Mail it in, the dishes are done, the fat lady sang, that's all she wrote, etc

I just left the last class of my business school career. I think it was fitting that it was one of the best classes here at CBS, Economics of Strategic Behavior. Greenwald got some major applause and a bunch of people brought their copies of "Competition Demystified" up to the front to get his signature. Not sure if that makes the book worth more on eBay but it's certainly a nice touch :)

Now I'm here in the admissions office doing Hermes Office Hours (we're here to answer questions for students who happen to pop by the admissions office) and then I am off to join a bunch of J-termers at the Boat Basin for some drinks before Follies. The afterparty is downtown at a club that the events planning committee lined up for our exclusive use, and the Office of Student Life has provided buses to shuttle people from the show to the club and back all night. That is a nice touch - thanks OSL!

I have talked to a few people today and one thing that has come up multiple times is that people are feeling emotional. It hasn't hit me yet but it will probably sneak up on me at some point. Luckily we still have some time before graduation and between the Puerto Rico trip and Dis-orientation Week there is plenty of quality time to be had.

Last Happy Hour of my b-school career - tonight!

Tonight is the last happy hour of my (and many others) CBS career. A couple of my clustermates are providing the musical entertainment via their band, known only as "The Fear". It should be a lot of fun, and I brought my camera to school today to make sure this happy hour is immortalized. Or, it will just make good blackmail material for later on ;)

I will be taking it moderately easy as I do have an interview tomorrow afternoon, and then the finals for the Small Business Consulting Program (judged by McKinsey). I think we have a good shot at winning it and I'll let you know what happens.

Reader email - J-term compared to Fall Term, VC/entrepreneurship, and NYC

Here is a note (slightly abridged to maintain writer's anonymity) I recently received from a reader:


John -

I came across your blog (actually, I pretty much read the whole thing) and would love your perspective on the CBS experience. I'm interested in the January term myself...I'd like to run a couple startups and then eventually move into VC. I'd love to hear what you thought of J-term (were you an outsider and/or felt like you missed out?), why you chose J-term, what you think of CBS in general for startup/VC focused folks, and how you like NYC (I ain't never been, if you can believe that).

Lots of questions there, and I'm sure you have little time, but whatever you
can pop back I'd love to read. Thanks!


Happy to help. Let me take these one by one...

1) "were you an outsider and/or felt like you missed out?"

I get this question fairly frequently and it is sort of a shame because it implies to me that a) I have done a terrible job of explaining the integration of J-termers and fall termers in previous posts or b) the school is doing a poor job of communicating the level of integration of J-termers and fall termers.

In short, the integration is there. We are all Class of 2008 - J-term, fall term - doesn't matter. We join all the same clubs, get to go all of the same events, take the same classes, and in our second year we're sitting in elective courses right along side fall termers (and sometimes in 1st term as well if you exempted out of stuff).

I think the recent GBA election results also speak volumes of how involved (especially this year) that J-termers are in the school. I think 2 or 3 of the GBA exec board (including the incoming GBA president) folks elected by the entire 1st year class were J-termers. That is pretty strong representation. BTW, alot of that I think has to do with J-termers who peer advised J-term 2009 and got them fired up about contributing (thanks Kabir & Venk!)

The only thing I "missed out" on was a summer internship, but at this point in my job hunt I don't think it really mattered anyways. And, if you think you'll miss having a summer internship (if you're career-switching, for example), then I wouldn't do J-term.

2) "what (do) you think of CBS in general for startup/VC focused folks"

We have a good crew of entrepreneurially minded folks at CBS. There are some great entrepreneurship and VC courses, and the administration is supportive. I think it's an awesome environment although I have nothing to compare it to (i.e. I have not gone to another business school so it would be unfair to compare).

The one thing that is somewhat less appealing for VC-focused people like myself is that NYC is not a hotbed of VC activity like Silicon Valley. Boston also has a leg up on NYC from a VC perspective in my opinion. However, there are a bunch of great firms in NYC - you just need to identify them and try to start working with them as soon as you can.

One thing I think the school could improve on would be integration between the engineering school folks and the MBA folks. There are a couple of classes that facilitate this sort of interaction but it's not culturally embedded. However, that is not to say that students can't take initiative and organize activities cross-school. In fact, one of my classmates recently set up a mixer between the two schools which was very well attended.

3) "how (do) you like NYC"


NYC is a great place to be. I have spent about 6 years of my adult life here and it is definitely one of the places I think everyone should try to live in at least for a bit. It's also a huge advantage for the school when in comes to bringing in business leaders to speak, advise, or teach. People love coming here, and often they need to come here because that's where they are doing business.

Open House report

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I spent Friday afternoon at Open House helping out on behalf of Hermes Society.

The first event I attended was the E Awards. E meaning entrepreneurship. Cliff Schorer, a great guy and great teacher of entrepreneurship at CBS, led an awards show of sorts, where he gave big E trophies to CBS alums who had started businesses. Recyclebank received an award, as well as Blow, and Tabula Digital. It was a great little event and the prospective students that I spoke with really enjoyed it.

The second event was the club fair, where all the clubs set up tables in Low Library, and prospective students can talk to the club officers about their clubs. For me, it meant chatting with a couple of prospectives, but mostly talking to my friends who were working the tables :)

PE/VC conference report

Friday I spent the day at Columbia Business School's annual Private Equity & VC conference. The conference was pretty good, and there was a diverse set of attendees, not just business school students (although, we did make up the majority).

Alan Patricof (CBS alum) opened up the conference and spent his time talking about entrepreneurship in the developing world. He is involved with a variety of initiatives in that area, and seems pretty passionate about it. He's also currently the founding managing partner of Greycroft Partners, which is a media-focused VC firm he started recently. He's also known as the "father" of VC - a very accomplished guy, no doubt.

I attended a couple of panels. One was about VC's and networks - not the wired kind of networks, but social networks. I didn't think this was a great topic to begin with, but it might have been useful for people new to VC who don't understand how important relationships are in the business.

The second panel was much better, and was focused on the globalization of venture capital. Lots of advice was given about pursuing venture capital careers, and one of the panelists mentioned she was hiring interns as well! (I should probably drop her a note, anyways). I also found it interesting how the panelists responded to a question about the tax treatment of carried interest. One panelist said in not so many words that taxing carried interest as income would not dissuade people from getting into the VC business. Meanwhile, another panelist looked like they were squirming a bit :) I dunno, carry looks like income to me, unless someone can convince me otherwise...

There were non-VC related panels as well, including one that focused on limited partners.

I was really happy to see attendees (and alums) at the conference who were working in industry and coming for the educational experience. I also met a couple of Masters candidates in the engineering school who came to learn more about PE/VC. From what I understand from one of those guys, the event was not really promoted within the engineering school, which is a shame. It would be nice to get the MBAs and the engineering folks working together more often, or even just mixing informally.

Afterwards, there was a social reception w/wine and beer as well as nice passed hors d'ouveres. Nice! Anyone who knows me well knows I am a passed hors d'ouveres junky...

I'm featured on the CBS school blog

The folks who run the new CBS blog asked me to do a posting. Here it is.

The sarcastic emails from my classmates have already begun (Tim!) :)

Let the semester's first happy hour begin!

Today is the 1st happy hour of the semester. I just saw a bunch of J-term 2009 Cluster Z'ers wearing their cluster t-shirts. I tell ya, it warms this old man's heart :)

Deutsche Bank scholarships

Just saw this in my email...

Deutsche Bank just launched The Deutsche Bank MBA Fellows Program at three business schools, including Columbia. It is designed to provide scholarship and employment opportunities to MBA students from underrepresented populations interested in careers in corporate finance or sales & trading. Applicants to Columbia from the class of 2010 are eligible to apply to this program which will provide each winner with a first-year full-tuition scholarship award as well as a guaranteed internship in summer 2009.

You can get the application forms and additional collateral here (courtesy of drop.io).

CBS Launches Blog called "Public Offering"

As a blogger, I am very happy to announce that CBS has finally launched its own blog!

There are a bunch of posts up there now, and I assume more to come. Also, people are already commenting, which I think is a good sign that there will be alot of engagement.

Also, there is a post from fellow J-termer Ryan Petersen, who is working on a school project in Africa as we speak. His personal blog is here.

Guest Blogger Kabir

I wanted to give a heads up that Kabir, one of my J-term compadres (from Cluster Y, although he is still an OK guy ;) will be doing a guest posting.

Kabir is heavily involved with the student body at CBS and was J-term president as well. A good guy to know and I'm sure he will have a unique slant on CBS and why it is a great place to go to school. His post should be showing up in the next couple days or so...

This is neat and says alot about our community and administration

This just came through on email...



Once again, Dean Hubbard and his family are opening their home to a group of students for a meal on Friday, November 23rd, the day after Thanksgiving, from 1:30 – 3:30 pm. We are especially interested in hosting students who are unable to travel home for the holiday, although the invitation is open to all students. There are a limited number of seats for this event; each student who registers may register for her/himself and one guest.

Rainy Day in Tokyo

It's raining today in Tokyo. That fact, plus the fact that the World Series is on is keeping me inside. I can even get the commentary in English. I think I might pop over to Ginza later for lunch since I haven't seen that area, but right now I am kind of goofing off with email, blogging, etc. Tonight we're going to hit some bars in Roppongi and then off to the airport tommorrow.

This morning I woke up early and did a call with the prof I'm TA'ing for. Myself and the other TA's are going to be grading final exams. Thankfully, there are three TA's and the prof, so we're able to split up the work of grading 200 exams :) I have a 12 hour plane flight ahead of me so that should be a good time to make headway.

As I write this, I am looking at the clock on my computer and see that it is 10PM Eastern. This means that Happy Hour is going on and there are a bunch of crazed MBA students running around Uris in Halloween costumes. Nice...

I'm flying back to the states on Saturday and have yet another friend turning 30 and having his party that night. Next week I am going to be spending alot of time getting my Kauffman Fellowship application in (it's due on Wednesday) and just getting caught up from the vacation. Thursday I'll probably be working at the VC firm and Friday I'll be with one of the startups I'm working with. This semester is flying and I'm so overworked, I'm not neccessarily upset about that. However, next semester I am going to be able to carry a really light load, so I'm paying now to be more relaxed later (if you don't count that I'll be conducting my job search at that time ;)

2009 J-term class to remain as 3 clusters!

Hello from Japan. This just came in from Kabir Ahuja, J-term president:

Dear J - Term,

It is my pleasure to share with you the news that there will be 3 clusters for the 2009 J-Term class. Although originally one cluster was slated to be dropped due to congestion of physical and teaching facilities, the administration has decided to keep the J-Term the same size. This decision was made in partnership with the student government.

One of the main drivers behind the decision to keep 3 clusters was the experience we have had at Columbia Business School so far; our class size allowed us to network across a large base while still being a close-knit group. We were also able to hold significant recruiting and social events due in part to having critical mass in terms of number of people.

Feel free to share this news. An official announcement and article will be included in the next issue of the Bottom Line.

For all with interviews, best of luck!

Thank you,

Kabir

World Business Forum - Day 1

Today was the first day of the World Business Forum at Radio Music Hall. Myself and a bunch of other CBS students were selected to assist with registrations, speaker coordination, and other logisitical tasks. So far it has been OK - we have to get in incredibly early (by 630am) to help register new people, but besides that, as long as it is not a break period, we are free to see the various speakers.

Today I saw Alan Greenspan, Jack Welch, Craig Barrett (Intel Chairman), and the CEO from Archer Daniels Midland (sorry, the name escapes me). Jack Welch was my favorite - very direct, great sense of humor, and from Massachusetts to boot (complete with Boston accent).

Tommorrow should be more of the same although hopefully less registrants. I am co-hosting a pre-happy hour happy hour for the Betters Halves club (significant others club) up at school so I'll have to leave a bit early (and unfortunately miss Carl Icahn - although as I said in a previous post, I did meet him 2 weeks ago :)

two tips

1) If you are sick of food at Uris Deli, there is a good hot/cold buffet at the Fu Foundation building (the engineering school, behind Uris). It's not a price break from what you'd find elsewhere near campus, but the food is decent, and you can always get a seat.

2) If you visit a school, take it easy and don't be pushy with the admissions staff, especially when asking to see specific members of their team. There was a guy in the admissions office the other day who was emphatic that he wanted to see Linda Meehan (dean of admissions) because he met her at an event, and continued to press even after he was told that she was really busy. As a bystander, it didn't look good, and I imagine that if the people in admissions remembered anything about that candidate, it was that he was obnoxious. You never get a second chance to make a good first impression. Cliche, yes, true, yes.

Great comment from an alum

A recent CBS alum just posted this comment to my blog. I think its excellent stuff and is very crisp in answering some of the questions others have posted related to careers and J-term vs regular term vs other schools.

I just came across your blog today and found it interesting and entertaining. By the way, I am a CBS Alum (05). Although I belonged to the September class, I also had many friends in the J-term class. After reading comments of some of the folks on this blog, let me also add my observations of Columbia MBA.

First, although known as an accelerated MBA, Columbia J-term MBA is a 2-year MBA in terms of its academic depth (almost 17 months just like any September MBA program). For career switchers, this particular aspect definitely helps as it allows you to take more classes, gives you more time for networking and also helps recruiters establish more trust in your academic abilities versus a 10-month or a 12-month program.

Second, unlike Cornell or Kellogg’s accelerated MBA program, the Columbia’s accelerated program is not separated from the September class. J-termers start late but then catch up with their September peers by taking classes in the summer and in coming September, everybody (both J-term and Sep class) merge together to take electives for next 9 months or so. Plus, if you can exempt some of your core classes, you can start taking elective classes with Sep class as early as Jan.

Third, it should be noted that when Columbia Business School releases logistics related to its latest class (GPA, age range, GMAT etc), those numbers pertain to the full class (J-term and Sep). What it means that Columbia admission folks literally keep the standard of its admissions’ criteria same for both Jan and Sep class to ensure that overall logistics of the incoming MBA class remain as high as possible. It means that both Sep and Jan terms are equally competitive from admittance standpoint (although a lot of folks speculate that J-term would be a bit more competitive this year as CBS is planning on reducing its J-term class by one cluster. Columbia ED could also little easer to get into because of the bond but you never know).

Fourth, recruiting wise, let me categorically state that for management consulting jobs, internship is not a requirement by any means. For instance, top management consulting firms recruit more students from INSEAD (over 70% are career switchers) than any other B-school and INSEAD does not have any internship. For industry related jobs, there is no need of internship either. For financial services related jobs, internship does play an important role especially for career switchers. But I do know many J-term folks who successfully transitioned to IB jobs as career switchers. Obviously, they had to do more le work.

Fifth, I don’t know why but somehow in my class of 06, I found Columbia’s J-term folks more interesting, diverse and much more international (I am an international myself). Most of them were aspiring entrepreneurs with very interesting backgrounds. Whereas, my September class was filled with more traditional students (engineers, IT, finance). However, J-term also attracts a lot of high achievers who want to switch their career but they do not want to wait till September.

Last post today, I promise

I was goofing around seeing where my blog shows up in Google search results (yeah I'm a geek) and stumbled upon the CBS GBA page. GBA is the Graduate Business Association and are the student leaders within the school. There are descriptions of what all of these folks do, and I think it will help you get an idea of what kind of stuff is going on at our school. I thought it was great because it really gives you an idea of how involved people can be and also what kind of leadership opportunities are out there for incoming students.

Ahmadinejad

Dean Hubbard just sent out an email to the CBS community regarding the inconveniences we're likely to face tommorrow with the president of Iran's visit to the Morningside Campus.

I wasn't expecting anything more than an informational note, but was pleased to see the Dean shared his opinion with our community (bolding was added by me):


The University’s decision to invite Mr. Ahmadinejad to speak on campus and to engage in a dialogue with our students and faculty has polarized our community. Some would argue that a University should be a place of intellectual freedom and open debate, but others – including me – argue that Mr. Ahmadinejad, who is responsible for the death of American soldiers, denies the Holocaust, and calls for the destruction of Israel, has proven himself incapable of engaging in a true and honest academic discussion.

While neither I nor any member of the Business School community initiated the invitation to Mr. Ahmadinejad, I thank you in advance for your patience in dealing with the disruption that his visit will cause us.


Should be an interesting day tommorrow. I'm supposed to meet a prospective student on campus and I'm a bit worried they won't be able to get in.

We shall see.

Carl Icahn visit

This just in...

I just got this email from Adam Dell (yes, of the Texas Dells) who is teaching my Business, Technology, and Innovation course.

He alluded to this in the first class but we are now confirmed to be visiting Carl Icahn's offices on Thursday evening. And yes, we get to meet Carl.

Very cool stuff. This is why I go to school in NYC!

Good questions and hopefully some answers

My last post was commented on quite insightfully by an anonymous blogger, and I think the answers to their questions are relevant in general, so I will answer then as a post. His questions are in italics:


You have done a fabulous job in updating your blog for J-terms. There is no other blog for J-term and therefore your efforts are highly appreciated.


Thanks, I appreciate the kudos. It's good to see people are getting some value out of it.


Though your future goals do not constitute moving into IB or consulting, majority of future J-term aspirants do want to make this transition. For career switchers, regular September term definitely makes more sense but many applicants, however, still end up applying to the J-term as it fits well in their schedule plus there is no other top class MBA program that starts in January baring INSEAD J-Intake which is more beneficial if some one wants to work in Europe or Asia.

Keeping this in mind, would you be kind enough to comment on J-term students’ experience with consulting/IB or even industry recruiting?



You are correct. Many of my classmates do want to switch careers. The jury is still out on my class with regards to jobs since the interviewing for the banks and consulting firms is starting in the next few weeks. I will be certain to report any big successess (or failures) that I hear from my classmates. I assume that the net success rate of career switching J-termers will be lower than career switching September termers because the September termers have had summer internships which often lead to full time jobs with the same firm. But, this is conjecture on my part. I don't have any empirical data. This might be a question to ask on the BusinessWeek boards (I know some CBS admissions folks hang out there).

I also think the degree of career switch is important. A J-termer from IB to private equity is probably not as big a stretch as the J-term theatre production manager-turned-MBA who wants to get into IB. I think the latter case is much more of a possibility if our imaginary theatre production manager was a September termer, because he could get an internship in that area and build some relevant experience.

I know some guys in J-term who are going for general management programs within industry, and I will also let you know how their recruiting goes.


Do recruiting firms exhibit any sort of bias towards J-term students?


Hopefully my last response addresses this. Another data point is that there were many top firms who came to do presentations this summer at school (and off campus) specifically for J-term. Bain came, I think Deloitte had something, Citibank, and others. This leads me to believe that they want to tap the talent in J-term.



My understanding is that starting September, the J-term students take classes together with regular 2nd year September class? Is that correct? Are J-term allow to recruit with September class?


You are correct although I will add that you can have classes with September termers as early as your 1st semester if you place out of any core courses and get into electives. For example, I had a Direct Marketing elective 1st semester because I placed out of CEO. In that Direct Marketing class I was the only J-termer out of 6 or 7 total students.

We participate in the same recruiting process as everyone else 2nd year. We all compete for the same spots. Think of it this way -- regardless of being September term or January term, we are ALL Class of 2008. Everyone has the same rights and privledges when it comes to recruiting.


As a J-term, did you ever had “almost there” type feeling in terms of band equity and social hangout.


I'm a little unclear about this question but I think you're asking if we have the same social oportunities as September term? Absolutely. I tend to hang out with more J-termers (sometimes I think of us as one giant cluster) but J-termers also hang out with September termers, too.