MBA JOURNAL(Stanford) From BW

chipmunk

INTRODUCTION

Sucharita Mulpuru: Who I Am and Why B-School is for Me

Just a year ago, I had sworn off business school.

"No way, Jose. Not for me. I don't need an MBA-I'm already doing everything I'd be doing anyway with the degree."

"Come on. Just do it. An MBA keeps your options open," retorted my boyfriend (a recent Berkeley/Haas graduate himself.)

"You know, he's right. You really should get a graduate degree," my parents chimed in, seemingly in conspiracy. "It's an insurance policy...for the rest of your life!"

It was killing me that no one saw my predicament: I was the first employee at a successful, venture-backed start-up, I was managing a team, I was responsible for my own projects, and I was working with super smart people. The thought of all the baggage of grad school drove me crazy: giving up a great job (the opportunity cost!), readjusting to school (the stress!), and paying for the whole thing (the debt!). Why would I want an MBA?

I'll tell you my story shortly, but fast forward to the conclusion. After months and months of cajoling and convincing, I was persuaded to capitulate. I broke down and applied.

And that concession will be taking me to Stanford's Graduate School of Business this fall.

The Back Story
I was born in India 27 years ago, grew up in the States (specifically West Virginia), graduated from Harvard with a BA in economics, and then started working at the Walt Disney Company in Burbank, California in the Corporate Strategic Marketing Group. I loved my job-I had a plum analyst gig where I worked with senior executives, had exposure to high-level projects and had, most importantly, a generous expense accounts that made me feel much more important than I was. I supervised focus groups, did market research and wrote reports on everything from Disney's new cruise line to Disneyland Paris to waning Asian markets. But make no mistake, while this was a great job for someone out of college, I was still on the lowest corporate rung.

My work was a phenomenal training ground in marketing at a large multinational consumer company, but the analyst track lasted only a few years before we were passed on to business school, much like the two/three year programs at management consulting firms and investment banks. We were, of course, all welcome to return to Disney, but in the name of resume diversification, or, more frequently, to meet the more philistine end of making more money (an ever more enticing goal due to a newly acquired load of MBA debt), most former analysts sought options outside the House of Mouse, a notoriously frugal company on the compensation scale.

So, in preparation for my imminent departure from Disney, I took the GMAT with the rest of my analyst class, but somewhere along the way, my independent streak got the best of me. I realized I didn't really want to go back to school just yet and that I should take some time to decide on my next professional move. So, I took a break from the job world to embark on an existential Gen X Trek Around the World. Coincidentally, several of my friends happened to be abroad that year and the old 'this-is-the-best-obligationless-time-between-jobs-time' argument prevailed.

After several months of globetrotting, I was ready to come back home and start another job hunt. By chance, I was checking e-mail at a cybercafe in Jerusalem when I received a note from one of my old managers at Disney. E-commerce excess was in full swing and she wanted to jump on the dot-com dash of the late 90s--she'd just finished raising her first round of funding to create estyle.com--a maternity and baby online shopping site. "So you want to join?" she asked.

I quickly came back to be one of the first employees--who could turn down the prospect of becoming the next twenty-something millionaire? To make a long story short, the market tanked before we could go public, but there have been plenty of other perks to the job: I became a director of the site's content and marketing, I learned how to launch a business, I helped build a team, I saw what it took to bring in revenues, and I got to hang out with some famous people along the way (like Cindy Crawford, who was our spokesperson). Plus, I was helping build what we believed would be a sustainable business--we had raised lots of money early on and had been spending it gingerly--and that ultimately was a more valuable learning environment than shooting out of the gate but quickly fizzling, like so many of our Internet counterparts.

The Thickening Plot
And B-school? It just didn't make any sense to leave my job. Estyle was thriving, our competitors were slowly dying and we were poised to capture the top position in our space. The company was doing well and I only stood to gain personally and professionally by staying.

Then I had My Epiphany.

One of the entrepreneurial professors at Harvard Business School decided to write an Internet case on one of his former students. That ex-student was my boss. On the day of the initial presentation, all the founders of estyle, including me, attended various classes to spar with the first-years on the solidity of our company's business plan. To my great surprise, I had a ton of fun! I forgot how stimulating and exciting a classroom environment could be--especially the interactive free-for-alls that business school courses are.

The clincher was when I met other students who already had their own business plans and were building teams and working on ways to make their own ideas a reality--which was ultimately what I had hoped to one day do. Sure, I'd helped hatch and grow a business, but I didn't have the sense of ownership I wanted. Maybe it's not such a bad thing to hedge my bets and keep my options open, I started thinking.

Business school I quickly realized was an invaluable stepping stone, even better than estyle, to where I wanted to be. Estyle was great, but my scope within the company was limited and I probably wasn't going to spend the rest of my career in the baby/maternity space. If I wanted to start my own venture soon and pitch investors, I needed a better, more credible story for myself-that meant more experience, more business knowledge, more contacts-everything that B-school is about. I started two applications--one for Harvard because it was my alma mater and the other for Stanford because of its strong entrepreneurial curriculum. I finished both applications just in time for the second round deadline in early January.

In the few weeks I was formulating my answers to questions like "Why business school?" I realized just how much I had real reasons to go. While I had a taste of starting a business, there was still so much I had to learn in the other areas --operations, technology, finance, accounting and yes, even in starting a business. Furthermore, I realized I was thinking narrowly in my self-assessments. I did only have exposure to two industries--entertainment and retail--and the breadth of backgrounds of classmates and professors would enlighten me in ways that work couldn't. Business school would teach me to think much longer-term and broader than I had thought up to now.

I dropped my applications in the mail in early 2001, my point of view having completely changed. If I really wanted to go, what was I thinking only applying to two schools-and two of the most competitive ones at that? Oh well, it's too late now. I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

The Conclusion
The reviews were mixed--I got a thick envelope from Stanford and a thin one from Harvard, which suited me fine as Palo Alto was my first choice. It's in the heart of Silicon Valley and the startup spirit. I'd already done the Harvard thing anyway--onward and upward! I wiped my brow that at least one of my choices worked out. In retrospect, I think I may have stood a better chance at Harvard if I had applied earlier. To anyone looking for advice, that would be mine: APPLY EARLY. Many schools have their first deadlines in October, and I have consistently heard that competition only increases further along the process.

Which brings me to the present. I've spent the last several weeks before Stanford's official start date in late September grilling all the recent grads I know from the GSB, packing up my Los Angeles apartment and hunting over the Internet for a new place up north. I'm also wrapping up my projects at estyle, meeting classmates via e-mail, brushing up on first semester classes like accounting and statistics, reading up on the Bay Area. I'm already anticipating all the super things school will enable me to do: working with professors, entering a markedly new milieu, perhaps even beginning my own business. How fortunes change in just a mere few months!

Stay tuned for the next episode.

chipmunk

GMAT: 780
Undergraduate GPA: 3.7
Work Experience: 6 years
Age: 28
Schools Applied To: Stanford and Harvard

In retrospect, my biggest mistake was underestimating the business school application process. I should have known better, having witnessed over a dozen colleagues struggle over scores of applications, but memory, as we all know, is selective. Having spent the last several years whipping up quick presentations, I figured how long could it possibly take do one about myself?

To elaborate: no single part of the application process was difficult, but I soon realized why there was so much moaning and groaning: work supercedes, good essays take days to finish and there are so many parts to manage-recommenders, college transcripts, deadlines, essays, resumes, not to mention proofreading, making copies of everything and so on.

Given that, I only submitted two applications at the end of December: one to Harvard (my alma mater) and the other to Stanford (my first choice--I loved its entrepreneurial focus). I had considered INSEAD--the 10-month program outside Paris with an older class, an international focus, and an application deadline in July--if I didn't get in to either. However by March, I got an affirmative from Stanford and immediately hung up my application hat. A week later, Harvard was not so kind, but by then, I'd already made my decision.

Now onto advice. I was lucky to have the hindsight of others who went through the B-school application process and these 10 points below protected me against my procrastination.

My Top Ten Tips:
1. Take the GMAT as early as possible. Years in advance if you can-it's valid for five years and it isn't a tough test. B-school essays alone are so time-consuming, why stress about the GMAT too? So prepare early. The professional courses (Princeton Review, Kaplan) are typically 10 weeks long and are worth the investment if you have a hard time disciplining yourself to study. If you can self-study, it's quite effective to buy all the GMAT books/CDs from the ETS and your local bookstore, and to spend every weekend 1-2 months before the exam studying. Also, pick up LSAT practice exams (especially the official ones from the ETS). The LSAT has two sections (critical reasoning and reading comprehension) that often mystify GMAT test takers and it's an excellent tool to prepare.

2. Order applications early. Again, years early if possible. Why? This gives you the opportunity to know what your target schools are looking for, and more importantly, time to recognize (even engineer) accomplishments for your application.

3. Attend information sessions in your area. Usually they are listed on the school's Web site and the key benefit is that the admissions officers attend. The more important benefit (schmoozing aside) is the advice the admissions officers dispense first-hand about creating a strong application. It's an opportunity to read between the lines of the glossy brochures to understand a school's affinities-a particularly strong focus on team work, a soft spot for community service, a predilection to quirky essays, a commitment to ethnic or gender diversity, etc.

4. Keep a journal and all your work notes. Under the pressure of a deadline, it's difficult to remember all your accomplishments. Notes were an excellent way to jog my memory, and gave me ideas to incorporate into my application and interesting threads to spice up my essays, even people to call for references. This helped in writing essays and in chronicling all my experiences and professional challenges.

5. Craft a story throughout your application. "Interesting people make class interesting," said one admissions officer. Not that I consider myself particularly interesting, but I tried to look objectively at the 5-6 things about myself starting from childhood that other people seemed to find intriguing (background, ethnicity, work experience, travels, etc.) and that I could most easily spin into some sort of tale. I then made sure they were all addressed at some point on my application-in essays, on the resume, or in recommendations.

6. Pick gung-ho recommenders and help them. I created a list of everyone from my professional, personal, and academic lives who could write a recommendation and sent e-mails to them all. The three I picked were the three that responded to my initial e-mail the fastest. (I'm not sure if it made a difference, but all my recommenders also happened to be alums of either Stanford or Harvard Business Schools). I gave them all copies of my resume, as well as salient points to answer each of the questions asked-this is especially important if someone hasn't worked with you recently enough to comment on all aspects of your professionalism. My recommenders took care of the rest, mostly crafting 2-3 page essays using that outline.

7. Solicit an audience for your essays. Since essays are often rushed and have word limits, another set of eyes can help mask problems like poor transitions, bad word choice and redundancy, or cut gaping errors, like typos or tense problems. Most of the applicants I knew had at least 2-3 former MBAs read their essays for ideas, words, and thoughts to strengthen their storyline.

8. Long live Embark.com! I learned about Embark when I asked previous applicants what they did to type their application. Embark enables to you to create your entire application online, save changes and work on it at your convenience. Plus, it automatically formats most applications so they look exactly like the hard copies, and enables you to pay by credit card. Furthermore, Embark.com is free for most schools (some charge a nominal $10 fee). I found this much easier than schlepping my applications to Kinko's for a typewriter or hiring a professional typist. There were a few small negatives: Embark worked best on a high-speed Internet connection, tech support was slow, and some of the margins are a bit narrow and immutable. But these glitches were vastly outweighed by the benefits. One note: Harvard Business School's online application was not available through Embark. It was available separately through the HBS Web site. I would not advise using it because it is cumbersome and messy (it printed out to over 50 pages). The Web site claimed that the applications were reformatted later, but I'm not confident that this happens. If I had to do it again, I wouldn't have used HBS' online application--I would have just submitted a hard copy.

9. Apply early to your top choices. Many of the top schools now have multiple rounds of admissions or rolling admissions. In either case, it only gets more competitive the longer you wait-especially these days. One former Harvard admissions officer told me that application volume is directly affected by economic conditions. When the economy is weak, volume goes up and vice-versa. Another advantage to applying early is that you find out your status early. This gives you time to still submit applications to secondary programs you may not have considered if you didn't get in to your top picks.

10. If you end up getting wait-listed, squeak. Ask for an interview. Get any alumni you know from the school to call. Get your recommenders to call. Write a letter to the admissions office. Retake your GMAT if you have to and write a letter about your new score. Unless you'd rather just wait another year and reapply, you've got nothing to lose, and who the admissions committee picks off the wait list is entirely subjective. The rule of the squeaky wheel applies.

Now, a couple of other things that I also learned along the way about:

Work Experience. The top schools all seem to have an affinity toward several years of blue chip job experience (i.e. a Fortune 500 company, an A-list management consulting firm, a top-tier investment bank). While said experience is not a guarantee for admission, a lack of it seems to make an acceptance harder.

Financial Aid. Older students often benefit from more generous financial aid packages. Students over the age of 26 won't be asked for financial information from their families, which often translates to greater financial need for you, and therefore more generous packages.

While the process was overwhelming, exhausting and intense, forethought and preliminary investigation into the application process made it less anxiety-filled for me.

chipmunk

Stanford Business School starts later than most MBA programs. Classes don't get into full swing until October. Perhaps to take the edge off anxious Andys gunning to go, or just to initiate the school year in a spirited way (with emphasis on the "spirit"), much of the month of September is spent engaging in classwide bonding-only without classes being held.

Most students smoothly make the transition during their first week into small but sweet suites in Schwab Hall, a recently constructed terra cotta residence dorm specifically for first years in the MBA program. That's where I assumed I'd live too, until I received an e-mail politely informing me that I was number 55 on the wait list and should probably seek alternative accommodations. Schwab, it turned out, could only house about 200 members of our 360-person class. I thought my first month would be spent looking for a place to live.

This was distressing for several reasons: 1) rents in the San Francisco South Bay were notoriously usurious; 2) living off campus held the very unfair consequence of being the first to get up in the morning but the last to get to class, and 3) worst of all, living far away from the home of two-thirds of my classmates. Fortunately, business schools heavily weigh engendering camaraderie and, Stanford being no exception, I felt no particular disadvantage in being homeless at first. I had met many of my classmates informally through e-mail over the summer. The school set up a message board through Yahoo Groups where people posted anything and everything -- weekend parties, travel plans, vacant apartments, and more. It was a great introduction, and one that made connecting names to faces even easier when school started.

In fact, initial events at the start of school were created to start everyone off on equal footing. Such was the purpose of the Outdoor Adventure trips. Every year, on the weekend before orientation, the GSB school year begins with a series of camping trips with sports themes (e.g. rock climbing, hiking, mountain biking, rafting) created to send small groups of first years off into woods or waters far away to bond and become friends. Normally, I am not a camper and certainly not a happy one, but on the advice of some recent graduates who raved about it ("You MUST go on an outdoor adventure!"), I signed up for the fly-fishing expedition. There were over a dozen of us, and between the five-hour drive to Mt. Shasta, evenings eating and drinking around our campfire, and the comic company of an enterprising fishing guide who tried to convince us his real name was Jack Trout, we certainly did get to know one another. As an aside, it seemed there was a strong representation of ex-Stanford and Harvard undergrads on our trip, a statistic reinforced by our dean a couple of days later when we were told the two schools in fact comprised nearly 20% of our incoming class.

We came back to Palo Alto from Shasta the night before orientation started. The first thing that surprised me about the business school was that for a place with such a big name, Stanford is small! Most classes happen in one building, most professors have offices in one place, most students live in one dorm and the administrative staff sits on top of the classrooms. The main GSB building is not particularly grand or aesthetically charming (certainly not compared to the gorgeous terra cotta tile of the rest of the university). Only 22,000 people have come out of the MBA program, yet it has come to occupy a rather significant place in the development of business leaders in both the public and private sector. From what I can gather, one of Stanford's biggest strengths is the pervasive altruism and, of course, the people (what else?). As one international second year sweetly misspoke, everyone "bends over" to help one another.

The official activities of orientation began with speeches and panels featuring faculty and alumni in Bishop Auditorium. On our first day, we were encouraged by just about everyone to play lots, meet people-friends, business partners, spouses. In short, have a good time and enjoy the next two years. "There's no better time to be in business school," multiple speakers reminded us. Messages of course ran the gamut from enthusiastic welcomes to warnings -- we were chastised by the academic dean for propagating the alleged rumor that Stanford was a party school. I thought there were few schools that didn't espouse that reputation, but as he said, "It does no one any good to have that reputation."

The evenings were to be filled with various activities getting our class together. That was the plan at least. The second day of orientation was September 11. Classes and activities scheduled for that day initially started as normal, though the morning's terrorist attacks were clearly something weighing heavily over everyone's minds. The days that followed were an odd juxtaposition of social interactions with new people where pleasantries and salutations were supplanted by much personal introspection.

Life within a few days went back to normal, as did the week's orientation activities -- evenings were spent on bay cruises, barbeques, bowling, and a bazillion other bonding activities (karaoke, scavenger hunts, hiking, dancing, wine tasting, and lots more) -- all with the bigger "b" in common: booze. During the day, we had the option of attending semi-academic sessions to brush up on Excel and other resources within the university, like the Jackson Library and the Management Communication Program, Stanford's in-house Dale Carnegie school of sorts, with a yearlong series of workshops on subjects like "First Impressions" and "Team Building with Myers Briggs."

Pre-term started a few days into our orientation activities, and was intended to be more of a series of simulated class environments, the academic equivalent of entering the school pool from its shallow end. The registrar selected two classes, each lasting 2-3 hours, for a weeklong session led by real professors: one was on the ethics of business and the other was working in teams. Every student was assigned to one of six sections and we saw everyone in our group every day for each of the classes. As a way to force us to take these mini-courses seriously, we were assigned study groups of four people each with whom we had to craft several presentations. Furthermore, these "classes" were evidently requirements for graduation and therefore showed up on our transcripts! Our section got us a little closer to the amazing individuals in our class, some really remarkable people - a ballerina, a NASA scientist, Olympic athletes, professional baseball players, one (yup, just one) perfect GMAT scorer. And to think, I thought I was only going to be in the company of former consultants and bankers -- who, incidentally, do make up about 50% of Stanford's class.

Real classes are set to follow soon. Having finally settled into an apartment (Bay Area rents have started to come down) after scouring the Palo Alto Weekly for listings and Pier 1 for furniture, I feel much better. When I first starting looking for places over the summer, prices were nearly twice what they were when I was living in Los Angeles. But after moving up in September and seeing many of the vacant apartments and rentals still empty, I knew that market conditions were shifting. Why not hold out as long as I could and save some money, I thought.

So I lived with friends and family in Fremont in the beginning, which was rough to say the least. Anyone familiar with Bay Area traffic knows that the transportation infrastructure is inadequate (they keep building more roads, but just not fast enough), especially from Fremont to Palo Alto in the mornings. On the best of days, car congestion would cause my commute to be well over an hour. After one particularly vicious accident on the two-lane Dumbarton Bridge that doubled my drive time, I had reached the end of my rope. The next day, I signed a lease for a two-bedroom condo owned by a sweet landlady and situated three miles from campus-perfect for the requisite B-school dinner parties, for accommodating another roommate when second-years have to move off campus, and for making my life easier. At first I was apprehensive about not living with other students, but I figured that so much of every day is spent with classmates, that living on my own wasn't too isolating.

So, finally things are falling into place and I'm in a routine. More importantly, it's now time for the real stuff.

chipmunk

For weeks, we'd been warned. "Watch out for midterms," was the categorical advice of second-years left and right. Even so, I wasn't worried. They were, after all open-book exams. Plus, my professors seemed so unintimidating. ("First names only," they all insisted. Some even graduated from college the same year I did!) How hard could it be? I was an economics major for crying out loud.

Then two days before my statistics exam, I took a practice test and got seven of the eight problems wrong. I had five midterms coming up and 36 hours to climb out of my hole.

ARGHHHH!!

When I was an undergrad, the months of January and May were punctuated by sporadic cries of anguish that did not go unheard by anyone on campus. To anyone less versed in this ritual of semester-end test-taking, it could have been mistaken for something worse, though it was just an innocuous semiannual service to communicate a public catharsis of crazed frustration in the form of something we affectionately called Primal Screams.

When exams started a few days back, it was the closest I came to carrying on the college tradition. I was baffled by this whole notion spread by B-school graduates that the program is one big party. Clearly that didn't apply to first quarter.

The Schedule
Stanford Business School is on the quarter system, which is shorter than the semesters at many other places, but promises to cover no less material, and consequently moves at a much faster pace. By the time I was sort of settled and somewhat accustomed to, among other things, the long litany of school-specific acronyms -- FOAM, LPF, WIM, GMP, PMP, MTC, CMC, BBL, OIT (pause for another primal scream) -- I was facing midterms. Granted, the tests were not too significant as Stanford never discloses grades to outsiders, but it is still sufficient to cause a ghoulish first-year fright. I should have just appreciated that I was in an exciting, challenging, intellectual environment that I'd been craving for years. But many of us just hadn't been in academia in a long time and readjusting to exams was nothing less than a hair-puller of the first degree.

In a smart split from most business schools, Stanford does not have traditional "sections" for core classes, where the same students sit in the same classes every day. Rather, the GSB offers the opportunity for all first-years to take exemption exams at the beginning of every quarter, ostensibly to select out the class jocks, who would be bored to tears and a tough act for everyone else to follow. Because of this filtering, there are not consistent sections since some students skip over core classes. The upside is that we meet a wider cross-section of our 365-person class throughout the year by not having a consistent section. And to my surprise, especially given the collaborative reputation of business schools, the whole idea of teams doesn't quite come into play during the core. There are a few problem sets that we can work on with partners, but for the most part, first years are flying solo in the beginning.

As for my schedule, I am registered in the entire core and my classes are as follows:
- Microeconomics, which is taught by a department that's become quite a source of pride for the university lately, having produced this year's Nobel prize winner in economics;
- Statistics, or Data & Decisions as it is more precisely called here, which is certain to give me many sleepless nights in the weeks to come as we complete the notorious first-year regression project (tune in to my next entry);
- Organizational Behavior, which is our first introduction to business psychology and the only core class required of all students;
- Accounting, which despite being led by a very experienced and colorful professor who loves to entertain us with Seinfeld clips, is a subject that continues to confound me -- an episode I'll get to in a moment, and;
- Quantitative Modeling, which is an introductory engineering class (or so it seemed based on the number of engineers that exempted out of the course). The professor promised would help us "walk the walk" during next summer's internship.

But classes were only part of the story during the first quarter. With the business school being what it is, there are all sorts of tempting calls to participate in a myriad of enticing diversions -- clubs, conferences, speeches, social events, dinner parties, study trips, and so on (including the acronyms below). On average, my days start at 8:00 a.m., consist of 4-6 hours of class, a company presentation or panel discussion or club meeting, a study session, a problem set or two, and at least a solid hour of culling through e-mail. Most of the school subscribes to a list called GSB Unofficial, which is a repository of comments, calls to action, and of course, complaints, put out to everyone in one fell scoop. The end result is a daily string of e-mails ranging in degrees of utility (e.g. summer job postings, speaker notices) to futility ("Did anyone find the $20 I lost today?").

But if school may have played second fiddle for even a nanosecond, it was quickly dispelled during my last few weeks of midterms.

The Strategy
Fortunately, Stanford institutes a slew of safety nets to put everyone on equal academic footing -- tutoring sessions, a fairly generous curve, and public services by benevolent classmates for everyone's benefit -- "cheat sheets" get mailed around in the days before a test, second years pass on their old tests, and emergency study sessions are led by those who have been there and done it. The Letter, a fifteen-year-old epistle that is an annual "gift" from the second-year class to allay the angst of nervous freshmen, is disseminated just before the first midterm. And there is also (God bless it) Freerider - the mother lode of files from first-years past that is an online compilation of notes and test prep tips that have been put together over time.

Back to exams. The practice statistics test was definitely my turning point and the genesis of my hunker-down-and-study attitude. I had nearly been oblivious to the outside world and would have remained in my cave of class notes for weeks more had it not been for a bizarre episode involving my accounting exam that ensnared us in the geopolitics of the past months.

This particular test came on the heals of a series of four other midterms. Two hours prior, as I was making my final mad dash through my notes while sitting in Jackson Library, the fire alarm went off, not the kind that everyone ignores, but one that caused the evacuation of the school and more critically, great concern when strangers in big white suits and masks soon made their way inside. The rumors flew. They're shutting the air ducts! Anthrax! The terrorists think we're capitalist pigs!

For nearly two hours we were kept out of school and in the end, the episode turned out to be a false alarm. Some classmates insisted it was a cruel hoax on the first-year class just before a test, a hypothesis I would have readily accepted had I not later learned from one of the deans that it was actually a sweep of the school brought on by a suspicious Pakistani package addressed to the human resources department.

While I was initially irritated, in a strange way, it recalibrated reality and put tests, business school, and life back into proper perspective. As unprepared as I was for my accounting test, I was able to approach it with a sense of calm.

The Post Mortem
I'm almost done. On the day after tomorrow I have my modeling midterm. I've been promised that the worst is over. It took a few weeks to get readjusted to school and the incessant activity that fills up every day with classes, extracurriculars, and social fun. And while it looks like there's no simmering down any time soon -- resumes are due for the first-year recruiting book and interviews for internships start in just a few weeks -- it's far more fun now that I'm used to it.


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GSB Acronym Guide
LPF: Liquidity Preference Function. Probably the first thing I learned. Free beer every Friday.
FOAM: Friends of Arjay Miller. Arjay was actually a former dean and annually, the top 10% of each class is bestowed with the honor of being an Arjay Miller Scholar. Those who aren't said scholars go to FOAM, the Tuesday bar nights.
WIM: Women in Management club, complete with exclusive brunches and banquets. The club is a great way to meet and chat offline with other female classmates.
MTC: Meet the Company presentations. My favorite was L'Oreal, which brought boxes of fun samples.
BBL: Brown Bag Lunches, noontime chats with everyone from deans to dignitaries.
GMP: The Global Management Program, which organizes tons of international speakers and experiences.
PMP: The Public Management Program, which organizes cool projects for students interested in public sector experience.
OIT: Operations & Information Technology, a field of discipline within the business school that covers both the statistics and modeling classes, and, natch, operations and information technology.

chipmunk

One quarter of business school is already over (actually, it's a sixth in fractions but a quarter in SchoolSpeak). It was only 10 weeks, but after 30 problem sets, nine exams, over a dozen company presentations, and scores of new friends made, it seems a lot longer.

I last signed off just as midterms were wrapping up. Whether it was just to scare us at the start or to give us a break, our workload following substantially lightened in both quantity and subject matter. For starters, the weekly homework assignments and problem sets were scaled back to be far less frequent. And in our previously lecture-driven economics class, we now had cases to discuss and even a role-playing episode of a 1970s strike at The Washington Post, complete with a classmate as Katherine Graham. In accounting, we had a spirited section on a teen con artist-cum-Oprah celebrity who bamboozled investors out of millions in a carpet-cleaning business. ZZZ Best, as it was called, was, in the words of our professor, "all we really needed to know about accounting." He was only half-joking.

Midterms definitely marked the turning point of the first few weeks. The anxiety that was two months in the making was quickly dispelled in the days following exams as sealed manila envelopes with our scored midterms (with distributions of where we stood relative to the rest of our class) were promptly deposited in our mailboxes. Not surprisingly, nerves loosened after that - some perhaps in resignation, but mostly in recognition that the worst was over. It was clear that it would be as hard to fail a subject as it would be to ace it and, more importantly, there was more to school than class. As a result, final exams consisted of far less pressure and were concluded with one triumphant first-year who gleefully took a dip in the closest fountain on campus after our last final.

Of course, things promise to be different (it is, only a sixth over), though the consensus is that the worst is indeed behind us. ("Congratulations," one recent graduate told me after our last exam, "you've earned your degree, you just have to stick around 18 more months to receive it.") Even so, I'd distill first quarter to this trio of subjects:

QUANTITATIVE.  Who knew?! Before I started, I would have sworn by the rumor that business school coursework was full of the qualitative material that comprises organizational behavior classes - team dynamics, managing groups, leadership skills. The good news: That was definitely a substantial part of our pre-term and first quarter classes.

The bad news was that it was only two units of our 18-unit course load. The rest of the first-year schedule was a core course load crowded with quantitative material, required of everyone who did not have the background to skip out with an exemption exam - microeconomics, statistics, accounting, linear programming, optimization models, and computer simulations. Every class called for a calculator - not the simple ones, but hard-core Hewlett-Packards with net present value (NPV), exponential, and factorial functionality. We were bombarded with plenty of partial derivatives, myriad multivariate regressions, loads of logarithms, and enough Excel to cause just about everyone to scream for Excedrin at some point during the quarter. (Some even more than others - there was an entire contingent of "Poets" - the liberal arts majors who had worked in non-quantitative jobs before business school, who struggled the most but managed to survive.)

Though it was tough, I wouldn't have wanted it any other way. Our first quarter course load was the backbone of business - the essentials of everything from supply and demand to queuing theory to accounting tricks to operational efficiency. Without it, I would have felt that I was missing the biggest part of business school.

FUN.  Since classmates are such a substantial part of the business school experience, it is not surprising that so much of the experience is a social one, augmented in no small part by Stanford's standing as a fun place to go to school.

Even the first-year regression project, the capstone of our first quarter statistics class, largely a maligned multivariate analysis that was often maddening to many, was an entertaining experience. There were five of us who shared a small study room and a computer for a weekend trying to figure out the causes of airline delays at San Jose Airport. While we'd heard of major crises in other groups with data gathering or personality conflicts, ours was a cooperative crew that worked well together and even came to be friends. To my surprise, it turned out to be a fun team-building experience that actually was an interesting way to learn about the practical application of statistics into the work world.

However, most of the entertainment at the GSB is, of course, outside of class work. There are at least two weekly group gatherings for business school students (conducted of course in the most extracurricular of capacities). The first is FOAM (Friends of Arjay Miller, see previous entry for the explanation) which rotates around local Palo Alto bars every Tuesday night. For a flat fee of $125 paid at the beginning of the year, students (identified with a sticker on the rear of their Stanford ID) can drink unlimited quantities of beer and fraternize with classmates. As a large fraction of the school usually shows up at these events (Wednesdays are largely open as there are no business school classes scheduled that day), it is a great way to get to know schoolmates outside of class.

The second of the weekly gatherings is the LPF (Liquidity Preference Function) which takes place most Fridays after class somewhere on the business school campus and comes with a couple of kegs for the whole school. As it happens at the end of the week, it comes to be the event that brings out more families and students who often are unable to make the later bar nights like FOAM. Each LPF is usually sponsored by one of the school's clubs. One of the most memorable was the Challenge 4 Charity Carnival which featured professors in dunking booths and sumo wrestling costumes.

On the subject of clubs, Stanford has, not surprisingly, a slew of them. There are, of course, the requisite pre-professional posses for the popular job tracks, like consulting, banking, technology, real estate, marketing, and more, but the ones that caught my eye were the entirely extracurricular activities - namely, the GSB Wine Circle, which sponsors tastings, speakers, and occasional excursions to Wine Country. I joined in large part because it just seemed sacrilegious to spend two years in graduate school in Northern California and not master the regional varietals.

All of this, the clubs, and cocktail hours, serve to achieve a central objective, which is meeting classmates, a group of really interesting people who hail from all hemispheres, hold passports from scores of countries, and have different experiences in disparate fields of work. B-school students become chums and are known to take advantage of their stretches of vacation time to congregate in large groups on holiday. Groups of Stanford students during the winter break alone had trips to Tahoe for New Year's, Whistler for skiing, the South Pacific for sailing, and South America for trekking.

SUPPORTIVE.  One of the biggest drivers of the culture at the GSB is the policy of non-grade disclosure to anyone outside the school, namely recruiters. It's so strict that any potential employer that recruits on campus and so much as asks about grades is politely requested not to return. What this policy does is that it infuses a spirit of cooperation and camaraderie amongst classmates that is unparalleled. Where competition and a cutthroat culture may be common in other places, it is not unlikely for students to share answers to homework assignments or to e-mail around exam aids that they procured from second-years. I learned this early on when I sent out a desperate plea for help on a homework assignment and was bombarded with an inbox full of solutions, many from people I'd never met.

Of course, there is the flip side to non-grade disclosure. There's been vehement seesawing back and forth as professors feel students have insufficient incentive to work hard, especially during the second year. However, that is always countered by the students' argument that Stanford's culture is unique and one of the most special elements of the school.

For all their griping that students should work harder, professors at business school are nonetheless the most involved and accessible teachers I've had. My most vivid personal example involves a professor who I e-mailed in the middle of the night regarding a class question. I received a very polite, very helpful response within minutes. Many professors run their own review sections, a task many undergraduate lecturers would leave to teaching assistants. This, of course, is all the more impressive as these professors, like any others, still face the perennial pressures to publish papers and attend to research.

Professors make themselves available in many other ways, too. Nearly all are more than willing to partake in the school's Take a Professor to Lunch program, where any student is free to invite any professor to a lunch (reimbursable up to $7.50). Then there is the recently incorporated Books on Break program, where a faculty member leads a discussion of a recently published book (fiction or non-fiction) that students decide to read over the winter break. And at Student Faculty suppers, students host dinner parties for a dozen students and a faculty guest. Mine was a delightful Thai dinner whipped up by a group of second-years in the company of none other than our venerable head, Dean Joss himself. The level of accessibility among senior administration, in this case the dean of the GSB, who graciously came to a student's house for dinner, I found most impressive.

To further encourage communication among students and faculty, there are weekly WIM group sessions in which small groups of female classmates gather for a couple of hours to air concerns, complaints, commiserations and anything else to create support structures and female companionship. There are also extensive student body committees that help shape everything from the social life and academics to the information technology and sports programs. Additionally, there are monthly lunches with the deans, and quarterly surveys to gauge students satisfaction.

Stanford is also very supportive of career decisions that are 'out of the box.' There is funding available for students who opt to take low or non-paying summer internships in the public sector, as well as programs to assign students to work with alumni living abroad. There is also an Alumni Mentor Program that matches local alums with a variety of professional backgrounds with students who share their interests. The university also supports and partially subsidizes Study Trips, two week immersion experiences where students go in groups to foreign countries (the most recent ones went to Brazil, Australia, India, Russia, and Mexico) to meet with businesses to whet their appetites for international business and potentially poise them for a career abroad.

And finally, probably one of the most indispensable and camaraderie-building parts of the business school is, oddly enough, the computer lab. Open 24 hours, 7 days a week, it is a gathering point and central learning place - the venue where countless group projects come together. It ends up being a particularly social place before any big assignment is due, as numerous students congregate to one of the many workstations to finish their papers.

I'm finding that business school is good in many ways that undergrad wasn't. While there is some rigid structure that I didn't have even in college-assigned classes, mandatory attendance, class participation, name tags - it is met with a student body that is actively involved in just about every aspect of the GSB and a sense of camaraderie that breeds a wonderful and non-competitive culture.

chipmunk

Another quarter all done. I slipped my last final exam into the designated lockbox under the e-mail terminals outside room 153 and left shortly thereafter for a spring break trip to Shanghai. I decided on Shanghai because as part of a group of about eight classmates who opted for something other than the beach. A week straight of torrential downpours when we got there made me a little regretful that I didn't go on any of the class trips to Cabo, Belize, or Guatemala, but it was an amazing experience nonetheless to be in a city that was modernizing so quickly.  

But enough about spring break -- bigger issues abound these days.

The most substantial difference between the first three months of business school and the second three is this. The beginning was a protracted and at times painful reintroduction to schoolwork while the winter was a whirlwind that whizzed by in a blur. Second quarter ended up being a steady stream of interviews on and off campus, a quantitative courseload with lots of problem sets and group assignments, and a packed social calendar. The highlight of February was Vegas FOAM, an insane overnight trip by the entire GSB (well, about 60% of the GSB) to Sin City. I knew it would be a ham-filled episode when one guy showed up in class fully spiffed in Elvis attire (i.e. sideburns, glasses, white suit), just before his Southwest flight, and replaced his class name placard with one that said "The King."

Classes this quarter were a mix of basics and fun stuff -- four classes in all. My courses were Finance, Operations, Strategy in the Non-Markets Environment, and my first elective, Marketing Research. As before, I was completely impressed with my professors, all of whom had fascinating backgrounds and an impressive roster of achievements. Ming (at the GSB, we're all on a first-name basis), the Finance prof, won last year's outstanding professor award, Erica from Operations was one of the GSB's young engineering stars, Justin in Strategy was a dashing and dynamic Australian economist who was one of the most impressive teachers I've ever had, and Michaela was an ex-Kellogg all-around marketing whiz.

While classes were of course critical, there was no mistaking that one of the biggest focuses of second quarter was the first-year internship hunt. The whole summer job hunt, crippled by the economy's current condition, was a class-wide crisis that had even professors relaxing their otherwise stringent class attendance requirements to accommodate cross-country callbacks and inflexible recruiters. Cold winter mornings would have been more bearable had they not been matched by the frigid reception of recruiters this year. How dramatically the tables had turned! Just a few years back, there were rumors of GSB students who had courted eight offers simultaneously. There were the wistful memories of all the promising startups (now defunct) that had once actively recruited on campus. It was even reported (unofficially) that one in three graduates from the class of 1995 had become millionaires. Ah, the good old days.

For all the people who had shook their heads, sighed and said "It's a great time to be in school" or "It's a shelter from the storm," fret not, for I differ. There's no good place to be during a down economy, including business school. What's worse than being in the market for jobs when there aren't any? Even old economy stalwarts, and safe Stanford standbys like my old company Disney, didn't come onto campus this year. And those that did indicated how the economy was affecting them in their own ways -- they hired fewer people, they made no promises for full-time offers and, horror of horrors, feted far fewer students at lavish restaurants.

Given this backdrop, the one good thing was that we were spared this depressing reality until January when the process started in full force at the Career Management Center, an office of about a dozen job advisors located on the third floor of the GSB's main building. The CMC serves as the central routing point for interviews, resume drops and first-round interviews. During the months of January and February, I trudged up and down those stairs for dozens of interviews, meetings with career advisors, and help sessions.

Interviews with visiting companies were scheduled through a bidding system whereby we were either invited to interview or bid points. As at many other schools, interviews went to those who were formally invited first and then to the highest bidders. The recruiting schedule for the month of January mainly included the investment banks and a few of the larger management consulting firms. In February, there were more 'industry' interviews -- some Fortune 500 companies, including a few local area tech players. The winnowing process varied by company. Some, like the consulting firms, had extensive interviews of multiple rounds with multiple people. Others, like Clorox, were 30-minute, one-shot deals.

In all, about 80 companies came to campus this year. While a respectable showing and far more than most business schools, it was a disappointment to the GSB that normally attracts nearly twice that many. No doubt that part of the results were due to Stanford's powerful network within Silicon Valley. In recent years, most GSB grads opted for jobs in the Bay Area after graduation. And naturally a recession in the tech sector was bound to adversely affect Stanford's core recruiters.

At my nadir, I went to consult with Uta, the legendary German denizen of the career center and who seemed to me to be Stanford's most sought-after job counselor. Uta was said to have a Rolodex in her mind of every student who has passed through the GSB in the last decade. Furthermore, she knew them all personally, which meant that a meeting with her would yield a stack of people to call. She had the Glengarry leads.

Even more than that, she was great for comfort in distressful times, especially those involving the general state of the employment market. "Great things are going to happen. I can tell!" were her parting words to me. While the same advice was dispensed to me in a fortune cookie the previous evening, Uta's Yoda-like wisdom made the words much more persuasive.

The economy aside, I quickly realized I was lucky to be at a school with tremendous alumni and academic resources. After initially spreading myself thin and interviewing for more jobs than I had an interest in, I realized that my professional passion was marketing as that was where I wanted to be post-graduation. It was a relief and an enormous breakthrough to come to this realization. While there were fewer marketing companies that made their way to the West Coast, I was thrilled with Stanford's marketing department, which is one of the biggest secrets of the school. The faculty is top-notch, with a fantastic combination of research pioneers and real-world marketers, the curriculum is challenging and the resources are plentiful for students keen on taking advantage of the opportunities.

Once I'd narrowed my field of interest, I found far more success in the interviewing process. I ended up getting one marketing internship in the Midwest. However, I decided to take a local offer with Intuit, largely to facilitate planning for my wedding, which also will be taking place this summer.

The job placement continues to be tough, but every day I hear of more classmates landing their dream internships, whether it be in Malawi, with Motorola, or at MTV. Already, some of the focus has shifted away from summer planning to orchestrating school activities in the fall, like orientation activities for first-years and study trips. Hopefully, by the time summer starts, everyone will be looking forward to another great year to finish off the GSB!

chipmunk

In the days after my first year of B-school ended, I embarked on the long-delayed (and mammoth) chore of organizing the reams of paper that had been collecting next to the computer in my apartment. Amidst the piles of course readers, final papers, graded exams, and numerous other school-related whatnots, I found my old business school application—which, of course, called for an obligatory pause and perusal. A year goes by fast, and the things from back then seem so long ago!  

It was nostalgic to think back over the last 10 months, and to revisit everything that I hoped the experience would be. In order of priority: Insight into subjects I had little background in like finance and accounting, the chance to engage in an entrepreneurial foray or two, some fun at Stanford and in the Bay Area, and perhaps some new and lifelong friendships. My actual experience, I would say with little hesitation, was exactly those things—except in the reverse order.

Absolutely, categorically and without doubt, one of the best decisions I've made in my adult life was to come to business school, and a large part of my affirmation is due to the fact that it has been here at the GSB. I was initially skeptical of the whole prospect of coming to graduate school since I was leaving a company that I helped start and I wasn't too confident that school would land me a better opportunity down the road. From day one, however, I've met a slew of amazing classmates and professors, I've contributed to class, school, and the education of my peers, and I've explored the incredible culture and spirit of San Francisco. Best of all, I've had the chance to experience a taste of Stanford's legendary curriculum (golf classes for credit!) – which trumped any experience I would have had working.

In fact, there's hardly a thing I would have changed about my first year. Granted, the first quarter was a little rough and a tad on the tough side for many of us (the sheer volume of problem sets was overwhelming), but the bad memories faded rapidly with time.

Spring quarter was by far the best of the three, and not only because the weather warmed up and Arbuckle cafeteria started barbecuing tasty chicken and salmon sandwiches outside. This was our chance to finally start taking more electives. Even our required core classes were more engaging – human resources was my personal favorite. I'd been told by recent grads that Stanford's HR department was full of stars, but it was only after I was lucky enough to be put in Charles O'Reilly's class that I realized how true it was. Professor O'Reilly was a white-haired, tenured, and wise man who had one of the most engaging, fun, and charming personalities of just about any teacher I've had, even counting my undergraduate days. The fact that he beat out all the scores of other faculty members for the GSB's Distinguished Teaching Award this year showed that lots of other people thought the same.

Spring quarter was also my chance to do an independent study project with a real company, sort of a mini-consulting assignment for students – called a 390 in GSB lingo. I worked with a second-year and a senior professor in the marketing department to create a regional marketing plan for the Zagat Survey, the New York-based restaurant guide company. I also finally took advantage of the great classes offered 'across the street' – the euphemism for courses in the undergraduate curriculum.

One of the cult courses that has attracted hundreds of GSB students over the years is a public speaking class titled Engineering 103. It is a class actually taught by undergraduates, many of whom were former national debating champions, and is intended to help engineering students polish their oral presentation skills. In actuality, it turned out to be a really practical and fun course for just about everyone. Another highlight of this last quarter was the GSB Show, a raucous four-hour song-and-dance production that involved nearly one-third of the student body, and even several faculty members.

School aside, there were some big discoveries for me personally. One in particular was launched by a Harvard Business School article called "Executive Women and the Myth of Having It All" that also generated much soul-searching by my female classmates. The article reported that nearly half of all middle-aged women in corporate America are childless, leading us to question what we hoped to get from our business school experiences. For me, it was the realization that I would probably have to work in a smaller, flexible company in order to balance family and personal life. To that end, it would make sense for me to not focus on classes like corporate finance or global expansion strategies because, honestly, they just would not be as relevant to my career.

The past year has also been enlightening for me because it has further solidified my personal interest in marketing as a career choice. This has helped focused me in seeking out work with professors, companies, and projects that are complimentary with my professional interests

As for the summer, I just began my first days back in an office, this time at the Bay Area software company Intuit (more famous for its flagship products, Quicken, QuickBooks and TurboTax). So far, so good – the company is known for having one of the best MBA internship programs around, giving students great experiences and a fun summer full of meetings with senior executives throughout the company. Already, we have had a breakfast meeting with Founder and Chairman Scott Cook and CEO Steve Bennett. There have been parties with other interns as well as dinners with my work group. And my managers have set me up for the next 10 weeks with some challenging marketing projects involving one of the company's upcoming product lines. The summer ends with my wedding, a quick honeymoon, and then the start of my second-year classes.

They say second year is even better than first, and that ultimately, the latter half of school is the memory that everyone leaves with. There is definitely plenty to look forward to – I'll be organizing a school trip abroad next December (to the Caribbean no less!) and taking more of the famous "silver bullet" classes we kept hearing about as first years. Our time will be filled with hanging out at our weekly Tuesday night bar outings (since the GSB has no classes on Wednesday), taking courses like "Touchy Feely" (said to help us better understand the touchy-feely part of being managers), and getting to know the incoming first-years. Like wine, my MBA experience is getting better with time!

chipmunk

Given all the hysteria around the sad state of the job market, I was prepared for the worst summer internship market in years. I spent much of last winter making cold calls to tons of alumni, submitting endless copies of my resume to H.R. departments around the country, interviewing with dozens of companies on and off campus, and crossing my fingers that something affirmative would come out of it all by the end of the school year. I considered myself lucky if I found anything at all, much less a position in the Bay Area, which is what I ideally wanted, what with my wedding coming up at the end of the summer.  

I was fortunate enough to be able to decide on a summer internship that not only required no relocation, but also happened to be in the Palo Alto area -- in my case, it was a company a mere five minutes from my school-year apartment. Intuit, the billion-dollar maker of personal finance software (Quicken, QuickBooks, TurboTax), is located on its own campus of about nine buildings with lush trees and fountain-filled landscaping in Mountain View, California. Other offices are in Southern California, Arizona, Virginia, and other states, but the large majority of the company's employees work in Silicon Valley.

I decided on the company after a series of interviews on both Stanford's and Intuit's campuses. I was very impressed during my initial screening talk in our Career Management Center's offices with my interviewer, a current product manager and recent MBA graduate himself. I left the talk with high hopes. My next round happened in an Intuit conference room with two more very smart and interesting marketing executives. The final round was a 'fit' round, in which several managers looking for interns interviewed several students. Both the interviewees and the interviewers then rank-ordered their preferences for placement. I ended up selecting one of my second-round interviewers who, lucky for me, picked me as well. The entire hiring process ended up being a fairly extensive one as Intuit ultimately took nearly two dozen MBA interns for this summer (one of Intuit's largest crops of interns ever). They came mostly from Stanford (about a third of the total), Harvard, Kellogg, and other top programs.

Intuit turned out to be an indisputably wonderful employer. Not only is it the market leader in the personal finance software space, with a strong stock price and a very promising future, but the company also tops many 100 Best Places to Work lists. The examples of why the accolades are well-deserved were countless -- weekly yoga classes, a free gym on campus, Friday happy hours. And that's not to mention other professional perks reinforcing the company's respect for life outside of work, including adoption assistance, paternity leave, and telecommuting opportunities. (Many city dwellers at both junior and senior levels work at home during the week to avoid the brutal commute down to Silicon Valley -- one executive was even rumored to live in Hawaii!)

In fact, several of my colleagues during the summer were new moms or moms-to-be who had several months off and part-time schedules to accommodate their new lives. Even Steve Bennett, the CEO, proudly boasted to the interns that he played over 100 rounds of golf last year. I had rarely seen a company as generous or respectful of the personal lives of employees.

For the summer, Intuit had a smattering of MBA internships in finance, business development, operations and engineering, but the majority of them were marketing positions in one of the three business lines (Quicken, QuickBooks, TurboTax). The key reason for this is that marketing, more than at most high-tech companies, is an extremely important function at Intuit, given the company's substantial direct-to-consumer component. While many technology companies like Siebel or Cisco sell their products to large corporations, or through a professional sales force, Intuit sells its products to customers through stores and the Intuit Web site. Not only are there several hundred marketers throughout the company, many in senior positions, but they hail from blue-chip marketing backgrounds. This is unusual in hi-tech as most Silicon Valley companies make marketers out of engineers.

In my group alone, my colleagues were former employees of General Mills, Procter & Gamble, Levi's, and American Express -- an indication of the importance Intuit places on research-based, consumer-focused business decisions. No doubt, much of this emphasis on classical marketing experiences emanates from the founder Scott Cook, who himself cut his teeth years ago at P&G.

For each product there are two marketing capacities. The first is product management, which, through consumer interviews and market research, creates the blueprint for what the product will look like and works with engineers to execute it. The second is brand management, which manages the marketing budget and revenues (and profits) that the product ultimately delivers.

I worked with a growing team called the Vertical Solutions group which launched extensions of the QuickBooks brand. As background, QuickBooks is an accounting software package for small businesses. My group worked on creating and executing marketing plans for new versions of QuickBooks that provided customized software for specific industries (accounting, contractors, non-profits, etc.). During the summer, I had several projects -- some strategic, others tactical -- dealing with the new Accountant Edition version of QuickBooks.

Fortunately for me, the projects were made as painless as possible by my managers. I was lucky to have clear deliverables, regular reviews, support throughout the company, and above all, plenty of autonomy. One of the best features of Intuit is its friendly culture of sharing. In the QuickBooks group for instance, there was a central repository for every document, memo, presentation, and piece of research that had been done in the last several years, all available to any employee through the company's Intranet. Of all the companies I'd worked with before, I'd never had such easy access to internal data. Elsewhere, either the information was disorganized -- or, worse, employees were reluctant to share it.

Another pleasant surprise was that Intuit was a very MBA-friendly culture. Many current employees (and founder Cook) in fact hold MBAs from the country's top programs, and several of the company's rising stars started their careers at the company through the internship program, which is largely viewed as a pool for cultivating talent. The respect for the program was evidenced by the positive experiences the company tried to ensure all interns-'meaty' projects, regular feedback, a 'buddy' system, private meetings with all of the companies top executives, including the CEO and CFO, and a slew of social events like cocktail receptions and a Giants game. Because of the frequent outings, and our large Stanford cadre, the Intuit interns came to be quite chummy, regularly gathering to lunch at the nearby In-n-Out Burger on Fridays, and to go to social outings such as karaoke, golf, or bowling.

By late August, my ten weeks at the company were over. For now, I have an option to return to the company after graduation but in the interim, I have a few key concerns to sort out. Is a software company for me? Is the Bay Area for me? But at the moment, readjusting to my final year of school is the near-term challenge.

At the end of my first year of business school, I was more certain than ever that I really wanted to pursue a career in marketing. To that end, I am now interested in tailoring my second-year experience to help me be a stronger manager in a marketing organization. Many of my classmates have been eager for a final dose of Corporate Finance (self-flagellation as far as I'm concerned!), but I'm keen on taking some of the psychological theory-based GSB classes, particularly in the Human Resources and Organizational Behavior departments. These, after all, are courses known for preparing students for the politics and complexities of working within organizations.

Already, I have finished an intense two-week, pre-term version of the GSB cult class Interpersonal Dynamics (popularly referred to as Touchy Feely). It's largely a class in emotional intelligence, if there can be such a thing, and it has been one of the highlights of my B-school experience. With the help of a small group of classmates and professional facilitators (officially called a "T group"), we were taught to understand the emotional impact of our behavior on others and to develop far deeper insight into motivating and leading others.

From an extracurricular standpoint, I'm continuing my involvement in various clubs, planning a study trip to Cuba for the end of the year, tutoring a first year in statistics, playing some golf on the Stanford course, and having more of those dinner parties I promised myself last year I would have.

So far, the tally is this -- I've got a roster of super classes, the possibility of a great job next year, and an impending school trip to the Caribbean in December. While first year was a blast, they say second year is even better. So far, I can definitely second that!

chipmunk

I'm in the throes of a vicious winter storm at my parent's home in West Virginia -- far away from the last quarter in Palo Alto and the last few weeks in Cuba (see "In Cuba, History's Joy -- and Curse"), the latter of which was, without a doubt, the highlight of business school up to now.  

Every year, Stanford sponsors "study trips" throughout the world during the winter holidays. Students organize meetings with business officials and political dignitaries in other countries to give fellow MBAs primary source data on multinational companies, global exchange, and international relations. To illustrate the variety of destinations, last year's trips were to Australia, Russia, Brazil, India, and Mexico. This year, there were trips to China, Costa Rica, Japan, and my 'baby,' Cuba.

The trip to Cuba was unique because we had none of the usual organizational support from alumni or students who are citizens of the destination country. A slew of bureaucratic hurdles imposed by the university and the U.S. government and a confusing communication infrastructure on the island further complicated talks. But, given that it is such an unusual country politically and economically and it would be very difficult to visit without an official school-sponsored license (and that it was a trip to the Caribbean in the month of December!), I pushed the Stanford administration to approve it.

Much of this quarter was spent subsequently planning and working with a group of 33 (five other trip leaders, 24 student participants, and two professors and their significant others) to make the trip happen. I had been told that study trips were fantastic and it was only after experiencing one first-hand that I was able to see how true that is. Over the course of 10 days, we met with more than 50 people - Cubans, Americans, and Europeans from a variety of backgrounds (in business, academics, and politics) and a diversity of points of view (pro-Castro, anti-Castro, pro-socialism, anti-socialism, pro-America, anti-America). You can only imagine the heated debates resulting from taking nearly three dozen young businesspeople from arguably the most entrepreneurial business school in the world to meet with staunch socialists!

Even before the Cuba trip, second year was off to an exciting start that began with non-stop work. I've found it entirely untrue that the latter half of business school is a breeze. We weren't weighed down with the perpetual problem sets of core classes, but there were plenty of other assignments (fortunately, most of them pretty much fun) that kept us busy. I spent the first part of the quarter working with the Marketing and Arts, Media & Entertainment Clubs to create extensive career and resource guides for first years. And as far as academics were concerned, my classes included an economics seminar called Incentives and Productivity, a course on Negotiations, a Spanish class (to prep for the Cuba trip) -- and my favorite, an entrepreneurial course called Formation of New Ventures, an excellent overview of starting a business.

The class rotates among several top-tier professors, but I was lucky to be taught by Garth Saloner, a legend I'd heard about even before coming to the GSB, and Jeff Chambers, a partner in a Silicon Valley private equity firm and a Stanford alum himself. They brought in outstanding speakers including CEOs and founders of companies such as Handspring, Cisco, Gordon Biersch (the national brewhouse/pub chain), and others.

In fact, the entrepreneurial resources at the GSB are, not surprisingly given its proximity to Silicon Valley, unparalleled. The school has its Center for Entrepreneurial Studies which creates classes, hosts conferences, and has databases and resources for students and alumni looking to start businesses. There is a robust Entrepreneurship Club, which this quarter alone has brought to campus Jake of Body by Jake, Pete of Pete's Wicked Ale, and the twenty-something wunderkind James Hong who started hotornot.com, heralded as a famously profitable dot-com. There also are classes to help cultivate business plans and connect students up with local mentors. In fact, during this coming winter quarter I will be taking a course called Evaluating Entrepreneurial Opportunities, where I will work with a team of GSB and non-GSB students to explore a business idea of our own.

School aside, much of second year was spent in the exhausting pursuit of a full-time job. It would not be right to go on much longer and not dedicate a few words to this topic since it is the source of so much annual angst. So much for all the optimistic well wishes from when we started ("The economy will be GREAT by the time you graduate!"). Even recruiters acknowledged it was one of the worst times in years. While there were few signs of visible improvement, there were some silver linings. The fact that several dozen students had already accepted positions from the summer or from their pre-business school employers made the competition for the 50-odd companies that did come to campus somewhat less frenzied.

As expected, the bulk of recruiters were from consulting firms, with the rest from financial services and a mix of other industries - consumer products, health care, and some hi-tech. As I was still not set on a post-graduation job, I spent several days this quarter wandering in and out of the career services interview rooms, and zipping back and forth to companies around the East and West coasts.

Recruiting ultimately did create options for many of us, me included. But several members of my class have yet to even begin their searches in earnest, knowing that the companies that interest them are not yet hiring. Others have decided to forsake just the fall season, anticipating that numerous listings, often of more promising positions, will flow in later in the school year. And many initially considered recruiting but then passed on on-campus options altogether, still in search of more appropriate professional fits through independent job searches.

Now that my biggest commitments (job search and Cuba study trip) are over, I hope to have a more relaxed second quarter. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to take a handful of electives (classes "across the street," Stanford's expression for undergrad classes and classes in other graduate programs), work on our little business plan, hang out with classmates, cook dinners, and savor the last legs of second year. Life beyond school is becoming more important since the friendships I've made have been the best part of the last few months. The Touchy Feely crew (see previous entry), friends from the summer as well as my extracurricular activities, professors, and even folks from the Cuba trip have all made me laugh, think and wish school would last more than two years.

In a way, I'm sad that it is already 2003 because that means graduation is just a few months away.

chipmunk

It's now spring break and most of my classmates have left to warm sun-drenched beaches in Mexico or Maui. I decided to stay in the continental U.S. because of three weddings I had planned to attend during my two-week vacation. It's actually been a very relaxing transition to the last quarter as school, which started at the beginning of this year with some of the most fun classroom experiences I've had yet. Before, my schedule was always filled with some required class, but this quarter was entirely full of classes that I was excited about taking-on sales management, business planning, and photography (held on the undergraduate campus). But my favorite is a class on power.  

We're lucky because few business schools, we're reminded by the professor, have a class on power, "a very important but vaguely understood topic." In it, we had a series of case studies of characters ranging from business to politics - former Vanity Fair, New Yorker and Talk magazine editor Tina Brown, Henry Kissinger, ex-President Lyndon Johnson, former president of CBS Frank Stanton, Oliver North, and more.

It was a fascinating study of how people achieved the roles they did, what they had to do to retain their positions, and how they fought obstacles. Throughout the course, we were also assigned several self-reflective assignments to assess our own achievements and failures as they related to the class, and how we would change our behavior now knowing what we did.

The highlight for me was our final project, where we examined the 'power path' of just about anyone we wanted. Several classmates chose themselves as their topic, but I and a group of three others were excited to pick a man named Keith Ferrazzi, who was once the youngest Chief Marketing Officer of a Fortune 500 company when he at Starwood Hotels.

One of my other fun experiences was the chance to work with some classmates on a business plan. The topic we ultimately picked related to wedding photography, something interesting to us all because we had all either recently been married or were on the verge of it. Other teams in the same class also had fun, consumer-related ideas. One group wanted to start a salad bar chain, another was looking into creating a marketing consortium for the ecotourism industry, another was looking to buy a minor league sports team, another was looking to market natural preservatives from South Asia.

This quarter was also enlightening for the slew of conferences and speakers that came to campus. In a mere ten weeks, students groups ranging from Women in Management, the Entrepreneurship Club, the Black Business Students Association, the Partnership for Education and the Arts, Media & Entertainment Club all organized speakers, panels, lunches and breakfasts to bring together distinguished alumni, high-level executives, and students onto the Stanford campus. The one I was most involved with was the Future of Content conference, which presented nine panels and 50 speakers to the business school campus to discuss topics ranging from the future of TiVo to the piracy of digital music to the growth of video games. I was also particularly impressed with some classmates who pulled together the first-ever Business of Education conference, attracting numerous CEOs, including those from companies such as test-prep giant The Princeton Review and educational toy maker Leap Frog.

Aside from school, the job hunt was high on the priority list for many second years, especially with our time at graduate school drawing to a close. I was fortunate to have had a handful of options, including one from my summer employer, but ultimately I decided that moving east and being closer to family was a wise move for now. If all falls into place, I'll be starting in the strategic planning group at Toys R Us just outside of New York City in a few months.

Many of my classmates also already have plans for next year squared away - many are returning to their pre-business school employers or industries. Those switching to new jobs entirely seem to be the ones facing the greatest challenges, but even many of them have options to return to old jobs if better options don't work out.

Perhaps the biggest sign of it being a unique time in the economy (and a notable difference from years past) is the length of deferrals being granted upfront. Whereas in recent years graduates reported being surprised with 'extended vacations' by prospective employers after graduation, many of my classmates are being forewarned of their late start dates - some slated to begin eight months after graduation! Some consulting firms even granted classmates extended deferrals of one to two years, "giving them opportunities" to pursue other degrees or even other jobs in the interim.

With that major concern addressed, I'm very much looking forward to the last few weeks of school as I head down the homestretch and approach graduation. Like last quarter, I am very much looking forward to my classes - on topics ranging from the entertainment industry (which will actually be taught by this year's Oscar-winner for Best Short Documentary, Twin Towers,), women in organizations, and brand management.

Many of my classmates have decided to take as few classes as possible, but I actually found myself enjoying the elective process and wanted to take as many as possible in the limited time I had left. For me, it was far easier to spend twenty hours writing a paper on a fascinating person than to spend the same amount of time studying for an accounting final, which is what I had to do this time last year.

I'm sad that school is nearly finished. The last few weeks will be spent no doubt with lots of speed socializing - last calls for quality time with classmates. There has been some talk about the 'big trip' after graduation, though the uncertainty of war and the political climate in June seems to have tempered some of the planning. That said, I was still hoping to take some classmates around south India. In the interim, I'll try to get the most out of school that I can.