Hugging Trees - Stanford MBA 07

its b-school

2005-08-18T07:26:00.000-07:00

WOW! I finally looked at the quant stuff that Stanford had said we should look at.

Find the derivative of 3x^7 – 2/x

yeah, I know, no need to bother with the quant stuff anymore, it does not get easier than this!

As the time gets closer and closer, my feet are getting colder. Yes the usual feelings of what the hell am I doing leaving my highly paid job with an ignorant boss, who thinks that I am really useful and would love to see me stay!

Well, I don’t really know, life is rather boring if everything becomes normal. I have not had the chance to train my liver for pre-term! I know its sacrilege, and to punish myself I shall be the one in the suit on the first day. (bskewl would love that!)

Seriously though, I really think that I should start training my liver soon, else I may be left far behind by my fellow funny farm residents!

Events at Stanford

2005-08-03T17:49:00.000-07:00

The other day I decided to check out the information on a conference at Stanford scheduled for Feb 2006. Guess what? Its already sold out! Registration opened just a short while ago, and its sold out! Is this the norm with all Stanford events?

been away

2005-07-31T20:33:00.000-07:00

Hey guys & gals,

Been away for a while. Thanks so much to Nick for the info on the pda and websites! Also thanks to anonymous from Stanford who has given some real valuable info.

More later…

emails

2005-07-20T22:47:00.000-07:00

Does anyone feel that email technology has given the people the license to be careless of others feelings or lack common courtesy? Or is it just me? I recently received a rude email from someone that I am helping! This got me thinking in general about emails.

Firstly, there are the strangers who write to you having found your address from somewhere and know what you do or where you are and just ask for information or some help without even introducing themselves, or excusing themselves for intruding! I am not talking about spam, that’s just stuff you delete. I am talking about those people that are not selling anything, and genuinely want to ask you something. Something that you would happy to answer to any stranger if he/she stopped you somewhere politely and asked the question. I mean how many times have you given someone directions? Would you have given them directions if they stopped you and rudely asked you where some place was? I for one would be tempted to tell them @&^&&**()*_*^*%$&%)*)$&(*#

Secondly, there are those that you know well. In person they are just great, but when they write emails, its like a whole new person. A long time ago, you had to put in some effort to write a letter. I mean you had to make sure that you wrote it legibly cause it was going to take months to get to the place you were sending it to and if the person could not read it, what would be the point? Also, people took care to try and make sure they were not misunderstood. Writing should be like talking to people, you have to use the correct punctuation marks and phrases to send the correct emotional tone. Emails seem to draw out the worst in people skills. They are just sent out without a second thought!

Why can’t people be polite in emails?

Adventure ahoy!

2005-07-18T06:25:00.000-07:00

Rafting, sea kayaking, surfing, rock climbing, golf and games, fishing , backpacking and family games. Wonderful, this is more like it! This is the stuff I like to hear about! Which should I pick folks? What would you do?

Now I am starting to look forward to this pre term stuff! Partying with a whole bunch of farm folks……let the beer flow!!!

Work Work Work

2005-07-17T20:50:00.000-07:00

Tons of stuff to do before heading off to the farm! I still have to look at all the work that Stanford has asked us to do before getting there! How important is the pre-term prep work?

To PDA or Not to.....

2005-07-09T22:21:00.000-07:00

yeah yeah, I know the title is lame. I have just been
thinking about getting myself one of those important things
people carry around. A PDA. Now I have never actually
bothered with one because I had one of those new fangled
smart phone things. So does anyone have any clue whether I
would need one at b-school? will a smartphone do? what is
the coolest smartphone out there at present? any ideas noble
ones?

Preparation

2005-07-08T10:49:00.000-07:00

A lot of stuff to be done before semester officially starts. Still have to think about the LDP (leadership development program) essay and whether I want to participate in it. Seems to be a great program where you get to work on a specific team for two semesters, on projects and special leadership sessions. The down side is that you end up taking a lot more on your plate than you would otherwise, as its extra work. Is it worth it? Reactions of the last MBA1 batch are mixed. I must say though that the fact that you get a personal mentor for your leadership skills makes the program attractive.

Still have to do the accounting work, Excel stuff, career development stuff and tons of other stuff. I can’t imagine going back to taking classes again, it will take a while to adjust to the lack of reality.

Time is flying, got to get some work done………

London

2005-07-07T07:30:00.000-07:00

A tragic day. My sympathy to London and England.

Violence

2005-07-06T12:06:00.000-07:00

G8-stirling

where does the innate attraction to violence come from? Does everyone have a hidden desire to throw a stone at the men with shields ?

NY lost the Olympic bid! a sad day!

A hearty congratulations to London

protests

2005-07-03T03:07:00.000-07:00

What's up with business schools & application rounds? Why don't they
have rolling admissions? Surely after toiling for hours and hours on
the application, you deserve to hear as soon as possible?
Individuality should be celebrated! So I now ask all the potential
applicants, in the spirit of peaceful protests, to march upon the farm
and protest for a week, day & night. I shall be right behind you!

As Bing says –a long way behind you of course, my mom did not raise an idiot!!

Yes, I have been smoking again! So I shall bother you with quotes from
adcom when reading your application:

-damn he's good! I just don't like his name –DING

-ha ha ha! dinner is on this one!! No need to read any of his essays.
That's another 199.9 dollars for us. Can we afford champagne yet? DING

-Great! Him again! Do these people really believe the drivel we send
them? I'm ordering lobster tonight! DING

Whatever I am not feeling inspired right now. Anyone with better ideas?

NY 2012!

2005-06-30T06:03:00.000-07:00

Ah the pre-mba months......

I remember myself this time last year, thinking about applications and the gmat...at that point I still could not get myself to get my lazy ass moving and start reading books to do the research. I sure am glad that I did not have to reapply! I am not even sure I would! to those who are still fighting on, here's to you.

Some friends tell me to hit the beach, others to read some business magazines (forbes, harvard business review, fortune) and also catch up on the recent business books on globalization .........now I am thinking, I will spend the last two years reading case studies on nokia, cartier and whole lot of other stuff....so should I really be spending my summer reading all this stuff?

Stanford sent us an email recently, telling us to get our asses moving and do an excel test, apparently less than 10 percent had done it and less than 20 percent had even looked at it...wow, did not know they tracked that stuff...I for one never even realised that we had to do it....I was blissful in my ignorance thinking that stuff was for pre-term....my dreams of late night kegs, late morning breakfasts and afternoon golf is slowly but surely eroding.....

now where was that stuff I was smoking?

2005-06-29T00:10:00.000-07:00

How to respond to a ding letter.

Another lazy post from the tree hugger. The letter below was posted on the business week mba forum by rexclements in 2001. I thought its worth a prize, so I have been shameless and reproduced it here. enjoy.....

Dear SchoolX

I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your rejection letter for the SchoolX MBA Class of 2003.

I have reviewed your application letter of rejection and noted the basis on which you have come to your decision. I congratulate you on the thoroughness of your evaluation. I expect to receive no less than seven letters of rejection this year. Most of these letters are from schools with a sucessful track record of rejecting applicants and have low admissions ratios; however, with seven letters applying to reject me, I have only the capacity to accept six.

With virtually every school offering significant rejection experience, demonstrating low acceptance ratios, and submitting persuasive letters of rejection, my task in selecting acceptable rejection letters has been extremely difficult. As a result, I cannot accept your excellent rejection letter based on the competitive context of the pool of rejection letters. The fact that I have not offered to accept your rejection should not be taken as a reflection of your potential to reject future candidates, the thoroughness of your evaluation process, or your potential for maintaining low admissions ratios.

I am sorry that this letter does not carry better news. I wish you success in your rejection of future candidates, and, regretably, will be enrolling at SchoolX in Fall 2001.

Sincerely,

A Candidate

2005-06-27T23:41:00.000-07:00

this guy is a legend. cracks me up every time I read it.

By Tim Shields, MBA 2

Well, summer is over and by all relevant measures it was a smashing
success; after all, in addition to getting to spend 110 hours a week next to Iris, my job provided me with a whole new crop of people towards whom I could direct my rage and bitterness. The 38 members of my Investment Banking Summer Associate class represented a wide range of personality types, from the merely obnoxious to the moderately narcissistic to the overwhelmingly repugnant. What amazed me most of all was how these differences invariably broke down along school lines. I had always been of the impression that all MBA students were more or less the same, allocated in some random fashion (a.k.a. the admissions process) to the various schools. I was wrong. I was very wrong. The differences between people from school X versus school Y are enormous, and I write this column to provide you with a useful glimpse of the person you might have been if Marie's dart had landed just a tad to the right. Without Further Adieu:

Wharton.

These people were frightening. Like caged tigers long deprived of fresh kill, they descended upon Wall Street seeking to satiate their unquenchable thirst for discounted cash flows, coverage ratios, and, of course, 'the Big Deal.' They were boorish and dull, and interacting with them was like being locked in a room with a Bloomberg machine, except that the Bloomberg screen has two dimensions. Their armor was not impenetrable, however, and I loved tugging at their Achilles' heel. It annoyed them to no end when I referred to them as 'the Penn people.' They also have this complex about their status in the b-school hierarchy, desperately trying to convince themselves that everyone buys into Business Week's
assessment of their school. When one of the Wharton people expressed to me his disappointment at the number of fellow summer associates who were not from Stanford, Harvard, or Wharton, thus presumably reflecting poorly on the Bank's recruiting efforts and relative prestige, I concurred, noting that 'at Goldman they hire nearly exclusively from Stanford and HBS, which explains its sterling reputation.' His subsequent wince was one of the highlights of my summer.

Columbia.

Sort of Wharton-lite, Columbia MBAs were finance semi-gurus with a little less attitude. Having successfully climbed over the backs of their classmates in order to obtain one of the precious few slots allocated by Wall Street firms to the hundreds of eager Columbia MBAs, it was always great fun to tell them how by comparison it was so remarkably easy to obtain an investment banking job from Stanford. 'My background? I worked in a food pantry in Appalachia for a couple of years after obtaining my peace studies degree from a junior college in Arkansas. I also failed my finance and accounting core classes in business school, so I was really surprised when I had eleven banking offers for the summer. Do you think that would have happened if I had gone to Columbia?' Yeah, I loved doing that. If I was in a truly nasty mood, I would follow up with a discussion hypothesizing on the quality of life differences between Palo Alto and Harlem. As you might guess, I wasn't too popular among the Columbia crowd.

Kellogg.

Believe it or not, I actually like the Kellogg people. Not the sharpest ginsu knives in the set, they were as out of place on Wall Street as you might expect from people who'd spent the prior year intensely debating the merits of Dave Thomas appearing in person in the Wendy's commercials. Still, they were all pretty cool and laid back and into having a good time. I thought they would have fit in quite well here at Stanford; in fact, if you took the average Stanford MBA, subtracted 50 IQ points and added a penchant for sub-zero weather (probably related to the lost IQ points), you would have a Kellogg MBA.

MIT/Sloan.

I think I found Waldo. Every stereotype you have ever
heard about MIT is true. These guys were such incredible weenies, brilliantly managing to combine both the brainpower and social grace of an HP19B-II. Every time one of them came anywhere near me I did my best to convey a look which said quite plainly: 'go away - now.' I was generally unsuccessful, as they would not budge until they had finished telling me how they had been working until 5am every day this week on such and such a glamorous and sexy project, and that they had worked on a project similar to the one I was assigned
to 'when they first started.' Moments before going postal, I could usually get them to leave me alone by making a comment to the effect of 'it must be a bummer constantly having to remind people that the school you go to in Boston is not Harvard.'

Harvard.

Speaking of Harvard, I've got to hand it to the HBS people. Their ability to mask their general incompetence with sheer arrogance impressed me. Floating through the summer like Cinderella at the ball, they expected you to accept their jargon-laced drivel with the same attitude that Moses and his stone tablets received on Sinai. Universally despised, they were oblivious to the disdain they inspired among their summer classmates. I suspect they would have been indifferent, though, associates being several levels below anyone they considered worthy of their attention.

Others. There were also a few stragglers from other random schools. To quickly summarize, Darden and Chicago people get a thumbs-up; NYU and Yale a thumbs-down. There were also a few ranch-hands from Canadian schools who I thought should have been raising cattle or growing wheat or doing whatever it is they do in Canada, but probably not investment banking, eh.

2005-06-25T05:28:00.000-07:00

There is tons of talk around that an MBA is not as valuable as it once used to be. The question I ask is, is it all MBA’s that are no longer that valuable, or is it some. The answer I got from one recruiter is that if you don’t get an MBA from a well known brand, then you may as well do something else because every tom, dick and mary has an MBA.

Not an ideal dilution in general. However, does this mean that the top X MBA brands increase in value or decrease along with the rest?

I can say from experience having met some people who had MBA’s, I was rather disappointed with their knowledge or shall I say lack of knowledge about what I would consider simple organizational issues. When asked where they got their MBA, the answers would vary from vaguely familiar to umm ok where is that?

With these sort of pseudo MBA degrees running around with the printed credential, its no wonder the degree is seen with some skepticism. Perhaps a new degree should be awarded, nothing too drastic, maybe just MBA*, by shall we say M7 or M10 to take all the ten within the M7 category?

2005-06-23T11:25:00.000-07:00

Stanford Student Profiles

In a comment, anonymous mentioned that people like to know profiles of admitted students. One thing that really stands out when you look at the stanford admitted students message board, most people seem to have done quite a bit of travelling, and are due to do a lot more over the summer after quitting their jobs.
Travelling probably shows international awareness and ability to adapt.
something to think about! hit the forests of the amazon I say!

edit: corrected spelling typo

2005-06-23T03:09:00.000-07:00

Another b-school blog! Great just what the world needed, another nutcase writing about time spent on the farm. Why don’t I just leave my computer and hit the trees? Well its an anonymous blog and I’d rather spend some quality time reporting unbiased news and views from the farm (for those who do not have the b-school virus yet, the farm is aka – drum rolls – Stanford GSB).

Unbiased news and views? Sounds great doesn’t it? Course it could be a shameless lie after I get to the farm and get inoculated with stanforditis! Yeah that was lame I know! But who cares, this is my blog!

So to all the enron-mba wannabie types and tree huggers out there, if you want to read anything specific from my rather “divine” log splitting head, or whatever let me know and I shall see what dirt I can dig up!