Find me a job

If there is anything that could be both extremely crazy and incomparably gratifying in a business school, it would be recruiting. That is what me and most of my classmates have been doing over the last month or so - yeah we started recruiting a full week before classes started :)

Considering the status of wall street (or whatever is left of it) and the economy at large, we all expected recruiting to be quite difficult. Even though the stakes have been raised in certain areas, recruiting still looks mostly promising. Talk about the advantages of being in a top business school. Basically every firm that is recruiting is in campus.

Investment Banking, as an industry, is in shambles. Even the banks that have survived so far have either taken some beating or have taken on other risky assets. Quite obviously their numbers are gonna be pretty low compared to any year in recent memory. Interestingly, people who have offers from many "strong" banks have also accepted much sooner - hence bringing down the necessity of many banks to recruit. We expect a 30% - 40% drop in IB numbers (and this does not include S&T - which would be much worse).

Interestingly - consulting numbers have been strong. In fact, as an industry, they seem to be increasing recruiting. But the landscape has become very difficult - many of my classmates who have offers from "less strong" banks are uncertain and are looking at consulting careers. The crowd in the consulting events is bigger than ever, says GSB's Career Services. Purely based on demand and supply - i believe this is gonna be very very competitive.

Industry jobs have kicked in and filled the gap created by banking. These job posts have gone up significantly. In turn, this has brought the overall job posts made in our job portal up by 4%. That doesn't make us feel that bad. The good thing that is happening is that people are thinking harder now than ever to see what exactly they want to do. The Career Services has worked extra hard and made sure we have all these options. They brought in more than 30 new companies, and that seems to have helped balance the situation. Overall - we seem to be doing well as of now, and will know better once the final numbers are out by Spring.

I don't see anyone at GSB really concerned about their chances. Instead, there is this optimism that is true to being here. Everyone seems to be believing that if the stock is good, the market will buy. Going by the response from the employers - our belief in us seems to be true.

Classes - first impression

What am i doing staying awake at 3AM in the morning on a Tuesday night???
I'm celebrating the completion of my first classes for this quarter. Boy, wasn't that fun?!?!

After talking a little about my classes in this post, I figured New Venture Strategy clashed with a few recruiting events. Since i wanted to do a good job in that class, I dropped it and signed up for Managing in Organizations for the Saturday morning class. So my first class for the quarter was actually on this Saturday morning. The other classes were on Monday and Tuesday afternoon.

To begin with, all three classes are with kick-ass professors. They are unbelievably awesome. While Ms. Ginzel held me awake throughout the class even after my partying till 3AM the previous day, Ms. Smith just blew us away (literally) by the way she started her class - she whistled to catch our attention!!! Ms. Bertrand has an attitude that is unbelievably awesome. I thoroughly enjoyed all three classes.

However, I did not enjoy all the work :( I read almost 100 pages of material for each class. Starting next week, each class has some sort of an assignment to be submitted. Since I'm trying to do as much as possible for all classes, I did read everything I was supposed to read and showed up ultra-prepared (and slightly sleepy) for all three classes. It was one long stretch from Friday morning till today afternoon.

So I am celebrating such a successful class week with a movie night. I know - I should be sleeping, but my Netflix DVDs had piled up and I had to do something. So now after two movies, I thought I'd write about it all before I doze off. Any friends reading this, no calling till noon okay...