Happy Thanksgiving, y'all. I know I'm a day late with that, but it's the thought that counts, right? :-) I hope each of you had an enjoyable turkey day yesterday and that you rested well with all of that food in your bellies. For me, yesterday was a long day filled with driving way, way, way out in the country to visit my family, goofing off, and eating like food was about to be outlawed. Best of all, I got to hang out with the cutest little girl I've ever seen...my new neice. She's only 9 weeks old, but she's got some crucial game and had my entire family hooked on her. Now, after all that, I'm up bright and early and I feel like going right back to sleep...I love Thanksgiving.
One of my planned activites for this Thanksgiving break week was to get all of my readings done for next week's classes, but, as of right now, I haven't done a lick of work. I've tried to do work, but then something random would come up like having to take my youngest sister to visit a college, babysitting my neice, or getting some QT in with my mom. I'm flying out later on tonight and I've got a long 6 hour flight, so I hope to do work during that time, but I know I won't make much progress. I guess I'll be using this weekend to grind like crazy on work so I'll at least be ready for Monday and Tuesday's classes.
Everything is set for my return trip to ATL for McKinsey's sell weekend. It's going down next Friday through Sunday and they've got some exciting things planned from us according to the recruiter, so I'm excited. That trip will represent my 9th and 10th cross-country flights in 3 weeks, but I'm going to have to get used to it as a Consultant for at least the next few years. I wish the events would have been restricted to Saturday and Sunday only because I've got to miss two (and possibly three) more classes to make it there by Friday morning, but that's all a part of the game. It sucks that I actually dig the classes that I'm going to be missing, especially my Formations of New Ventures class. First year MBA students, get ready to face the same thing next semester/quarter when your internship interview process starts up.
One more thing...I must say that it's pretty entertaining when a company give you a self-imposed deadline to contact you about your status after an interview and then they miss it. BCG's DC office told me 9 days ago that they'd be giving me my status in 7 days and I still haven't heard anything. I'm not exactly sweating it or anything, but I'm just surprised by this turn of events. I'm going to email the recruiter to see what's up and I assume that the delay is related to the holidays, but I don't think it bodes well for me getting the good word from BCG.
...and they are checkin' for The Kid!!! I'm buggin' out right now! The sell weekend is in a couple of weeks and I'm looking forward to a good time down there in ATL.
Ahhhhh, it's finally over. The OCR recruiting process is over for me as of a couple of hours ago. I still haven't heard from Google about my status with them after my phone screens a couple of weeks ago, but they'd contacted me offline about interviewing, so i don't count that as being in the realm of my OCR interviews. This is the first time that I haven't had job stuff hanging over my head since getting to business school last September, so it's good to finally be free of the pressure. I have no clue how McKinsey will turn out, but, even if it turns out badly, I'll still have Booz Allen and Accenture to mull over, so I'm in good enough shape to be relaxed.
As I just said, i have no clue how these joints went today. From the time I walked in the office, I just felt comfortable. I'd seen the office last year during internship interviews and the recruiters remembered me, so they had me feeling welcome from the start. The interviews consisted of four cases that started off at 8am (for any of you at west coast schools wanting a job on the east coast, be ready to fight jetlag like it was Mike Tyson when interview time comes). I won't go into details about the cases because I've done that a ton of times in other entries. Instead, I'll just give a rundown of how I think they went. The first interview went pretty smoothly and I left it thinking that I'd done really well on the case. The second one was my major fumble of the day...the case wasn't too hard, per se, but there were a few tables with a ton of data that I was shown and I was so tired that all of the numbers ran together in my mind when I saw them. There's no way that I could have done well enough to have gotten a thumbs-up on that one. The third interview is a wild card as far as I know because I can't decide whether I did well or not. I was strong in parts of it and thought I was running into a brick wall in other parts. It was a mixture of "awww shucks, this case can't fade me" and "Dang cuz, I'm strugglin' like nobody's business". The last case was with a partner from the ATL office and, although I tripped up a couple of times, I thought I did pretty well on it.
Overall, I would have given myself a B-grade for the entire day, but I don't know if that's good enough to get an offer from McKinsey. One thing I can say is that I put it all out there for them to see and it's now up to them...I don't know if I could have done any better than I did, so I'm just going to leave it up to God to make a call on this one. Now, I'm sitting in the airport waiting to take off for Cali and feeling chill as I don't know what. It's nice to be done with interviews and to have my flight back to VA for Thanksgiving only a couple of days ago.
Aight, they're starting to board my flight to SFO, so I've got to jump off of this. Hopefully, the next entry will be coming in another day or two and I'll know where i stand with BCG and McKinsey.
What's up, y'all. I'm writing this email from a hotel room in ATL where I am for second rounds with McKinsey tomorrow morning. This is my third trip to the east coast since last Thursday and all of this flying is wearing on me. Yesterday, I was in DC for my BCG second rounds and, as always, you know I've got to give y'all the goods on how it went down. To put it simply, I fumbled bigtime on that joint and I'm fully expecting to get dinged. Here's the deal...
The trip started out with me flying from SFO to Dulles on Tuesday night. As I've been planning these flights, I've been trying to miss as few classes as possible, so the earliest flight I could do out was at 4:15pm. By the time I got to Dulles, it was past midnight and it took another 35-40 minutes to get to the hotel in downtown DC. As you can probably guess, I was crazy jetlagged, so it was difficult to fall asleep once I got to the hotel. I think I got about 4 hours of sleep before I had to get up to get myself together for the interview. One thing that I should have expected is that very few companies that have "DC" offices actually have office in DC...this was true for BCG. Their office is really in Bethesda, MD, which was supposed to take 30 minutes by cab. As my luck would have it, my cabbie ended up getting lost and it took closer to 45 minutes for me to get to the office. He got me there with 5 minutes to spare before my interview, so I can't be totally mad, but I was ready to bug out if he'd made me late.
The interview day was set up with three interviews that each had a small fit portion and the remainder as a case discussion. by now, i've had a ton of interviews of this kind, so I was as ready as I could have possibly been. I got off to a good start with the first interview and I felt like I rocked the case as well as I could have...my interviewer seemed to be satisfied with my performance too, so I thought I'd be golden for the rest of the time. WRONG!!! my second interview was just as bad as the first one was good. I ended up making an incorrect assumption about the business problem based on some initial information that the interviewer gave me and went completely down the wrong track. Once the interviewer let me know what he was looking for, I let him know that that was one of the firs tthings I'd come up with, but had ruled it out based on earlier information that he gave me. I don't know if this made him mad, but the tone of things changed at that point. From then on, I couldn't help feeling like an idiot...everything I said for the rest of the case ended up being wrong and, when i got to the part where i asked him questions, I couldn't help but think that my questions weren't exactly satisfactory for him. After leaving that joint, I was frazzled and thrown off for the last interview. the third guy ended up coming out to meet me late, so we pretty much had to rush right into the case and I played his case wrong in every direction. I know that I broke the problem down well, but, everytime I made an assessment or gave a reason why something might be, he hit me with a "uuuuhhhhhh, I don't think so" or "I don't think that's right". After a while, it just got funny to think how wrong I was.
As I walked out of the BCG DC office to catch a cab to Dulles, I was SAD and couldn't stop kicking myself for how badly I'd done on those last two cases. I knew that I couldn't change what had already happened, but i was feeling low because getting an offer from that office would have given me a chance to be less than two hours from my family if I'd have taken it. Now, I'm pretty sure that it won't be an option. They said that I should find out my fate by next Wednesday, but I don't see the good word coming from them. I can't let that get me down though because I've got to hype myself up for the McKinsey joints that I've got in the morning. These upcoming ones will likely be the last interviews I do during my time in business school, so I'm looking forward to getting past them.
dang, your boy is SO tired right now. the past few days have been hectc as I don't know what, so i knew I had to write them up for the people to see.
As I mentioned in my last entry, I had my second round interview with Booz Allen yesterday morning. the drama involved with it started before I even left california...On Thursday, I went out to SFO to catch my 1:45pm flight to JFK and found out that it was delayed by 4.5 hours, which meant that I wouldn't be arriving on that one until 2:30am. I tried to get Booz's travel agency to switch me to a flight that would have left SFO earlier, but, because I had agreed to a cheaper non-refundable ticket for the first flight (in order to save Booz $$$), I couldn't get switched to a different flight and I was stuck. The delayed flight left even later than it was supposed to so I didn't get to JFK until almost 3am. By the time I got to the hotel, it was 3:30am and I promptly requested an 8am wake-up call so I'd have time to get up and prep for my interview, which was to start at 9:45am.
So, at 8:45am...yeah, that's right, 8:45am...I randomly wake up and realize that my wake-up call never came. I frantically scrambled to get ready for my interview and was ableto get over to the Booz Allen office on time, but I was so tired that I was barely coherent (thanks goodness for Starbucks). My session consisted of only two interviews that were each supposed to have a case given. I was pleasantly surprised when my first interviewer told me that he wouldn't be giving me a case because he felt that they were too widespread and that he'd rather get a sense of who I was during our interviewer. The second interviewer gave me two mini-cases that each took about 10-15 minutes and asked me a bunch of questions about my work background and my time at Princeton. When i left the interview session, I felt like I'd done OK, but I've learned that I'm often a bad judge of how well I do in these things.
The flight back was tough because I had a hard time getting comfortable for most of the 6 hours, so i was damn near a vombie when i got back. Then, when i got back here, we had a huge party for one of my roomies, so I had to act all social and what not when i would have rather been in my bed knocked out. I was finally able to crash at about 2:30am, but then I was awakened bright and early at 8am with a phone call...from my first Booz Allen interviewer. he was calling to tell me that they wanted to give me an offer and that news made me wake up all kinds of quick. He told me that more details would be coming in an offer letter, but the info he did give me had me grinning pretty big. I guess my struggles with the on-campus recruiting process are finally over. After all of those consulting companies faded me last year, it's good to have been able to seal the deal this year...I think I can say that my reign as "King of the 2nd Round Knockout" is just about over.
I can't believe it...it's a weeknight and i've actually got some free time to write an entry. that hasn't happened in ages. Normally, I'd be plugging away at work on a tuesday night even though we dont have classes on wednesdays, but, in the past week, i've been cranking like crazy to get ahead on my work and I only had to throw down on class stuff for a couple of hours earlier today. This week is a little different than normal because we have our friday class sessions meeting tomorrow due to the Net Impact Conference that is going down this weekend. I had planned to attend it but I'm going to miss Friday because I'll be in NYC. This is the first time the conference will be hosted at Stanford and a bunch of my classmates have been working like crazy to make it go well, so I'll have my fingers crossed for them.
As I mentioned in the last entry, we had our Many Voices event on Saturday and everything went very well. I ended up having to spend all day at the GSB (8am to 6:30pm) serving as the MC and then my housemates and I had a party at our place to give the attendees somewhere to kick it. I ended up getting absolutely no work done that day, but seeing the excitement of all the kids who came out for it made me not feel too bad for taking one for the team. We had about 100 kids here with a variety of ethnic, professional, and educational backgrounds and most of them plan on applying this year. I hope some of them get in because they were so excited about this place and I feel like they'd make great contributions to the GSB culture.
Despite the energy of the Many Voices event, I can't front...I often feel like I stretch myself too thin being the one who always steps up for things like this. I wish some other classmates would be willing to chip in on stuff like this too because there is only one "me" and all of this has a way of wearing on you after a while. Only a few more weeks until Winter break and then I'll get a much needed month off from school. Until then, i just have to find some more fuel from somewhere and keep on kickin' until I can get through these second round interviews.
Whew, this has been a long week and I'm thankful that Friday is finally here. I just realized that I forgot to write an entry last night about how the Booz Allen interview went, so I'm playing catch-up now. As I said in my last entry, the interview was at 8am, so I was exhausted when I rolled into the library for the two interviews. Most of my classmates were interviewing for the SF office and, as such, they only had to do a single on-campus round consisting of three interviews. Since I was checking for Booz Allen's east coast offices, I only had two interviews, one fit interview and one case. I felt like I'd established a rapport with the fit interviewer early in the session and we had a great conversation. As for the case, I didn't think I cracked it perfectly, but, eventually, I thought I got to what the interviewer was looking for. Overall, I would have given myself a B on the interview, but I wasn't too confident about the outcome because I couldn't help but have flashbacks of the "HECK NAW" email I got from Bain after my first round joint with them. Well, earlier today, I received word that I'd done well yesterday and that the NYC office was going to fly me out next Friday for a second round interview, so i'm pretty excited. The next round will only be two case interviews and I'm guessing I'll know where I stand with Booz Allen by the following Monday. It's nice to see the light at the end of the "OCR recruiting" tunnel finally getting bigger
Right after the Booz Allen joint ended, I had to go straight to my Corporate Finance midterm, which had me feeling like I was going to get slaughtered. I'd spent a good portion of the previous day studying, but I still didn't feel comfortable enough with the material to think I'd hit a home run on it. The test only ran for an hour and 45 minutes and, when it was done, I didn't think it was too hard at all, but it was soo daggone long that I only got through half of it. In fact, I only know of two people who were able to get through the whole thing...most of the rest of us got about half of it done. It was good to feel like I'd nailed everything that I had time to answer, but I'm still concerned about where my grade will stack up against everyone else's. THANK GOODNESS FOR THE GSB'S GRADE NON-DISCLOSURE POLICY!!!!
You know...I thought I'd be finished worrying about midterms when i finished my first year, but I guessed wrong. It turns out that my Corporate Finance elective has a midterm and I just finished spending the betterpart of the last 5 hours getting caught up in my readings for that class so I won't get slammed by the test tomorrow morning. The class has been great so far (the prof is one of the funniest cats I've ever been around), but the pace has gone pretty quickly, so i fell behind in the readings at end of the first week. Now that I've read all of this stuff, I wish i'd kept up all along because this material is MUCH cooler when you know what's going on. After spending much of last year terrified by exams, I've gotten used to the fact that grades aren't a huge deal here and I'm pretty relaxed going into this exam...that might also be because it's right about midnight and I'm dead tired, but it's nice not to be stress about an exam that will go down in 10 hours.
Before I get a chance to have that midterm slap me around, I have to worry about my first round interview with Booz Allen Hamilton bright and early at 8am. If it isn't bad enough that my interview is early as hell, Booz uses some of the toughest cases in the Consulting game during their interviews, so I'm pretty shook at the thought of what they're going to do to me tomorrow. Plus, I've been too busy with other things to do any prepping since my BCG and Bain interviews last week, so I'm guessing that they're going to make quick work of me tomorrow...at least, it'll get me awake for my Corp. Fin. exam.
Before I sign off, I want to send out a few shout-outs:
- a "Glad to be of service to you" shout-out goes to the ladiesof the GSB that I tore up the dance floor with at the annual GSB Halloween party this past Saturday. one of the gripes that I've heard from GSB ladies is that the guys at our school don't like to dance, so, if there's a party with a decent DJs, I make sure that give of my time to solve that problem for a few lucky ladies. :-) The GSB Halloween party is always a blast and, while I probably should have stayed home and caught up on work, it was worth it to go out and act a fool for a few hours.
- a "CONGRATULATIONS!!!" shout-out goes to any Stanford MBA1's who might be reading this entry. I know you guys were buggin' out over those midterms and it's got to have you feeling good to be finished with them. It's all downhill from here, so enjoy the ride while you can. Before you know it, you'll be an MBA2 wishing that you could do the first year all over again.
- a "Looking forward to meeting you" shout-out goes to all of the prospective students who will be coming to the GSB this weekend for the "Many Voices" diversity recruiting event. I'm going to be the MC for the event, so you're going to see a lot of me while you're here, but I'd like you all to know that we're putting in a lot of work to make this an informative and enjoyable event for all of you.