I can’t believe it, but I’ve survived another seemingly insurmountable week. I attended my Consumer Behavior class on Wednesday. It is definitely the most enjoyable class I’ve had so far. This week we learned about how politicians use marketing in campaigning. I’ve never really thought about a candidate as a product before, but there are several parallels. The three hours flew by. Then I had Strategy and Structure, which is about how different organizations can use their company structure to either help them or hurt them. It was an interesting and sometimes heated discussion, and I’m finding the case classes much more enjoyable than the strictly lecture based classes.
Thursday brought Operations Management and Strategy, as I’m pursuing a concentration in Operations. This class is also case based and it has a lot of overlap with my previous industrial engineering work. That evening, I attended a company cocktail reception. I felt a little bit more in my groove, and was ready to ask insightful questions. All of the consulting companies are offering to help with case interview prep, and I’ve been in contact with many of the African-American contingents within the companies I’m interested in. There does seem to be a big priority and emphasis on increasing diversity in the top firms and they want us to do well.
Friday morning, the Management Consulting Group, a club on campus, organized the First Year Case Workshop. Many of the top firms sent representatives, most of them alums, to give us an introduction to case interviewing as well as practice with us. I was very intimidated going in, because I haven’t done many cases and really had no idea what to expect. We did three rounds with five students, and three different company representatives. The first round was somewhat laughable. The student doing the case was pretty good, but I didn’t know where to start. I had a good answer for the question, but found it difficult to organize my thoughts and produce them in a logical order to someone else. In the third round, we found out it is difficult to do math when someone is both watching and evaluating you. I found it impossible to do long division, and under the pressure was unable to figure out how to fix the answer that I knew was incorrect. It was very frustrating.
But I left feeling a little more confident. I was procrastinating on cases, because it felt foreign and like I’d never get everything in time. Now I know that my problem solving ability will serve me well and I need only focus on structuring my answer and staying calm, cool, and collected. That is doable in two weeks. I returned from Gleacher Center at about two and then spent 6 hours doing eight loads of laundry. It was madness, but I finally got it all done. In theory, this gave me all day Saturday to start reading my cases for next week, but I really just took the opportunity to chill out.
I was supposed to go to a review session for Investments, but I’m feeling lazy and I’d rather just stumble through it on my own. We’ll see how that attitude changes as we get closer to midterms. So I’ve got homework for four classes and interview preparation to do. It’s going to be a fun few weeks.