Oh Carolina!

My journey through Kenan-Flagler Business School of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Mod 2 in progress

Here’s a recap of what’s been happening since my last post. We rounded up Mod 1 and had just four days to relax. I made a quick dash to the Magic city and had a great time with my family. For the current Mod, I toyed with the idea of taking five classes so I’ll have only one class to take in my last Mod in school. I dropped it to just four classes since the current Mod is the mod of full blast campus interviews. I think my classes this Mod are the coolest… (If only the gazillion interviews will let me attend them). I’m taking Private Equity, Financing Deals & M&A, Advanced Financial Reporting and Investing in Sustainable Enterprise (Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy).

Speaking of interviews, I got my first full time offer (a sweet one too I might add) while I was on break…Wooohooo…It came from the career fair I attended a few weeks ago. The company had invited me to their office a few weeks ago for a two-day final round interview. Very interesting experience. More on this on another day.
The challenge now is that the firm is not working with my school’s recruiting calendar and will like a response within 3 weeks. That is certainly not going to work because I just started on-campus interviews and I intend to explore all possible options before making such a crucial decision. For now, I’m putting those negotiating skills to work to find a win-win position for us both.

I had two interviews last week and one of them got back to me on the same day with an invitation to a “Superday” at their head office yesterday. I really like it when companies have such a quick turnaround. It makes the process much smoother. I’ve never been at a Superday but let me tell you, it is a marathon! Interviews with 6 folks almost back to back. It was well organized and we got some breaks in between. We’ll see how it shakes out. A common theme among all the interviews is that most want to hear about what I did over the summer. The 100 hrs/week of work over the summer is really coming in handy now because I have A LOT to talk about.

We are having an Interview Immersion Day for the first year students today. It’s their first real exposure to mock interviews. From hereon, it’s going to be non-stop until they all become pros. Another interview on Monday, but I need to hit the books today and tomorrow. I have so many classes to catch up with.

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

The State of Things

Hard to believe I’ve been away from the blogosphere for this long. The Mod is gradually winding down with just one more week to go for us second years. The first year students are already writing their final exam. They’ll also be heading out for their career treks to New York, Atlanta and other locations next week depending on their concentration. For us second years, on-campus recruiting will start the same week we return for Mod 2. The closed lists have started trickling in.

Wall Street recruiting is not looking too pretty given the current state of things in the market. The middle market I-Banks have however had a very strong showing on campus. For next Mod, I’ll take things very easy and take just one accounting class and a bunch of non-finance classes. Time to start enjoying the second year and start acquiring skills outside Finance. There are certain things that are just expected of MBAs regardless of your concentration. On a related note, my Advanced Writing class ended today and I really enjoyed it and got exactly what I wanted out of it – write the Corporate America way. I did a lot of writing over the summer and noticed that things a kept much simpler that the Corporate environment I cut my teeth in.
Prior to this I will have no problem saying “Ontological specimen of identical plumage invariably conglomerate to its nearest proximity”. Now, I’ll just say “Birds of the same feathers fly together”. Ok maybe I’ve exaggerated a little bit. I had a tendency to sound very formal in my writing and this does not exactly reflected my persona or leadership style. So now, I suppose my personality comes through. Thanks to Heidi Schultz.

Oh well, hopefully I won’t take too long before my next blog.