The Home Stretch

The last day of the year, and I'm about to enter the home stretch.

Winter classes start January 2. I'll be done with those in three weeks.

After that, 4.5 credits and I will be done.

I've filed my application for graduation.

Excited!

Seriously

I had a chat with a fellow Sternie before my morning class yesterday. One of the things we touched on was the non-Sternies out class.

It's a small class, fewer than a dozen people. I call it the Breakfast Club because we meet Saturday mornings. What's different about it is that a fair proportion are from other schools within NYU. There is representation from the Law school, Wagoner (public policy) and Steinhardt (social work, I think).

What is so funny is that they are all so serious. I don't mean to say Sternies aren't serious - we are all very competitive MBA students, after all - but these guys sound like they're auditioning for Meet the Press. The way they phrase their questions, it's like they want to show off their own knowledge. They ask about issues that are far out of scope for the class. Example: it's an econ class, and the lawyer quotes chapter and section from antitrust law. He's my partner on our class project.

Funny, he and I had a conversation. He realized that unlike his law papers, this one was not going to be 50% footnotes.

Funny for me, since my original ambition was law school. Funny for him because now he can concentrate his analytical eye on his LLM classwork.

Business News Views & Blues

As I finish up my degree this year - target graduation date, May 2011 - it's hard not to look around and wonder just where I'll find the most opportunity.

It's increasingly clear that there will be a lot of opportunity in health care. That is an industry I am keenly interested in, and I look forward to the class I start next week on the economics of health care. In one of our pre-reading assignments, PriceWaterhouse Coopers predicts that declining overall costs will mask myriad changes: a number of drugs are going generic in the next 3-5 years, employers are switching to higher co-pay plans with co-insurance, and health care firms are investing considerably in IT in order to comply with new government regulations. What was once a relatively staid industry is going to experience some significant structural changes.

The digital economy looks to be continue its dynamism. As Android devices achieve feature parity with Apple's iOS devices, we're going to see an explosion of developers developing for multiple platforms. In my opinion, there will be two levels here: one focusing on the front end user experience - the app on the phone; there is also the back end infrastructure, the piece that the front end ties into, which need not be specific to a device or platform.

We Take the Field

Well, after two years of hard work, I am finally taking the field. Interview season is upon us, and I am applying for jobs within my current company and outside it.

I won't say with whom, but I will say I am drawn more towards executive and consulting functions. I want to analyze problems, develop a solution, and implement. That is what I do now, within the more narrow confines of my technical specialty.

I ought to say that in the past few months, I have built a software distribution method, blocked applications that put the company at risk, and pushed business units to adopt corporate standards. This is on top of business-as-usual work like testing new equipment and serving as an engineering resolution for technicians.

Applying for jobs has been a job in itself: going to workshops, corporate presentations, submitting my resume, setting up informational interviews - it's a lot. There is no doubt i my mind that I have worked harder in the past year than I have since I was in college - where I also worked an almost full-time job.

So wish me luck. I think this will all pay off one way or another. I certainly hope it does.

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?

Sweatshops

In tonight's Emerging Markets class we had a lively discussion about sweatshops. Good ? Bad ? There is no Indifferent.

When asked, a few students agreed it is a corporation's role to provide a safe and equitable workplace. Most disagreed.

Questions: Where is the government? Can't the workers organize, or leave?

Most EM nations, and frontier markets, don't care. They are either too corrupt or too eager for the money that sweatshops bring in to really care. Workers often cannot organize, or can be swiftly replaced if they do. The labor market is such that everyone wants to work for the sweatshop. There is a lot of competition for these jobs we Americans show such disdain for.

There was some conflation of issues. Most of us agreed that the low wages are not the issue - the work and pay is not much worse than other options. When it comes to how workers are treated, however - beaten, or crazy hours, or what have you - there was considerable debate.

No one thinks workers should be treated badly, but more than half accepted that as "the way things are".

It was pointed out that fair labor practices might raise the prices of goods. That's one thing if you're discussing, say, a line of premium sneakers. What about low-cost clothes available at Wal-Mart or K-Mart or similar outlets? What happens to a poor American family that suddenly has to feed and clothe three or four children, and the costs for food and clothing have gone up 25 - 50 percent?

Moreover, our professor claims that in his undergraduate class, students from Asia tend to see sweatshops as a good thing. They are progress. It's apparently only us Westerners, first-worlders, who have a problem with sweatshops.

Casing

Normally I try to keep this blog very high-level and professional. I'm relaxing that aspiration for this post. I have to write about casing.

Casing, as any business student knows, is the art of pretending to consult on a business problem presented by a moderator. The moderator has one or more pages of case details, the bare threads of detail that define the problem: profitability, market entry, o what have you. The moderator then presents information, and through a loosely defined protocol, the person being cased sets up a framework, puts information into buckets, and then dives deep to try and solve the problem.

It's a bit like playing Dungeons and Dragons:

Dungeon Master: You are standing in the entry hall of a giant abandoned castle. On the far end of a hall is a might chest spilling over with treasure. However, there is also a giant dragon, guarding the treasure. The dragon wants to know if he should expand his internal medical billing practice into an external business offering.

Player: I'd like to take a few moments to structure my thoughts.

And so it goes. The moderator parcels out information, and the player - that is, the person being cased - takes that information and tries to find a solution to the problem. Sometimes, identifying the problem is part of the problem itself.

Thing is, this is usually just two girls (or guys, or one of each) in a room. Often as not, the moderator is trying to make sense of the case. There are cases where information is mislabeled ("reveal this for part II" that is clearly required for part I). There are cases where the arithmetic literally does not add up. There are cases with fully 1.5 pages of background information that are absolutely irrelevant to the case at hand.

The result, very often, is the blind leading the blind.

That said, I think that's actually apt training. Business school, like professional postgraduate schools (JD, MD) trains you to work through a problem; there is always a solution, even if it is a solution you do not like. However, real life is messy. Clients don't always have their information together, or even know what they're looking for. Consultants may start of with one framework only to realize it is really, completely and truly, irrelevant, and further clouds their ability to see what they actually need to see.

So, as frustrating as it is, casing is valuable. It is real life. It's uncertainty, debate, communication. As frustrating as it is (and hey, we MBAs like to always be right), it's valuable to see where we can go wrong.