OK y'all, it's finally here...the first week of interviews. I was supposed to be having an interview with Bain earlier today, but I got it switched to tomorrow because I would have been interviewing for the LA office if I'd gone today. Since I want to be on the east coast, the Bain folks agreed to move me to their Tuesday schedule, which is screening people for their other offices. My roommate just had his Bain interview about an hour ago and he just finished giving me the rundown. It sounds like it was a challenge but he thinks that he handled it well. Now, I'm all amped up and excited about getting started with things tomorrow, but I'm nervous too because I know how important these first round interviews are. Many of these companies will be talking to 100+ people and the first round is the only chance you'll have to make a good impression. I'd better do my thing over the next two weeks or else I'll be working in a fast food joint for the summer to make my car payment.
I spent most of the weekend doing a bunch of case interview prep with classmates and with one of the second year students who is about to accept an offer from McKinsey's Johannesburg office. Going into the weekend, i was terrified because I thought my case game was waaaaay off-point, but, by the time i went to bed last night, I felt much more comfortable. I still know that I've got to improve on the speed with which I break down the problems, but it seems that I'm thinking through them the right way. One thing that I have yet to practice is the fit portion of the interview. I have spent so much time working on cases that I might slip up and fumble on something as simple as walking through my resume. I've got a lot of work to do in the next 22 hours to make sure I'm on point tomorrow when i do my thing for Bain and BCG.
Even worse, I have a Finance midterm coming up on Wednesday morning and I've got to find time to study for that too. Winter quarter was supposed to be a breeze, but it is DEFINITELY nothing like that.
I know I've said this before (and I probably sound like a broken record by now), but B-school is no joke. If any of you have heard that B-school is all about networking and hanging, then you heard wrong. The GSB is putting us on the grind this week with a ton and a half of work. In addition to our regular preparations for our core classes (reading and cases, espcially in our Strategy class), we've got a group paper due in Marketing and a problem set due in Operations on Thursday and a problem set due in Finance on Friday. Plus, I've got a paper due tomorrow in my Nonpofits Management class. To make matters even tougher, my first interview is on Jan 31, so I've got to find time to put some major work in preparing for the consulting case interviews or else your boy is going to be without a summer internship. I can't wait until Spring break...too bad it's 2 months away.
Oh well, I guess I'd better get back to finishing this Nonprofits paper and, hopefully, I'll get a chance to put in work in my part of the marketing paper that's due on Thursday. Peace.
In my last entry, I mentioned that the summer internship recruiting process was gaining momentum. Well it's almost in full swing now because the interview invitations started going out yesterday and today for the companies for whom we dropped our resumes. The invites will continue to go out for the next week or so with their arrivals depending on the original submission deadlines for the resumes. So far, I haven't done too badly (2 invites and 1 waitlist), but I've still got 12 more companies to hear from, so i'm getting nervous.
Getting invited to interview is a good feeling, but that's only a small part of the battle. For those of us looking at internships in Consulting and Corporate Strategy, it's all about cracking the case, which is something I haven't mastered yet. I've gone to case cracking workshops (including one today given by McKinsey), but I'm still far from being a master at breaking down these business cases. I've been told that I'm putting too much pressure on myself to get the process perfect, but I don't want to end up not getting an internship, so I'm grindin' like crazy to get the techniques down. Too bad we've got a steady stream of classwork to do along with all of this interview prep. It's going to be a long month...
I'd like to start this post by giving props to Dr. martin Luther King Jr, without whom I likely would never have been given the opportunities to continue my education or even start it on the path that I've taken thus far. He sacrificed his life to make America a better place and I am thankful for that contribution to society every time I wake up and am able to head out for class.
I am just getting back to Stanford after spending the weekend in Lake Tahoe for our Black Graduate Student Association's annual ski trip. I have only skied once before and all of my winter gear is back in my mother's garage in VA, so I didn't hit the slopes, but it was still and enjoyable trip. While we've got a tight group of Black folks at the GSB, our numbers aren't exactly large, so it was great to spend a weekend hanging out with other Black grad students and finding out more about what they are studying, what they want to do, and their life experiences. Some of the conversations that we had were really eye-opening and I found that I had a lot of shared experiences with the other folks. Two of the highlights were: the "Visible Men" breakout session that we had with the fellas to discuss our views about manhood and what we saw our roles as men to be; and a conversation that I had with my boys Detavio, Corey, and a group of the women from other grad schools (at the peak of the convo there were 10 of them) that went from around 2:00am until 7:00am and covered everything from what we were all looking for in a mate to the tradeoffs that women are forced to make when it comes to their careers...I learned a lot from both of those convos. It was an exhausting weekend, but I'm glad that I went because I now feel like a part of the campus-wide Black grad community, as opposed to just the Black GSB community.
Now that I'm back, i've got to jump on the homework that I didn't get a chance to do over the weekend. It's going to be a long night.
At long last, it's finally time to begin the daunting task of trying to find a summer internship. Unfortunately, our Career Management Center doesn't allow companies to start focusing on first years until the Winter quarter, so we're stuck trying to fit this internship search in with the start of our second quarter of classes. I can understand the rationale of the CMC, but it's already starting to be an issue because there is so much work to do for classes that the extra company presentations and resume/cover letter prep have me staying up until 2-3 am trying to get everything done.
In about 10 minutes, I've got to run off to a "Meet the company" presentation being given by BCG and, after that, I've got to hit up a dinner sponsored by McKinsey. This is all after having gone to a Deloitte MTC earlier in the day and attending a McKinsey reception, a Monitor Group reception, and a Bain dinner last night. Plus, since all of the resume drops for companies started having deadlines yesterday, a lot of my time is being spent writing cover letters and customizing my resume to what these companies might be looking for. Throughout all of this, the companies are steady assigning tons of readings and giving us assignments to do for class discussion and for handing in. If things are this tight now, I'm worried about how it'll shake out once I start having to travel to different cities for late round interviews. This is going to be a rough quarter...whew, I wish i was still on break.
Well, I guess things are finally back to normal. I had my first day of Winter quarter courses and something tells me that this is going to be a busy quarter. In addition to the standard Core courses of Finance, Strategic Management, Marketing, and Operations, I've decided to take an elective class in the Strategic Management of Non-profits. People have told me that taking on the extra class will likely be a killer (because our internship search is like another class), but this joint is supposed to be the best strategy course offered by the Stanford GSB and I'm hoping to get ahead on class credits in case I try for a joint degree program with the School of Education.
I was really worried about these new classes because, like last quarter, everything is brand new to me, but, after having my Operations, Marketing, and Strategy for Non-Profits courses today, I feel like I'm going to be able to grasp the material well...that doesn't mean I'll get perfect scores, but I hope to understand it more than I did with my first set of B-school classes in the Fall. One thing that hasn't changed is the workload...whew! I'm sitting here now trying to cram all of the reading for tomorrow's Strategy and Finance classes into my head and I feel like I'm going to pass out. I wish I had done this reading over Winter Break like the professors suggested...
One thing that I'd like to remind anyone out there looking at B-school to remember is how expensive it is to be a student. Yesterday, I dropped $570 on course readers (big packets of Xerox copies of class material) for my five classes and that is in addition to the $200-250 I'd spent in December for used copies of my textbooks for the quarter. When I came out here, I didn't consider the amount that I'd have to spend on these extra materials. I knew that they wouldn't be a part of the standard tuition and fees, but I didn't know i'd get hit this hard. I'd better make sure I get a great internship this summer because my credit cards will be screaming for mercy by the time the summer comes.
Speaking of internship stuff, our recruiting season officially begins next week when companies start coming to campus to make presentations to us, so I'll be giving you lots of information about that in the next few entries. So far, I've been called by a McKinsey engagement manager (who saw my resume in our resume book and wanted to make sure I was consdering applying with them) and invited to dinners/presentations by Bain, BCG, and Monitor. I can't wait until the process gets going. I just hope I don't fumble when it comes time for the interviews.