tired. I hope that in the future I can remember the way I feel today - much more thoughtful, almost completely relaxed, and not anxious for anything. As my summer in New York draws to a close I am starting to get excited about going back to school (for the last time?) but I hope that I stay engaged until the very second I leave here. Like Thoreau I hope to suck the marrow out of this experience and never find that, in leaving New York, I never really lived here . Posted July 21, 2008 COMMENTS: (4)
ONLY IN A BIG CITY I have to admit, cities actually do have some advantages For a country-boy it definitely comes as a bit of a surprise to find that New York is really quite nice. It's obviously much bigger than Charlottesville, Birmingham, Aztec, or almost any other place I've ever lived... but while that clearly opens up the door to numerous negatives, there are also positives to spending lots of time in a big city.
My wife flew into La Guardia on Wednesday night. She got a cab and was in the kitchen eating dinner in less than 30 minutes. That's still amazing to me.
I saw a Broadway show, went to two world-class museums, ate two of the best meals of my life, bought my wife some extremely chic clothes (on sale), and still managed to take naps, run in Central Park, and sleep in.
Let me just take a moment to talk about the museums. First, it's remarkable to note that my wife and I both got in for free to the museums with my Lehman ID. The MOMA is certainly worth the $20-25 a person they normally charge to get in, but thanks to the world of tax-deduction and corporate sponsorships, all Lehman employees get in (with up to 3 extra guests) for free. Sweet!
Next we went to The Met and were blown away. We saw the best Turner exhibition I can imagine on the one hand, and a Tara Donovan installation on the other. We chatted and sipped a glass of wine while listening to a fabulous chamber orchestra (with Grand Piano) on the balcony, and then looked at Greek sculpture on the way out.
The world is strangely compressed in the big city. And while this can be disconcerting, or even disorienting at times, at its best big cities stand as a monument to the well-considered human existence. Everything is so expensive here that only the best things can afford to justify their existence -and so the restaurants are all fine, the museums are all classy, and the people are all, well, at the top of their game.
Even the beggars are some of the best I've ever seen. Normally a man of iron resolve, these folks find away to get through the chinks in my armor and I have found myself driven to give away my apples, dollars, and energy on several occasions to help some of the wonderfully colorful souls found sitting... on this island the Indians called Manhattan.
I don't know if I'll end up here. I don't know if I'll get a job offer at the end of the summer. But that's all weeks away. Which in New York is months away. And so I'm just enjoying life in the most chaotic, well-constructed, outlandish place I've ever been blessed to hang my hat.
New York in the Summer.
p.s. The image above is from the national zoo in D.C. where I was with Megan two weeks ago. It's some kind of jellyfish and glows and shimmers with light, but because it can't steer with anything it just floats along enjoying life and being indigo with a psychedelic stripe. I've kind of adopted these things as my mascot for the summer. Posted July 07, 2008 COMMENTS: (2)
10 INGREDIENTS FOR A PERFECT MBA INTERNSHIP Toward A Better Understanding of The Perfect 2nd Year Setup I am only three weeks into my summer internship here at Lehman, but I have already begun to consider the things that I want to have accomplished before I leave here in August.
Notwithstanding the current (psycho) market conditions in which I have found myself, it can still be difficult to find perspective on the "goal" of an MBA internship. Therefore, in the spirit of blogging (to live a more reflect live) and to make my friends feel better about my chances after I finish here and try to find a job, I have decided to filter my experiences here in the context of "a dream summer internship".
Without further ado, here are my top 10 ingredients of a perfect summer internship - and my current status towards attaining them...
1. Work somewhere you can make a difference. It should come as no surprise that if you can't contribute materially, it's very unlikely that you or your employer will enjoy your attempts to "drive value and create synergies throughout the value chain" (insert MBA-speak goals here). I took a job that I knew I could contribute to, and have been busy contributing since day 1.
2. Work somewhere that is challenging. No problem here either. I am working in a role that I do have some experience with (marketing consulting), but in a completely new industry. Without this ingredient one could get bored... not an option for an over-achieving B-school student.
3. Work for a firm that will add value to your resume. Again, check. Lehman is certainly undergoing a test of its operating model, but Lehman is still Lehman and their name is definitely a strength to my resume.
4. Clarify your role and responsibilities before accepting. This is something I could have done better one, because clearing up any miscommunications makes it a lot easier to "hit the ground running".
5. Live in the same city as your spouse/significant other. Hey, I said "perfect" MBA internship didn't I? These last few weeks would definitely have been better with my wife. But, since she surprised me last weekend by flying up here (*snaps) I've been feeling better. The above photo is from our Circle-Line tour of Manhattan island... so much fun.
6. Make sure that you like the people in the firm. Again, this seems obvious, but many students discount the strength of working with people you like to be with. In this regard I am way ahead of the pack. I knew my boss from California and (most) of the other people on my floor have a wicked sense of humor and a fun-loving attitude. I can't emphasize the importance of this point enough.
7. Intern in a city you are willing to live in. I know people that are doing internships in places that like... seriously... you have to break out the atlas to find. Unless you're ok with living in Muleshoe, TX (nothing against 'em) don't intern there. NYC is a great city that almost anyone would love to live in - no problems here, check.
8. Establish check-up points to evaluate your progress throughout the summer. I haven't really gotten very far towards this one, but I'm recognizing the importance of this more and more. These check-ups provide two-way accountability for you and your boss, and help ensure that you chart out the summer in line with the firms expectations and know where you stand.
9. Get a job offer. No matter how awesome you feel now, the job market is a strange beast and can change at any moment. Do everything you can to head back to school with a future job locked down. This is an essential ingredient of the "perfect" MBA internship.
10. Don't be a jerk. Many of your peers will work for smaller, lesser-known firms, while still others will work for bigger more prestigious firms. Who CARES! Never forget that many of the worlds richest individuals left B-School without an offer and then started their own firms. You never know who will be successful and who won't, so be cool to everyone.
If you collect all 10 of these ingredients, you will head back to school with the quiet satisfaction that comes from a job well done and enjoy a 2nd year much better than your first...
At least that's what I'm telling myself right now :-) Posted June 16, 2008 COMMENTS: (4)
