Final Lap

Well, I'm in. My final semester at Stern is starting, graduation is just 4.5 credits away. I have a six week course and a twelve week course.

I figure after spring break in mid-March, I'll be mentally checked out.

The short course is Venture Capital Finance. The longer course is Implementing Strategy.

Meantime, I continue to look for jobs. Some nibbles. Also, planning to network. I'm really interested in Turnaround Management, which is a stretch with my background, but I always need a long-term goal.

Interim

The big news this week has been China surpassing Japan as the world's second-largest economy. That's pretty amazing. It's by a hair, and it seems like it might be a fluke that won't last long, but it is certainly a reminder that one day it will happen with more certainty, and that China will eventually be the world's largest economy.

I have some more personal MBA-related news. First, I finished my Emerging Markets class and did better than I expected. I was able to follow that up by having lunch with another SSB alum who advises in Mongolia and China, and we had a very interesting discussion.

I'm also in the final stages of LRP, Stern's recruitment program for part time students. I've had mock interviews, been mocked, revised my resume, prepared for questions, and soon, I am told, we will be making contact with actual employers. With less than 9 months left before graduation, it all seems to be coming together. There's plenty of hard work remaining, but I have to say I felt a sense of accomplishment completing this process.

I've had a couple of weeks off. I'm taking a short vacation, and when I come back I start up summer intensive course that will last ll of ten days. I already have a pound or so of reading to complete. Who needs a beach novel when they're getting an MBA?

Halfway Point

I am officially halfway through my degree. I don't know my grades yet, but the end of this semester marks 30 credits. Next spring, I start taking electives. I am really looking forward to that.

So, what have I learned to date?

I learned about accounting. I like accounting, it's pretty straightforward. I got a little lost managing my contra-asset and contra-liability accounts (but fell in love with the wording), and how to manage an allowance for bad credit, or for theft, but still, the high level discussions of Enron and and Worldcom shenanigans were very interesting.

I learned about management. I learned how to organize teams, whether hierarchically or vertically, by function or geography, as well as a lattice structure. This was very applicable to my current environment. I work for a ginormous international conglomerate.

I took two strategy classes, back to back; I wish I hadn't, but I really wanted to take Strategy II. Here, I learned of a field I might be particularly interested in. After apocryphal stories of Coke kicking Pepsi out of Venezuela, and learning that Google is not in as strong a spot as it is widely considered to be, I decided to make strategy one of my specializations.

Statistics was nearly the end of me, but I grew tremendously. Firms and Markets was alternately easy and baffling - we had a new prof who would sometimes skip steps.

Operations was more difficult than I expected; Global Economy was easier. Here, again, I found a topic of long-term interest - macroeconomics - to consider as a specializations. Foundations of Finance began as a very interesting class but devolved into a forced march through options pricing.

So now that I've finished up Corporate Finance and Marketing, I have the basic skills of a proto-MBA, right? I at least know the questions to ask, and can follow developments in the news.

The Current Classload

So, we are officially three weeks in to the Fall 2009 semester, one quarter of the way through. I ought to comment on my current classes, Corporate Finance and Marketing.

Now that we've learned how the sausage is made (in Foundations of Finance) it's time to apply that to corporate planning. So far, we've learned how to model discounted cash flows for use in determining net present values, and to use NPV to make go/no-go decisions on projects. I find this very interesting, as I work in IT and I've worked on many projects from the ground level; now I am learning how they are valued and decided. Next up is risk assessment, which centers on gauging the beta value of a project, line of business, or segment.

Marketing is similarly proving to be much more interesting than I anticipated. It's a Saturday morning class, which I don't mind at all; it's an excuse to stop by my favorite bagelry (Murray's on 6th, just below 14th st). Marketing is so closely tied to strategy, I'm considering it as a specialization. All this time, I thought marketing came afterwards, but it seems that the intelligence gathering and product testing elements can actually help drive strategy.

Immelt, Bartiromo

This morning I'm attending a talk with Jeff Immelt, chairman of GE, hosted by Maria Bartiromo.

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to get from this. Networking was promised, and I met some fellow students, as well as a GE recruiter.

I was standing next to a JD/MBA candidate who asked most of the questions. *Sigh* yes in my heart of hearts, I want to be a JD/MBA candidate, but as intense as I can be, this guy was even more intense.

There's a lot of talk at NYU about opportunity, and certainly, it's plain to see that the MBA world can lead into all kinds of directions I could only imagine before. At the same time, one prof has referred to Stern as a school with an inferiority complex (at least wrt Columbia and Wharton).

So, truly, I don't know what to make of this. What will my $80K+ education buy me? I have three years to figure it out.

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The New Schedule

It's brutal. I don't like to admit things are brutal; I don't like to complain, I like to just do.

I have two classes that meet one night a week each. However, I also have to meet - however briefly - with my study group, and I have to find time to read. I have some volunteer work eating up my Saturdays for the next three weeks.

On top of that I have my regular workload, which has increased and requires some work at home. Somewhere, I'm supposed to work in a Stern social life (so I can win friends, supposedly the biggest benefit of any grad program) but I also want to keep my old friends.

I've gotten to know the NYU campus very well. Truly it will be home for the next three years.

I am really enjoying my Leadership class. The cases are pretty straightforward so far, and enlightening; I am particularly enamored of the backstory for Southwest AIrlines' CEO. The reading isn't hard, but I do have to make time for it.

Financial Accounting is interesting, and intriguing, but of course very dense. I would probably not engage it if I didn't already have experience reading technical minutiae as part of my career as an engineer. it is certainly well worth reading in the current financial climate.

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First Class

Tonight I had my first official class in the Langone program. I like the professor; she's smart and engaging, but also has curious tangents. The course is on managing organizations, and tonight we talked a lot about globalization. We saw an excerpt of Charlie Rose interviewing Tom Friedman and went over some statistics about the next ten to twenty years. Germany and Japan have aging populations. They are not alone.

It was, honestly, a bit inspiring. My classmates are not the stone-cold rob-drones I always feared B-school people to be; in fact they are warm, engaging, and diverse. What I found inspiring, however, was the focus on change and globalization, esspecially as, towards the end, we talked about identity, whether national, individual, or corporate.

Having grown up overseas, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and feeling like an alien in the US ever since, I raised my hand when we were asked to self-identify as global citizens. This would have been a different experience ten years ago, before I had really begun to figure out how I felt about those experiences and identify the strengths I could draw from them. Essentially, I felt lost, alone, and confused before I realized that I felt that way in large part because I was not raised in this country, and after that, I realized that as a perpetual outsider, I have very specific talents when it comes to interacting with and managing groups.

In this class, we were told that these strengths are what we bring to the table as "global citizens". To see the world outside of the local lens, and to adapt to change. "It's not small thing to move to another country," she said, and she is right. We moved to Germany when I was thirteen, and moved back to the US when I was seventeen (and spent nine months in California, which I might add is practically another country in itself). Ten years ago, I would have been taking this statement in from the outside as something new; as I am now, I heard it as affirming something I already know about myself.

It was good to hear that these ephemeral experiences may have significant value in a career path known for quants and efficiency experts.

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