Ready for the 2nd and final lap

The end of summer is looming and school is about to start in 2 weeks. As I look back over the past couple of years, I can't believe that it's almost over. Today is the first day of Orientation for the new class. I remember sitting in Lerner Auditorium trying to stay awake during the opening remarks, thinking that I wasn't at all ready for the journey I was about to take. Now I've finished my internship, have an offer in hand, and most of the classes that I wanted to take fall semester. For those of you embarking on the application process this season, relax and enjoy the ride. It goes by faster than you think. Below is the answer to a question that I received and I apologize for the late response.

Jennifer writes:

I am starting the application process but want to stay in NYC so am only applying to NYU & Columbia. I just took othe GMAT (very traumatizing experience) and got a 680. Do you think I should take it again? I went to Boston COllege (3.3) English Major, work for a real estate developer as an associate (doing everything from finance to marketing for luxury condos in NYC). If I don't get into Columbia or NYU full-time I am just going to apply to NYU part-time (This is how adament I am about staying in NYC). Any advice you can provide is much appreciated!!! Thanks. Jen

I strongly believe in taking the GMAT at least twice if you don't initially crack the 700 barrier. If your second score is way off the mark, then you should take it again, beyond that, hang it up and focus on other parts of your application. This is especially important if you have a "fuzzy" undergrad major and a weak quant section on the GMAT. Also think about what you can get from the part-time program. If you are planning to make a career switch, it may not be the best the route.

Please check out a cool new site just for prospective and current bschoolers called none other than Bschoolers.com. It's a daily blog covering all the important things about business school.

And just like that it's over...

To my unbelievable surprise my first year at business school is now over. This year has gone by faster than I could have ever imagined possible. A year ago, I was gearing up to move to NYC, complete a mini-internship, and get ready for one of the biggest changes of my life. In true irony, my very last final, Capital Markets, was probably the hardest test I have ever taken before in my life. There were some questions that might as well have been written in Sanskit. But, it doesn't matter because I'M DONE!!!

I thought all the activity would come to an abrupt end now that school is over, but my life over the next week will be just as busy as it always it sans problem sets and cases. My cluster had a great end of year party last night. Let's just we have some amazing cooks in the group!! Today is also field day for the 1st year class down at Chelsea Piers. I'd love to go, but I'm moving tomorrow and am nowhere near packed and ready to go. We'll see how much I can get done this morning. I really don't want to miss my classmates jousting or struggling through a 3-legged race.

It's kind of weird knowing that I won't be seeing most of my classmates for 4 months and even when we get back there won't be anymore core classes to take with my cluster. I've been fortunate to have a good number of my clustermates in all my electives thus far, but that's not guaranteed to be true next year. I'm actually kinda sad about the situation. Everyone thinks that their cluster rocks, but I think what matters even more is being really close with 60+ people. Just knowing that if you need anything you can send one email and get 15 responses in 5 minutes. Or the great conversations and diversity of opinions that are presented and more importantly respected, even when they are extremely contrarian.

For those of you applying to school or biding your time until you start in the fall, I hope you pick (picked) te right school, because it's really all about the people. If you find where you really fit in, you won't have any regrets about your choice, no matter what the rankings or trolls on the BWeek boards say.

I'm also in awe of how much I've actually learned this year. I can balance a balance sheet. I know what net income and WACC are. I can discount cash flows, use Solver, negotiate a conflict, and avoid pseudo-diagnostic cues. At times during the year the core classes were the bane of my existence, but looking back on it now, there is no way you could ever collect this much knowledge on your own. I wold never have taken a marketing class, but I've taken two. I won't be entering that field in the future, but as a result I can have an intelligent conversation with a marketing or product management professional. Surprisingly, my case analysis skills were also sharpened due to one of my marketing classes. Although you're not an expert in anything after taking the core classes, you at least have enough frameworks to know what questions to ask to make a good decision.

So for those of you wondering was it worth it, definitely. The entire experience taken as a whole is much more than I had anticipated and much more fulfilling. I can't wait to look back in ten years and see all the amazing things my clustermates are doing. It's very motivating and exciting constantly being around people you are going places. I mean REALLY GOING PLACES.

I'm hoping to have much more time to blog over the next year. But I may need to change the format. I'm not really up for current events type of blog, maybe we could try a Q&A sort of thing, with my random musings in between. So if you have questions about bschool admissions, recruiting (particularly finance or real estate), or life at school start sending them in. However, I will NOT answer any questions that you can research on your own. This will be advice only, not a fact-finding mission. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the first installment for Dear AC...

25 days and counting!!

25 days that's all that's left of my first year at bschool. Time has definitely flown by. I'm excited and sad for the end of the school year. On the one hand I am very mentally exhausted and the thought of turning in any more problem sets, papers, or cases and gearing up for finals is making me cringe. But I'll be very sad not to see my clustermates everday or my other friends for 4 whole months.

I've been elected to leadership positions for next year and am quite busy making preparations for a huge conference in the fall (more details to come later). So between school and outside commitments, I'm very swamped. I can't wait to start working. I know that sounds weird, but having a set routine again with just one place to be for 12 hours sounds so lovely compared to the chaos of running around all day. Having a paycheck again isn't that shabby either. As you know I got a position in exactly what I wanted to do and the group I'll be joining has very few MBA's so hopefully I'll be able to add some value and easily convince them that they'll crash and burn if they don't give me a full-time offer...HA!!

I found a great apartment withing walking distance of the office and great summertime amenities like a pool and balcony. I'll be headed to te caribbean for a few days after finals and I'm trying to work in a trip to south america, but I'm having a little difficulty stomaching the airfare at this point. Speaking of South America, my spring break trip was AWESOME!!! About 40 people turned out with 2/3 being from my cluster. It was great to get to know people better and see a different side of them. The houses we rented would have made MTV's Real World insanely jealous and our hotel was great too.

To all of you out there planning to go to bschool, SAVE MONEY (or miles) for trips. Also looking back on the year I wish I would have hung out more at social events. I've been making a concerted effort to attend as many things as I can since I got back from Spring Break and will continue that trend next year. Sure I have been getting way less school work done, but at the end of day when I'm slaving away on some financial model I can always look up valuation methods or the Black-Scholes formula, but I'll never be able to see one of clustermates dress up like a Ninja and scare people at a restaurant...

Last note, if you were admitted to CBS this year YOU MUST TO COME TO OPEN HOUSE NEXT WEEK!! I and many of my classmates have been working really hard for the past few months planning an amazing program that you really don't want to miss. There is a lot of buzz and excitement about who our classmates are going to in the fall. In short, we're all psyched to meet you, so come out, learn about the school, meet some cool people, and have some fun!!

This message has been brought to you by the letter V

V as in vacation!! Hard to imagine that I'm actually on vacation with absolutely nothing to do. No cases to work, no interviews to study for, no club activities, ABSOLUTELY nothing. However, the past few days have gone by way to fast. I took my last final last Tuesday and it's been a blur since then. A lot has happened in the last month. My spring break travel plans are booked. I, along with about 35 of my closest friends and classmates will be embarking on a party till you drop trip to Brazil. A couple of my classmates threw an awesome wine tasting shindig as a pre-party for the HUGE school-wide End of Semester party. Somehow the school rented out B.E.D. for the night. It was great to catchup with people, seeing as how I won't see anyone until January. My planned destinations do cross with some other students, but in true bschool student fashion, i'll be missing people by a day or two.

Now that the first semester is over, I can look back on it somewhat objectively. I still think it's busiest time of my life, but while it was stressful and overwhelming, it was still absolutely amazing. I know everyone says this, but I'm positive that I have the best cluster ever. I didn't think that you could really get to know a group of 65 people so well so quickly, but it's true. My classmates have been super supportive, helpful, funny, insert any positive adjective here, etc... So everyone wants to know about grades and if they really matter. I'm waiting on all but two grades right now. All of the grades I received were expected, no surprises at all.

I'm extremely excited about the classes I'll be taking next semester. On paper I have a lot of free time, but we see if that works out as planned. All in all, I'm happy that I made it through the semester that's supposed to be the hardest. But it's also a little sad that my first year is half over. It really does go by very quickly.

I'm almost there

Well, the dreaded first semester is almost over!! It's been tough and I'm so thankful that I'm almost finished. So over the past couple of months I've slaved through 2 finals and 5 midterms, sweated through what seems like a million informational interviews, gotten to know some really cool people, learned how to create a DCF from scratch (and realized that it's actually fun), and gotten my first job offer. At this point all that's left to do is about 5 more homework assignments (2 of which are already completed) and 5 finals.

All in all as much I've complained about being tired, sleepy, stressed, and just wanted it all to end, I'm very happy I decided to go back to school. I have learned some really good stuff and some not so good stuff. It all balances itself out. As you can imagine, recruiting season (for banking and consulting) is making it's final push before the semester ends. Interviews for those coveted jobs begin before we get from winter break. Yep, that means if you want a job, you have to cut your vacation short by almost 2 weeks!! This week I have 3 must attend events, and one I'm still debating about. Since I already have a pretty good offer and some specific requirements, I haven't been going full-force with the recruiting effort like my classmates. I picked out a handful of firms that I thought would suit me best and focused on those. So fortunately, I haven't had every waking moment of my non-academic life consumed by on-campus recruiting. However, I have had to do A LOT of my on leg work, since most of the firms I'm interested in, don't recruit on campus.

Time to dispell some recruiting myths:

1. Once you get you're acceptance letter, Goldman/McKinsey/Microsoft/etc... will be banging down your down.

This one is true and it's not true at the same time. These firms and their peers will be banging down the front to your school, but not your door personally. It's a very strange dichotomy. While the firms that recruit on campus will have a events where they want to wine and dine you, they still have the pick of the litter and you will not get any special treatment based on your school alone. However, if you're qualified and do your homework, you may just get on the closed list.

2. You can interview with any company that you want.

This one sucks the most. So most companies have what we at CBS call "closed-lists". Basically after attending a ton of recruiting events, coffee chats, workshops, Day at "insert prominent firm name here", you can spend days on crafting the perfect cover letter and resume and poof, you don't get picked to be on your dream firm's closed list. So after all that work, you don't even get to officially interview. The good news is that some firms will have a closed-list and an open list. The open list allows students to bid points to get on a firm's interview schedule. There is also some sort of interview stand by list, where you can wait around the morning of a particular firm's interviews and see if anyone cancelled at the last minute. I don't know all the details, but it's something like that.

3. Informational interviews are for gathering more information about a company or industry.

This one really depends on the industry you are pursuing. However, for the most part, informational interviews are unofficial interviews and another opportunity for the company to gather more information about you. For the banking set, informationals are actually formal interviews set up by the company's HR department and the interactions are recorded and go next to your name in their recruiting spreadsheets, for use in determining who gets on the closed list. And in these "informationals" they can and will grill you on your latest corporate finance case, where short-term interests are, what you think about their latest high profile deal, and what was in the wall street journal 3 days ago on page A4 in the bottom right corner, etc... And be prepared to have questions of your own. And not just, so tell me about your job.

I know before I got to school I wondered how much academics matter once you get in. Again it's really a personal choice and what industry you want to go into. I started out really focused on academics and then slacked off, due to recruiting and other extracurricular interests, now I'm trying to pull it back together for finals. I want to do well in all of my classes, but there are only a couple that I plan to study for really hard and that's because I need to retain that information well beyond finals. You can't really fail a class, and unless you are interested in ibanking or McKinsey/Bain, no one will ask about your grades and you could get straight P's if you wanted. The work itself isn't rocket science, it's just about having enough time and motivation to study it. I can honestly say that there are some classes that even if I had magically powers to stop time and study them I wouldn't. I'm just not interested and there are better things to spend my time on. On the other hand, there are some classes that I wish I could spend all day on and really learn.

1st years just finished bidding for 2nd semester classes. I was lucky enough to get all 3 electives that I wanted. I'm very exciting about all of them. Ordinarily, as a 1st year you only get to take 1 elective 2nd semester unless you exempt out of a core class. But CBS now allows us to bid to defer 2nd semester core classes until 2nd year. This is great, because you get to take classes that you are interested in and that will potentially help you in your summer internship. I deferred Macro Econ and Operations and will be taking Financial Statement Analysis, Capital Markets and Investments, and Real Estate Finance. So I'll be taking Econ and Ops in the fall instead. The downside is that I'll only have 2 classes at any given point in the semester with my cluster, but on a brighter note I'll get to meet some new people in my class and possibly the 2nd year class.

Good luck to all of those awaiting interview invites and to those finishing up R2 applications!!