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.

Task 1 Completed

My application to the Many Voices Event is signed, sealed, and delivered.

SO.FREAKING.BUSY

I'm busy both at work and outside of work. I've been occupied every night this week. Monday with my Prince concert. Tuesday with Toastmasters. Wednesday with laundry. Thursday with Calculus and tonight I have a work event. I have to come in to work tomorrow for the same work event. On top of that I have an application for the Many Voices at Stanford event due today and I haven't yet set pen to paper to figure out what intellectual diversity I bring to the student body. I've got to figure out something to do with my mentee on Sunday. Monday I've got an MLT assignment due. Tuesday I'm giving a speech at Toastmasters and on Wednesday night I'm off to UVA. In the words of Prince, LET'S WORK!

The Purple One: Prince Concert in the Bay Area

Last night I finally got to see my favorite artist of all time live in concert -- PRINCE. I missed out on his last US tour because I was studying abroad so when I heard that he was coming to Oakland I was amped. The man puts on a great show. I thought about getting a long purple coat and a frilly top to wear to the concert but didn't have enough time to get an outfit together.

Typically when I go to concerts, I spring for the cheapest tickets, but I went all out and got the 2nd cheapest option this time (lol)! We were still in the nose bleeds but not in the very last row like usual. The opening act was a classic funk musician Larry Graham and he killed it on the bass. Now I know a little bit of how it feels to have been at a Parliament-Funkadelic concert back in the 70s.

In between acts, my boyfriend went to the restroom, and he comes back and says "I got tickets to the lower level." I'm thinking he's joking or someone is playing a joke on him, but as it turns out there were too many empty seats in the lower level so the box office staff started giving out lower level seats to folks in the nose bleed. I knew the seats were lower level but I thought they'd still be towards the back of the lower level. I got to the section and started trying to find my row. I kept walking and walking and walking until I was 5 rows from the stage! Freaking awesome! It was like my dream come true. The only thing that could have made it better was Prince asking me to come up on the stage and sing Little Red Corvette with him.

As I said before, the man puts on a good show. He is full of energy, still has a great voice, and knows how to work a crowd. His back up singers were awesome, too, and Sheila E was great. He sang lots of his old hits: Cream, Controversy, If I Was Your Girlfriend, Purple Rain, Scandalous, Uptown, Raspberry Beret.... He also sang Adore! I was surprised he didn't sing at least one other song from Purple Rain, but I was pleased with the song selection. I was reading some comments on reveiw articles and some were disappointed that he didn't sing Erotic City, 1999 etc... There were a few of my favorites that he didn't sing, but to be honest the man has so many hits that we could have been there all night jamming. He did a good job of integrating enough songs from the various areas of his discography so that everyone had their needs met so to speak. Hell we got a performance from Sheila E and a surprise appearance from Carlos Santana and the entire show was like 3 hours.




All said, I loved it! I'm thinking of going again if he does a show in LA.

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.

Career Goals & My Performance Evaluation

It's time for our annual performance evaluations and I finished evaluating myself today. It's interesting doing this in light of my B-school applications. Going through the process of evaluating myself and setting clear cut goals for the next year was much different this time around. The goals I set for next year are much more clear, concrete and specific and I can't help but wonder if that's attributable in any way to the B-school application process.

Firstly, one of my goals for next year is to be promoted from associate -- something that I've been told is improbably if not altogether impossible. In the past, I've been far more calculating and decided to play nice and go about getting a promotion the traditional way. With my sights on B-school, I'm kind of throwing caution to the wind and going for the gusto. I do wonder how my manager is going to react to this goal. She might try to get me to change it before I submit it to HR, but I'm going to hold firm.

I've identified specific areas that I want to develop: my communication and negotiation skills. I'm very good at public speaking but I notice at meetings that when I speak extemperaneously it's difficult for me to articulate my ideas in such a way that gets me buy-in from the others in the meeting. I've also never had to negotiate a deal before and this is a skill I need to hone if I'm going to be an effective leader.

In addition to setting clear quantifiable goals and identifying areas where I need to improve, I also came up with some projects and initiatives that will assist me in getting to that end and will (if all goes according to plan) positively impact my company.

I need a suit!

Back when I had my epiphany, I started going to MBA informational sessions (both general and for specific schools). What became very apparent very quickly is that my publishing get up is not going to cut it. I need some more business attire. I usually buy a new suit when I go looking for a job, but I haven't been looking in three or so years, so all of my suits are now outdated and don't fit right now(I just reinstated my early morning workouts and egg white breakfasts to remedy that situation). The first MLT event is in approximately a month. I need a suit by then. Or maybe a nice dress...