Monday, March 28, 2011

Time flies

I can't believe it's been a month since I last took the time out to draft a blog post. So much has happened..

1) My work trip to MD has been canceled. I planned to take a week off afterward and visit Tuck, Wharton, Columbia and Yale. After much deliberation on how to get the best bang for my buck, I decided to push off visiting the east coast schools until September. This situation is not ideal, but I am going to make the best of it by getting all of my west coast visits out of the way now. Which leads me to point #2...

2) Not going to MD means that I can go to the Many Voices conference. If I were going to MD I would not be in the bay area for the event, so there is some silver lining in that cloud. Stanford is my top choice right now. I visited in the fall, and sat in on a class, but did not speak to very many students outside of my former Housemate. This weekend I'll get to hear more from students, get to speak to admissions officers and ask questions, and get to partake in an actual class. The Many Voices folks have sent along assignments -- one of the readings is 40 pages long. I'm going to have a veritable read-a-thon.



3) Speaking of visiting campuses, I had an opportunity to visit Darden at the beginning of this month for the MLT kick-off seminar. I wound up getting to Virginia pretty early on Thursday so I planned to visit a class, take a campus tour and attend a chili cook-off. Well I wound up falling ill that first day. I don't know if I was dehydrated or what, but I did not feel up to touring campus etc. Lucky for me I got to see a lot of the campus over the weekend and it's gorgeous. Like absolutely stunning. We also got our own classroom experience as one of the most popular professors at Darden led a case-based discussion for us. I enjoyed the case method. It was stimulating, but it didn't strike me as something that I must have as the dominant/sole teaching method. One could argue that with the case method you are always applying theories, but I'll have to think about devoting my entire 2-years to case studies. I spoke to numerous students over the weekend and they were all very friendly. I heard a lot about the benefits of going to a school like Darden when it comes to recruiting for management consulting. I also heard from quite a few future brand managers (more than I expected). I'm still undecided on Darden. It's a beautiful campus -- there's no denying that. I would get a great general management education there and I'm sure I would land a great first gig post MBA. I need to do some soul-searching to see if I can adjust to living in a small city.




4) I wound up getting an A on my calculus final and subsequently an A in the class. Yay me! I'm glad that it's out of the way and I've got my Thursdays back. Now I have a stats course and a calc course under my belt -- and I got A's in both. Woot. I had originally planned to take Micro economics and accounting in addition to calc and stat, but my MLT coach has me rethinking my original plna. I long ago abandoned the idea of taking 4 courses and settled on 3, but she thinks that 2 is sufficient. A 3rd would just be me driving the point home. I have a few months to think about what I'm going to do. I can take micro economics, lose another 4-6 hours out of my week and pay about 800 bucks. Or I can save the money for something else. If the $800 puts me closer to my long term goal without putting me into the red, it's probably worth taking the additional course. Fortunately I won't have to cross that bridge until May when the extension school offers the micro economics course.

5) This past month I researched Duke Fuqua. The students I spoke to seem excited about the program, but right now I am undecided on how I feel about it. I plan to visit the school in the fall to experience life on campus.

6) I gave my resume yet another face lift and have included more figures to show impact

7) I spoke with a former house mate who is a 2Y at Wharton. She's majoring in marketing there and I wondered how that was like for her. When I hear Wharton, I think consulting, not so much marketing/brand management, and as it's a school I'm considering, I wanted to talk to her on the phone about her time at Wharton. As it turns out, she thought she was going into finance but after a few weeks she quickly realized that it was not for her and managed to shift her career focus before recruiting started. She gave me the email address of one of her cohort mates who, like me, is from a publishing background and who, like I hopefully will be, is going into brand management next year. I need to email her to arrange a time for an informational interview.

8) My little sister surprised me with a visit this past weekend. She came up from Southern California for a weekend and wound up spending most of her time playing Call of Duty and hanging out with one of her friends who moved away from Santa Barbara. She did cook a fabulous dinner for me on Saturday and we got to spend some time together despite my pretty hectic schedule.

In summary, my list of schools is looking like this now:
Stanford
Tuck
Wharton
Fuqua
Darden
Anderson
Marshall
Stern
Columbia
Haas
Georgetown
Yale SOM
Kellogg
Booth

Keep in mind that this is a long list and I haven't researched all of these schools in depth yet. Stanford, Haas, and Anderson are definitely on my short list.
What's on the agenda for April:

Many Voices Conference
Toastmasters Speech # 5 (I've already got an idea)
Lent
Vegas and Janet Jackson at the end of the month with two of my bffs
A visit to Haas and hopefully a visit to USC and Anderson
Career planning and informational interviews with brand managers (I'm trying to paint vividly what my short term and long term goals are. They are abstract right now and for b-school apps, they need to be crystal clear).
And an email to my grandmother, and that I'll do right now.