Hello again! Here's a recount of life since I returned to campus Sept. 7 to begin my second year. As expected, classes took off, some at lightning speed over the next seven weeks, others on a slower, semester-long format.
Between reading cases, of course, back to the job hunt, this time for a full-time opportunity. Part of finding a job entailed preparing for the upcoming NBMBAA conference held in Houston, Texas, from Sept. 15 to Sept. 18. where hundreds of companies gathered under the same roof to talk to thousands of students (some 11,000 people had registered for the career fair), both current and graduates racing madly through the conferece hall, networking and interviewing like soldiers on a mission.
Unlike other students who had lined up interviews before attending the conference (if you are able to this, great!), I took this conference as a warm-up for other conferences to come and as a chance to connect early with a specific list of target companies. I arrived in Houston in the wee hours of the morning on Thursday, Sept. 16, and tried to get some sleep before the first long day of the career fair.
I arrived at about 11 a.m. and mapped put my "booth-hitting" strategy, company list in hand. Yes, promoting oneself at time feels odd, but someone's got to do it! This is why we are all doing our MBAs, right? Anyway, I first paid a visit to a company that had e-mailed me about an rotational program. There I met with one of the Human Resources representatives who, upon seeing that I had received an e-mail from one of her colleagues, proceeded to write my name on the next day's interview schedule.
And so the conference took me from booth to booth, making my pitch. As you can imagine, the pitch gets old as the day winds down. At the end of day one I had one interview lined up. I then headed back to the hotel, ordered room service and began preparing for the interview the next day.
On Friday, after a bite to eat, it was time to head back to the conference and find the interview location. After finding the company booth, I was given a form I would hand in to the interviewer. The interview proceeded as planned and by the end, it became apparent that I wasn't the best fit for the position the company had mentioned in its e-mail (they wanted 2-3 years of marketing experience), but I could be a good fit for other positions.
Following the interview, I returned to the Career Fair, ready to pitch my story to another handful of companies. A few pitches later, I had landed my second interview with the consumer healthcare division of a pharmaceutical company. I would need to return to the booth several hours later, so in the meantime, I continued my networking.
As 3 p.m. rolled around, I walked down to the company booth for my interview. There I sat with a marketing executive and had an extensive conversation about my background and experiences. I then returned to the floor to visit a couple of other companies before heading back to the hotel.
[As an aside, during my interview I received a call (of course, I DID NOT answer the phone) from home to inform me that someone close had just passed away. As soon as I returned to the hotel, it became clear that I would cancel my trip to St. Louis and go home to the funeral.]
Well, I must head back to my studies and everything else going on. Next time I will share a bit more about loss and returning to my MBA reality.