Milkround, exams and free tips

The official season of company presentations (aka, milkround) for summer internship recruitment is over. And what does it mean? It means no more walking around in a suit, no more boring presentations, no more consulting companies trying to differentiate themselves using exactly the same sales pitch ("our most important asset is our people" is my favourite), no more stiff-upper-lip investment bankers, no more 20 MBAs circling a company representative doing some "networking", no more of that fried food every day, and no more marquee (which, funny enough, appears on the satellite photo above... btw, this pic also shows how cool our campus is!).

And what else does it mean? It means that the hunting season for proper jobs and proper networking has started. Following the advice of my tanned friend, I'm not gonna name companies in here... you never know who might be watching (more on that later). But there's a handful of companies which I'm very excited about. For the most dedicated readers of this blog, some of these places are more obvious than others... Nevertheless, job hunting has started for me. Went to visit one of those companies a couple of weeks ago (fantastic offices, amazing atmosphere), I got a meeting with a media director of another company, and I'm sure more of this stuff will follow soon. A piece of advice for the next MBAs: do your own work! Your dream job won't fall on your lap. The MBA is a fantastic tool and experience, but you have to go out there. And try to be focused...

[I admit I tried a couple consulting companies for the internship. I thought that their name would look nice on my CV ;-) It didn't work out, though... I didn't demonstrate enough passion for the job, according to some recruiters. Bingo! I'm an open book! :-) ]

This last weekend was also time for two mid-term exams. Operations & Technology Management (OTM) and Finance. So... no more finance this year!! Yeahh!!!!! Really? Well... maybe not. Although it's not my favourite subject, I've now realized how important finance is. In almost every company you're targeting (mainly when you're changing your career into a creative industry like media, design, etc...) you'll need to convince them about the added value you can bring, since usually these are not MBA-friendly companies. Finance knowledge is a very strong argument. The stronger this knowledge, the stronger the argument. Of course, strategy is another strong argument. And these can be great tools to use as a stepping stone into your dream company or job. So, I'm almost sure I'll take Finance 2. Just don't know if I'll do it next term or next year. The same goes for Strategy 2.

The other exam, OTM, was too easy. Maybe that's because I'm an engineer ;-) or maybe that's because it really IS easy.

Moving into more entertaining subjects, the major major major MBA event of the year is already warming up. I'm talking about the MBA tournament (aka, the MBAT). Business schools from all over the world will meet in Paris, in May, to try to beat other schools on every kind of sports (from rugby to basketball, from ultimate frisbee to salsa dancing). LBS has already secured places for 225 people! That shoud give you an idea of how huge it will be. And here's the second piece of advice of the day (I'm feeling generous today): be VERY quick to sign up for this event. I mean, the 225 places were sold out in less than... 6 hours!! And no one wants to miss this opportunity.

Applications for the international exchange are now open and due next week. Columbia is obviously my first choice. It's a fantastic school, it's in NY, it has a great reputation in Media and... some electives are at the Columbia Film School! What a fantastic experience that would be!! The problem is... there's like 200+ other MBAs thinking as I do :-) This is the most sought-after school for the exchange. For obvious reasons. Another option for me is Berkeley (Silicon Valley!) and I'm still trying to decide on the third option. MIT would be great, but they only have 2 available places... Maybe Chicago...

And now, here are 3 geeky tips:

i) Looksmart's Furl is a great tool to store and share those interesting webpages you occasionally find. More user-friendly than converting it to pdf's, I would say.

ii) Google keeps going with its buying spree. Now the victims were Measure Map, who have some nice features for our blogs.

iii) If you use Mozilla Firefox (if you don't, you should), Google Labs came up with an interesting extension, which "makes it easy to see what bloggers are saying about a page you're viewing in Firefox and even make your own blog post about it, all without leaving the page you're on". Nice!

That's all, folks!

PS: It seems that the recent LBS newsletter includes a selection of students' blogs, including yours trully. I want to make it clear that this is NOT an official LBS blog. It was my own initiative to start writing it and I'll keep posting whatever I want.