Tomorrow, I have what I hope will be my final interview with the company I’d most like to work for after graduation. I have been spending the last two days preparing, and hope to be back to full blogging speed early next week.
Hello World…
I am back in the drivers seat blogging after an amazing summer in South San Francisco working for Genentech. I’ll have a video quickly summarizing my experience posted a bit later today.
Needless to say, it’s time for another big transition. I’m leaving for Copenhagen, Denmark in a little more than 24 hours. I’ll be chronicling the experience on this blog, complete with stories, pics and videos of my time there. I’ll also be trying to blog more about economic and business issues from an international experience.
I’m also looking forward to more guest blogging appearances from other b-schoolers back at North Carolina State. It’s going to be a tremendous experience and I can’t wait to share it all with you.
Over the last few months I’ve unfortunately strayed from writing about my experiences at school. Part of this has to do with the crazy economic circumstances, and part of it has to do with a general school overload. But a classmate reminded me the other day that this is an NCSU MBA weblog, and should at least make an attempt to address the events and happenings inside the walls of Nelson Hall.
So here we stand, exactly 30 days from the end of our first year of business school. The next four weeks will be full of tests, papers, and presentations for all of our classes: Strategy, Leadership & Ethics, Finance, Career Effectiveness and our concentration course (Supply Relationship Management in my case). On top of this stress, many students are still working towards finding an internship for the summer. This has proven a tough nut to crack in the current economic environment.
Fortunately, several students in the program have been successful in their internship search, myself included. I will be spending the summer in South San Francisco with Genentech, a leader in the biotechnology industry. I’m tremendously excited for the opportunity to work with an amazing organization and to return to one place I consider home. Early next week, I’ll produce a video highlighting the summer plans of other students within the program.
Over theses last four weeks, I’ll try to post more updates about end of semester events and highlights from the year. At the end of the day, I just can’t believe how quickly the last eight months have passed.
CNN publishes a story this afternoon that many of us here in graduate school could write in our sleep: For students, summer jobs are harder to come by. Well first of all, Duh. Of course summer jobs are harder to come by, the economy is in an awful recession and jobs are being slashed across the board.
However, the article does go on to note that while the banking industry and MBA’s in particular have been hit hard by the downturn, other graduate students are also feeling the burn: “At the law school, “everybody is scrambling,” according to Littman. “The phone has been ringing a lot from people who are worried.”
Everyone is feeling the crunch right now.
When I started this blog, I envisioned it as a diary about my experience in business school. North Carolina State offers a unique curriculum based on innovation, technology and entrepeneurship, and I wanted to highlight my experiences with that. While I still intend to do that as much as possible, my focus over the last several weeks has been elsewhere.
Namely, global economic events have somewhat taken over the content of this blog. I believe there is good reason for this. We are witnesses to the most cataclysmic economic situation since the Great Depression, except this time its playing out on a truly global scale. As I’ve mentioned, Europe and Asia are struggling more than we are in the United States. And the situation will almost certainly get worse before it gets better.
We are living history. This is a story we’ll tell to our children and grandchildren. Even the optimists at this point acknowledge it will be at least 2010 before we begin to recover, and what I’ll term the realists (Nouriel Roubini, the guys at Baseline Scenario, Paul Krugman) think it might be much longer (i.e. 2012-2015) before we see a real recovery. There’s also a distinct chance that we won’t be able to repair our broken financial systems, and the global economy will fall off the rails completley leading to widespread chaos and anarchy… think Soviet Union in 1989-90.
I feel it’s important to document what we’re witnessing from as many angles as possible. I will try to post as often as I can about how the economy impacts all of us as MBA students who are searching for internships and jobs over the next 12-24 months. I’ll also try to integrate posts about how companies are dealing with the challenges through their use of Web 2.0 and social networking technologies. Darwinism will rule the business world for the next decade. Only the most adaptable and flexible organizations will be able to survive and thrive out there, and there will be many Harvard Case Studies to emerge from the economic carnage around us.
This is the story of our lives, and I’m planning to stick with it every step of the way.
I stopped by the College of Engineering Career Fair earlier this morning to meet with the folks from Intel. I’m eyeing an internship opportunity with them out there in Portland, Oregon. While I couldn’t stay long, here were a couple impressions:
1. There were a LOT of people there. To be expected in the economic environment, but it was a harsh dose of reality to spend 15 minutes looking for parking and another 30 minutes standing in line waiting to talk to a representative.
2. There were a LOT of engineers and computer science folks there. And almost all of them were from India or east Asia. Funny enough, the first question I received from the Intel representative was, “Are you sanctioned to work in the United States?” (I’m a white male for reference). It’s one thing to read about India and China whipping us on science and engineering. It’s quite another to be competing with it right in front of you. America needs to reinvest in science and tech R&D if we’re going to continue to compete on the global economic stage.
UPDATE: Reading this again, I hope my writing isn’t misconstrued. I’m definitely NOT a nativist. Having plenty of Indian and Chinese scientists and engineers is most definitely a good thing. There just need to be more Americans and more of an emphasis on sicence, technology and innovation in American schools, starting with elementary and middle school.
While I’ve been focusing a lot of my posts on the economy recently, a lot has still been happening with school. Here’s a quick recap of some events that happened this week and what else I’m looking forward to:
I’ll also be creating a new video tomorrow featuring two of my classmates who want to start their own companies after graduating from the program. Should be an interesting topic.
The best New Year’s resolution I made this year was to turn my calendar from a book into a website. Since I’m checking my e-mail so often, it made sense to go with Google Calendar. It’s nice enough on an individual basis, but it’s real value lies in the ability to share information. When I add a friend’s calendar, it makes it much easier to aggregate a complex set of events. Myself and the other MBA candidates all have a class schedule, internship search, assistantship work and outside obligations to a family or a real job (don’t forget that 70% of NCSU MBA’s are part-timers). Balancing your time is essential to successfully navigating the demands placed on you by the schedule.
I’ve talked with a few of my classmates who are on the MBA Student Association (MBASA) about creating a unified Google calendar. I think Jay talked about it first. Nice work, Jay. On this Google Calendar, you’ll be able to find a common schedule including the following types of events:
The calendar could also provide links to other important sites (i.e. JobLink, Current Student Home Page, MyPack, WebMail and maybe even this blog). Anyone out there have thoughts on the idea?
Now that we’re creeping up on the end of January, I’m starting to really ramp up my internship search. I have my resume into a few companies, but I’m now visiting our Career Resources website on an almost daily basis scouring for opportunities. This is not something I want to procrastinate considering the state of the economy, and I know many of my classmates feel the same.
In other MBA-related news, I’ll have another video blog to post in the next 24-48 hours. I had a brief discussion with Tejas Sangoi and Han Hsieh, who are attending the program from India and Taiwan respectively. I have a tremendous amount of respect for our international students, all of whom have learned English as a second language. Here they are, immersing themselves completely in a new culture, far from the comforts of home, and they’re expected to keep pace in advanced classes where the Professors have been known to occasionally talk to fast. Props to them.
We’ve also seen a noticeable uptick in the amount of reading and work assigned this semester. We have another project due on Wednesday for MBA 560 (Marketing), and I’ll be attending a semester-long project kick-off meeting in about half an hour here for MBA 541 (Purchasing and SCM). We’re definitely back to the grind.
