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.

Management Consulting may not be for me after all...

One of the early activities in the MLT program is to take a career assessment survey. I've taken one of these years ago at my first job and was surprised at some of the assessment. I thought for sure it was going to peg me as a soft spoken person who is very detail oriented, but when I got my results the survey pegged me as a pretty gregarious person, with a big picture outlook, and who is not afraid of making difficult decisions. Not surprisingly, the assessment said I wasn't a very good listener. I remember the line verbatim, "Be careful in a meeting with her. She may very well appear alert and attentive but she is probably not listening." lol

The organization also had an expert come and talk to us in more depth about the assessment and the guy said based on my profile that I'm probably more reticent when I first meet people and that I'd make a good people manager due to my honesty, and my eventual outspoken-ness but that I have to work on warming up to people faster. That was five or so years ago, and the assessment was pretty spot on. Fast-forward to now, I have a hard time dealing with details, I'm known in the department for being honest and pointing out potential weaknesses in our strategies, and I enjoy talking and being the center of attention.

This recent assessment hadn't changed much since then. It still pegs me as someone who is outspoken and honest, someone who has a hard time listening instead of talking, and someone who prefers to deal with the big picture. The survey also says that my top values are monetary gain, autonomy, innovative thought/strategy, creativity, and ability to pursue interests outside of my career. In addition to the career profile assessment, it gave me a list of careers and a score on how much I'd like the work. What surprised me is that I scored a 96 in venture capital (I'm thinking this is due to my affinity for innovation) and only an 88 in Marketing.



What surprised me was the 37 in Management Consulting. I'm assuming I scored low in this area because autonomy is one of my most important values.






That said, I should probably conduct some informational interviews with management consultants. I'm not going to strike it off my list of possible career avenues just yet, but the assessment has me thinking more seriously about brand management.

What's my story?

If you're applying to B-school, you've surely heard talk about honing "your story." When we applied to college, we didn't have to speak much about our future goals. Sure we talked a bit about who we were and the experiences we had in high school, but our professional goals weren't really at play. We weren't expected to have a concrete plan of what we wanted to do post graduation. Applying to b-school is a different beast. Business school is a professional school and you need to give admissions committees a clear idea of what you want to do after you obtain your MBA.

I'm reminded of an epsiode of Living Single. Sinclair (Kadijah's cousin and secretary) asks for more responsibility. When Kadijah asks her what exactly she wants to do, Sinclair whines and says she doesn't know. I'm kind of feeling like Sinclair -- but just kind of. After all, I embarked on this journey after taking some personal inventory. So I have a hazy vision of leaving my current industry and perhaps my current function. When I was brainstorming , I thought about which aspects of my job that I liked and enjoyed the most. In certain ways I work as an internal consultant. I'm not married to just one product team. I conduct market research and pre-launch market seeding campaigns to unearth information about the market for any given editor or to help an editor solve problems with their book list or individual books. It'd be cool, I thought, to do something similar outside of publishing. Then I thought, and thought, and said you know what, that using an external, fresh perspective and approach to solving a problems is what consultants do. I did an informational interview with one of my good friends from college (I believe I've posted about it here) and confirmed that my idea of what she really did was correct. I was fearful, however, of how well I'd be able to convince an admissions committee that I'd be successful in making a transition from publishing to consulting.

That fear led me to other avenues that seemed more predictable for someone with my background. What if I stayed in publishing and wrote about my goal to revolutionize the industry in my essays? This is quite a lofty and original goal. Thinking about your career goals in terms of how good your essays will be is kind of backwards, though, and I wasn't sure if I'd be able to convince an admissions committee that I was passionate about that goal. While my end goal is to leave the industry, I won't pretend that there aren't any aspects about it that I like. I also won't pretend that if I stayed in publishing I couldn't find a niche for myself that would be fulfilling. That said I'm giving some more thought to using my MBA to come back to publishing, but there are other industries and functions that have caught my eye.

One day I was waiting for a friend to pick me up and I wandered into a GAP, and I found another career inspiration there. I love marketing. I really do. I started my publishing career in marketing, and I took my current job because it was a hybrid between marketing and editorial. When I did a stint at Starbucks fresh out of undergrad while looking for a full time job, I used to study the marketing materials that were sent to the store. Starbucks' marketing and branding is totally integrated from the core. There's no element in a Starbucks store that does not serve to communicate Starbucks' benefits to its customers. This is also what I saw at the GAP that day (though they have been suffering in sales as of late). A light bulb went off. Perhaps retail marketing is really where I need to be. I had had a few drinks at happy hour no more than ten minutes prior, so the $5 wine could have been at work.


Then out of no where a few weeks ago, without the aid of $5 wine, my editorial mind resurfaced. While I don't necessarily want to work with books anymore, I do like the idea of cultivating a list of books or products. And that is very similar to what a brand manager would do with a particular brand's products. I went to Wet Fish to research. According to wetfish, here are a Brand Manager's basic duties:

1. Monitoring the competitive landscape of the category in which your brand resides.
2. Developing strategies to exploit market opportunities.
3. Executing those strategies with the help of a cross-functional team.
4. Delivering the sales volume, market share, and profit projections for the business.

Currently, I participate in a process that is responsible for all four of the above.

Now I have four career paths in mind and four career paths I need to explore in more depth. I would like to develop a clear picture of my goals before B-school not only for the sake of my applications, but also for the sake of attaining these goals. I understand that most b-school students wind up veering in a different direction than the one they charted in their applications. I might also fall under that umbrella, but doing personal inventory so I know what I really like to do, what I'm good at doing, and what makes me happy will still be helpful to me no matter which career path I ultimately choose.

Needless to say, pensive cat has some thinking to do....