So That's Where I've Been

The last two weeks have been relatively insane and have included constant rollercoaster type swings in my mood and mental state.

Looking around the apartment, I see that there’s still a ton of wintry slush outside, my cable bill is still sitting on the table unpaid, and my textbooks and school stuff are still scattered all over like the UofC bookstore stumbled back after a hard night of partying and vomited all over my living room.

So the material aspects of this apartment are the same, it’s just me that’s been flipping out and turning and twisting in all kinds of ways (including but not specifically limited to waking up at all parts of the night).

That’s what we know, or rather, what I knew, and what you now know.

And now it’s pretty close to being over, or if not completely over, at least approaching its final destination.

With that, I wanted to make sure I blogged about a couple business school truisms that have come to light.

1 – Recruiting completely sucks

2 – Hmm…I don’t have another universal truth right now, so just go back and re-read #1, that’s a big one

Just to give you a sense of how the process has been for one MBA student (me), here’s a basic timeline of my recruiting activities over the last couple weeks. And a point of clarification, each one of these interviews generally include 45 minutes of discussion focused on prior experience and business problem evaluations.

Tuesday – Two first-round interviews with Firm A, where I analyze a grocery store company, followed by the fictional nation of Elderstan (which is apparently not nearly as funny as the Borat version of Kazakhstan). Hit a rough patch in the first interview when interviewer responds to my first answer with, ‘would it help to think of another example?’

Wednesday – Two first-round interviews with Firm B, where I analyze a Women’s Products Catalog company, followed by a fictional city called Contrivedville. Turns out I know something about Women’s Products.

Wednesday Night – Reception for Firm C, who’s interviewing tomorrow. They don’t have food, so I just drink a good amount…seemed like a good strategy

Thursday – Two first round interviews with Firm C, where I analyze a food products manufacturer, followed by a chemical distribution company. Did you ever think that a $5 billion market segment with 10% CAGR would be an industry where you DON’T want to spend more marketing dollars? I never would have guessed.

Thursday Night – Reception for Firm D, they interview next week, but since I know almost nothing about them, I really think I should go. They also don’t have food, so we simply re-apply the strategy from last night.

Thursday Night – Voice mail from Firm A, ‘Thanks for playing! But kindly get the hell away from us.’ My soul hurts

Thursday Night (20 minutes later) – Call from Firm B, ‘We’re intrigued…come tell us more.’ Soul rebounds

Friday Morning – Two first round interviews with Firm E, only one of which requires me to analyze an airline business situation. Unfortunately the other one focuses on me. Drag.

Friday Afternoon – Suspicious voice mail from Firm C that doesn’t ding me. Could be good news right? I return the call. Nope, turns out they want to make sure to ding you directly. I also would have accepted an exploding telegram.

Friday Night – One first round interview with Firm F, where I analyze an insurance company. Interviewer’s hobbies include quilting and horses, so lots of common ground with me.

Saturday – Phone call (wait, consultants work weekends???) Firm F appreciated my interest, and if there was one problem, it’s that I was too good with numbers. I debate complimenting them on the quick turnaround, but am generally too distracted by the sound of my internship dreams bursting into flames

Monday morning – Two interviews with Firm G, where I analyze a tractor company followed by a cable company and their potential wireless strategy. Given my background in the industry, I’m instructed to forget what I know about the area. Surprisingly, this is not difficult.

Monday afternoon – Two interviews with Firm D, remember them??? Just one business problem, this time it’s an appliance manufacturer. Biggest takeaway: if you call and complain about a damaged product, the company will probably pay you to shut up and keep it. I am now eagerly awaiting my first refrigerator so that I can scratch the hell out of it.

Monday afternoon – One interview with Firm H, where we manage to discuss no business issues. Part of the session actually focuses on me explaining what Jeopardy is and as a follow-up, how I know so much stuff (the answer: complete luck, or I’ve just got some kind of random fact gene, which I guess would be luck too). Anyway, interview ends with an invitation to a final round interview. That was unexpected.

Monday afternoon – Phone call from Firm G. Recruiter sounds upbeat, maybe she enjoys crushing MBA students? Put another ding on the board.

Monday Night – I’m on the other line and ignore call waiting. Good instincts, it’s a ding call from Firm E. Almost forgot you were even there Firm E, now you’ve ensured I’ll do everything I can to truly forget you.

Tuesday Morning – Very enthusiastic phone call from Firm G, almost like she was looking forward to dinging me. Why would that make an HR person happy??? A great mystery.

Tuesday-Wednesday – No interviews, I actually go to class and stuff. So I’m taking marketing this quarter? Really???

Thursday Morning – One interview with Firm I. This is actually a large corporation looking for a strategy analyst. A nice change of pace, until it turns out the interviewer just joined from Firm C. Would I mind a consulting-style interview??? Funny you should ask…

Thursday Afternoon – Two interviews with Firm J, one focused on analyzing a lubricant manufacturer, and one focused on me. Much of the first interview centers around me battling giggles regarding the lube company.

Thursday Night – Phone call from Firm J. ‘That didn’t totally suck, come in tomorrow.’ I didn’t want to have any free time on Friday anyway.

Friday Morning – One interview with Firm J, with two senior consultants, about a media company. Did I mention I was in the Media & Entertainment Group??? An opportune time to put my ‘passion for media’ money where my mouth is.

Friday Afternoon – One interview with Firm K, another corporation focused in a pretty cool industry. Did I say I didn’t like the routine nature of my historical corporate finance roles? I meant I loved it. I would marry process-oriented corporate finance roles if I could, that’s the world I want to live in.

Friday Afternoon – One phone interview with Firm L. Take everything I said in every other interview and reverse it. ‘It’s a pretty weird situation, but yes I did come back to business school to get a job doing EXACTLY what I was doing before school.’ One bonus, tap-dancing doesn’t show over a phone interview, or so I hope.

Friday Afternoon – Two interviews with Firm M. Can’t figure out if the first interviewer likes what I have to say or if he just thinks I’m cute. Could be both? Second case, focused on car battery technologies, goes better, without any semblance of homoeroticism. I am much more comfortable in the second interview.

Friday Night – Phone Call, it’s Firm J, do you want a summer job??? Partner informs me that I was on the bubble, then they saw the Jeopardy thing on my resume, and that pushed me over the top. Ha-ha, is he joking? Half-joking? Frankly, I couldn’t care less. I use the opportunity to bust out my ‘Got a Job Dance.’ Thank god the blinds are drawn.

Saturday Morning – Phone call from Firm M…are you free to come back in on Monday? When it rains, it pours.

Saturday Afternoon – Try to remember everything for a blog post.

So that’s where I’ve been over the last couple weeks. It’s been a long strange trip, and one that’s not over for another week. I still have the big Firm B opportunity, which has been my focus since day 1. Firm H might force me to rethink any aversions I’d have towards the city of Troy. Who knows what Firm M is thinking. But what’s struck me about the whole process is how much of it is dependent on complete random luck.

Two identical candidates could interview with the same firm, and because of different interviewers, time slots, case questions, what they had for breakfast, or any other such thing, could get dinged or passed through. No rhyme, no reason. And yes, certain people who are more well prepared are significantly more likely to do better on average. But really, it all comes down to whether you click with them or not.

So if an interviewer ever makes eyes at you…I say go for it

Inside the Recruiting Machine

I have a couple minutes to breathe, so I thought I'd post a blog before I get swallowed up by this giant recruiting tide. It's incredible how efficient it is, devouring just about every first year MBA student.

We all want summer internships, and if there's a hoop we need to jump through, just tell us how high (and then maybe light it on fire for some extra style points)

Let's take me as an example...how has the recruiting scene been treating me???

Well....I'm pursuing a lot of really good opportunities (thanks to the GSB and it's pretty decent pull)

My first choice, as just about everyone knows, is to join a leading management consulting firm. I have a lot of good reasons for this, which I will not detail here. But suffice it to say, I've cast quite a few nets in that industry's general direction. Beyond that, there are a number of intriguing potential opportunities in various corporate functions.

So I'm applying for a lot of jobs, but there's two subsequent elements to this story, actually getting an interview, and doing well in that interview.

Getting the interview can happen in one of two ways. You can be pre-selected by a particular firm for one of their 'closed list' spots...which means you applied and they definitely want to talk to you. If for some reason they don't realize how awesome you are, you can bid for an 'open list' slot. Open list slots are fewer in number, obviously, and each student only has a fixed pool of 1000 points to work with for the entire internship recruiting cycle.

Many of the top firms interview a lot of students. The three biggest names in consulting are close listing 70-100 people a piece, and many of the other major firms are close listing between 30 and 60. Now you might be saying, 'then just get on the close list and don't worry about bidding'

Not so fast. Remember when you wanted to go to a top-tier business school and surround yourself with really intelligent and accomplished people. Well, some of them want jobs too. It's totally unfair.

So you craft the best resume you can, and you try to build relationships with members of the firms you want at networking events. Etc. Etc. And then you apply (which we did over break), and you wait.

Oh, and if you thought it was just the 125-150 students who were interested in consulting that were applying against you, you were wrong. I forgot to mention that tons of bankers, investment managers, marketers, private equity privateers, and god knows who else threw their respective hats in the consulting ring. Lord knows why, I think the guy at the security desk got a McKinsey interview slot. Maybe they think consulting seems cool, maybe they think it makes a great backup for banking, who the hell knows...but there are more applicants than you expect.

With that said, the first week of consulting interview invitations have come out, and I'm fortunate to have done alright. Of the five firms interviewing, I got close listed for three of them. Then, this morning I got an email that another firm has bumped me up off their alternate list to a closed list spot. So I'm four for five, and remain on the wait list for the last firm (so if you're a banker and reading this, and you have a consulting interview that you insist on keeping because you can...just remember that I will definitely know exactly who you are...and I'm not one for threats, and I can't say what I'll do, but it's going to be ugly)

Anyway, I'm really pretty happy with how things have worked so far...but there's still the little problem of getting ready to not completely freeze up in the interview. In that regard, the school has a pretty robust support system for making sure their students don't come off like total tools (or so they try, I'm sure some bad apples still squirt through)

I've had two school sponsored mock interviews, both specific for my intended field, both recorded on DVD for my viewing pleasure. That's in addition to all the students helping each other.

In particular, the consulting interview is its own class of awkward interaction. There's still some room for standard questions like, 'why do you want to work here?' and 'walk me through your resume' which isn't really a question, but you know what I mean.

Then they have this thing called the 'case portion'

For those not in an MBA program, the case portion is basically challenging the interviewee to answer a general and usually open-ended business question.

A typical prompt might be...

"Our client is a large national chain of coffee houses. It's revenues were $1 billion last year, but it has not matched the growth of its competitors. The CEO wants to know what the problem is, and how it can be fixed"

Then you just kind of go for a half hour or so, asking questions, trying to gather evidence (which the interviewer usually has in their notes or in their head).

There's a whole process to it, and honestly, I think it's pretty interesting to do...definitely more fun than telling leadership story after teamwork story after accomplishment story.

Anyway, the vast majority of my life is now spent either preparing for generic interview questions, case questions, or worrying about getting interviews.

It's a fun life here in Chicago, where the temperature is supposed to feel like its below zero this weekend.

Apparently that's what they meant when they said it got cold in Chicago

Cover Letters and the Human Response

I officially hate cover letters. I don’t care if they’re a necessary evil, I can still hate them. At its core, the average cover letter always says the same thing.

“Dear firm X,

It’s been my lifelong dream to work at firm X, ever since I found out you hire at my school and everyone else wants to work for you. Wisdom of crowds right? I’m not sure exactly what your company does, management banking? investment consulting? whatever, as long as it completely both satisfies me personally and pays me a shitload of money. Oh, and gives me a good work-life balance, so maybe like 40 hours a week? I know that your firm will do this, because you’re totally awesome, probably for reasons you posted on your web site or mentioned in your job posting.

Did I mention that I am the most awesome person ever? In case you were totally oblivious, I go to business school, which is like a really big deal. Yeah, we can’t tell you what our grades are, but trust me, I’ve learned a lot and could probably run your company in like 2 weeks. I know I don’t exactly have direct experience doing what your firm does, but I totally have tons of transferable skills. I beat Minesweeper advanced in less than 2 minutes and can keep like 5 internet explorer windows going at once.

In conclusion, I’m sure that if you hire me, I would be the single greatest business addition since that cheese that goes inside the pizza crust. If you need your paradigms shifted, then look no further. In fact, if you don’t hire me, I guarantee that you will suffer tremendously, and then cease to exist, because I will have joined a competitor, and vanquished you mightily. Keep that in mind.

Sincerely,

the most awesomest candidate ever”

Break

It’s been a while since my last post, and I figured that since I’m on winter break, I really had no excuse for not writing anything.

Finals ended about a week and a half ago, although I spent the next week in the San Francisco and LA areas visiting companies to explore potential internship opportunities. Now with all that done, I’m visiting back home and looking for ways to keep busy.

It’s weird, given how busy I was during the first three months of the school year. Now I’ve got no readings to do or tests to study for, and I don’t have any recruiting events either, so I’m kind of just sitting around.

The west coast trip was really good by the way. Got a chance to visit a bunch of very interesting companies (some of which may actually hire MBAs this summer). One of the high points had to be hearing from the director of new business development at a major gaming company. A guy with the responsibility of finding and acquiring new video games. Talk about a sweet job.

It was good to see, and a lot of the companies were definitely interesting, but I’m still pretty dead set on consulting as my primary recruiting target.

Given that, I guess I could start prepping for potential interviews.

For those who don’t know, the consulting firms that recruit on campus put their candidates through what is known as a ‘case interview.’

The interview will have its share of normal questions (walk me through your resume, tell me about a time when you were awesome, tell me about a time when you were on a team that wasn’t awesome, etc.), but there’s also this case portion.

Basically, you’re given an open-ended business-related problem and generally allowed to go through it and analyze the situation. Essentially, through the process of laying out your internal thought process and asking the interviewer good questions, a candidate will display whether or not he/she has the capabilities to be a good consultant.

It seems relatively straight-forward. Although I think so many people get worked up about it that they completely forget about the more traditional part of the interview and are left stammering when they ask why you chose to go to business school.

Anyway I have that to work on. Thus far I’ve just read over a couple cases and tried to see what kinds of questions I should be asking and how responses should be structured.

Of course, I can’t do that all day…interviews don’t even start until mid-january, so it’s not like I’ve got a deadline coming up. And this all assumes I get invited to interview with some of these firms, which is certainly not a given.

The way that works, is that each firm has a certain number of interview slots for GSB students when they visit campus. A majority of these slots are ‘invitational’ slots, which means exactly what you think. The firms go through applications and resumes and invite students to interview. A smaller portion of slots are ‘open’ slots, and are available to all non-invited students to bid on. But you only get 1000 points to bid for the entire year, so you need to carefully consider what you’re willing to spend.

I really don’t want to have to bid for interviews, at least with the firms I really want to interview with.

But there are only so many slots, and so many great resumes out there.

We’ll see what happens…

Healthcare in this country is crazy

I only have a couple minutes before my next thing to do, but I needed to post this story before I forget it.

I've always thought the whole healthcare industry in this country is completely insane. I've always had insurance, luckily, but any kind of interaction with the healthcare system has always left me confused/angry. And the way I figure it, I'm a reasonably intelligent person who only has to worry about himself...how much worse must it be for senior citizens, or people with tons of family obligations that leave them with even less free time than I have?

So what incident got me thinking about this stuff again? I went home for Thanksgiving this past week (which was good btw) and found I had a couple letters from Aetna. I had Aetna coverage as part of both of my pre-B-School jobs, and now here in Chicago.

So I open these letters, and each of them have information regarding healthcare claims made on my policy. These claims were processed a couple weeks ago, but the dates of service were in November and December of 2006, respectively.

The items they listed looked relatively standard, a US exam on one, and a series of normal blood tests on the other. The provider was listed as some fund in California, which seemed odd. Then there was the part where they said I owed them over $1200 for those services, because they were both out-of-network and because my coverage had been terminated before the services were rendered.

Whoa....

I fixated on the $1200 part, not even really thinking about the California element. I was livid, convinced Aetna was actively trying to go out of its way to screw me over. I've never had an insurance company make a mistake that accidently gave me more money than I deserved.

Anyway...since it was Thanksgiving, they weren't open to receive customer calls. They weren't open on Friday, or over the weekend either.

OK, so I got back to Chicago on Sunday night, and called them first thing on Monday.

The first Aetna rep I spoke with didn't quite understand what I was saying. I tried to tell him I hadn't been to a doctor for bloodwork in that time, but he didn't seem convinced. He suggested I call up my doctor's office and see what the deal was. Fine, so I called my most recent doctor and asked what the deal was with this extra $1200 in charges. They had no idea what I was talking about, because as far as they were concerned, everything was taken care of and no one owed anyone anything.

Hmmm.....let's try Aetna again...

New representative this time, maybe she would be more helpful. And this time, I was armed with some advice from the receptionist at my old doctor, who said, 'That sucks for you, make sure you document exactly who you speak to and what they say and get confirmation for everything, because they'll try and screw you.'

Good words from a healthcare industry professional.

So I'm talking to the Aetna rep, and I tell her that I'm confused, because I don't recognize the provider or the services.

She goes to get more information on the claims.

"It's for a Dr. Chien in California." she said.

"I've never even BEEN to California!" I said, which is a bit of an stretch, but realistically, I've never seen a freaking doctor in California.

"Can you get more information on the actual procedures?" I asked

"Sure, please hold" she said

I waited for a while, then she came back on the line.

"The first one was an ultrasound and a uterus exam"

Needless to say...I felt as though someone at Aetna should've been a little more on the ball before billing me for this stuff. Like maybe just looking at the file and noticing....'hey, this is a guy, he probably isn't having any ultrasounds done on him'

So with my gender as proof, the Aetna rep agreed to void the claim and work back to see who actually received the services. It didn't help that the doctor's phone line was disconnected (shocking, for someone who clearly doesn't run an efficient operation).

But they've assured me they'll take care of it....we'll see

Zombies

I decided to take a break from plotting an elaborate revenge fantasy against my cable provider to post another update of the goings on around here.

Last night we had our awards ceremony for the cohort films. So the class is divided into 8 groups called cohorts, and each one makes a film about the school in some way, and they get judged. We got to see the five finalists for best film last night before the award was announced, and I was amazed at the high quality across the board. Apparently, we’ve got many more creatively talented people than I would’ve guessed for a school with a number-cruncher reputation.

They were all really good, it’s too bad only one could win.

But I’m glad that ours did.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QNE3qxAsoA

That’s a link to our film, winner of the 2007 Golden Gargoyle for Best Film (also winning for Best Actor and Best Dance Sequence). And since the Writers’ Strike has killed a lot of good new television, you probably need something cool to watch anyway.

If you focused really really hard, you might be able to see me in a very bit part. But you probably won’t, and that’s fine by me. I focused most of my time and energy on collaborating with the directors to create the story. Without spoiling the surprise for those who haven’t seen it, it’s a zombie movie, and it’s pretty darn awesome.

Of course there’s been other stuff going on here apart from movie-making. I competed in another case competition yesterday morning, and continued my tradition of playing the role of bridesmaid (without the dress).

So in my first case competition, the judges didn’t select us to advance to the finals, but told us they really liked what we did and that we were the last team eliminated.

I hoped this one would go better, and was looking forward to it because it was asking us to create a growth strategy for a real company, and required us to actually present it to a panel of real consultants. The last competition didn’t require a presentation.

So our team plotted our strategy, made the slides, and presented yesterday morning. And like last time, we didn’t get selected as one of the three finalists. But I talked to two of the four judges from our presentation, and they both had identical things to say;

‘We thought your presentation was fantastic’

‘You were really creative and insightful’

‘You explained things in a phased approach which clients like’

‘You actually addressed issues that most of the groups largely ignored’

‘If you had put any kind of quantitative numbers in at all as for projections, we would’ve put you through’

Our group didn’t project revenues or costs of our strategies, mainly because we had no information to base it on. Our thought process (and our critical mistake) was that it would be better to keep it qualitative as opposed to making a bunch of crazy assumptions for numbers.
So that was a little disappointing, but it was still a really good experience and a good opportunity to actually present something.

Now that’s it’s over, I actually have some time to do some other stuff, you know, like reading for classes.

I've been parodied...or something

So I saw this video posted as a response to my Kebert Xela video...I'm really not too sure what it is, but I thought it was pretty funny to see myself turned into some kind of cartoon character.

YouTube - eMax - Jeopardy

In other news, school's been pretty darn busy now that recruiting has started.

The good thing is that midterms are over (and they went pretty well with relatively little stress), so recruiting has taken on most of my time.

I did also spend a bunch of time on this presentation as part of a case competition. Basically, a consulting firm sponsored a competition where groups of students formed consulting teams and were given the same hypothetical business problem to solve. It was good to interview a bunch of role-players and get the information. It wasn't as much fun to actually put it all together in a presentation, but we put some serious effort into it.

There were 15 teams, and apparently we came in 6th...which wouldn't have been so bad, except only the top 5 teams made the finals and got to actually present their findings. (of course presenting involved starting at 8 this morning, so there's a silver lining in missing out I guess)

It was a pretty good experience, and I'm interested to see how the next one (next week) goes. I figure I'll try to do as many as possible and try to work with as many different people as possible. That'll have to be helpful.

The recruiting stuff has been pretty much what I expected, although I never really knew what it was like to have companies actually interested in hiring you. Coming out of PSU in one of the worst hiring markets since the depression, let's just say the firms weren't banging down our door. Now it's almost the opposite, there are so many firms competing for your attention, and it's up to each one of us to figure out how to best allocate our time.

I still haven't figured out what the optimal mix is, but I feel like I'm getting better at telling my story and asking good questions. Of course, we won't really know until the winter when I find out if I succeed in getting interviews or not.