WHARTON DIARY:The trick is to strike a balance between finding any job and finding one that is interesting
A S SOON as the new year arrived, many of my classmates made resolutions. Perhaps the most common resolution seems to have been to kick the job search into high gear.
First-year students are preparing for two weeks without classes at the end of January, as the semester is structured to provide a dedicated interview period designed to accommodate multiple rounds of interviews with employers interested in hiring students for the summer.
Many of the big employers who come on-campus to recruit have well-defined hiring routines, and a lot of my class have scheduled multiple interviews in the next few weeks with banks and consulting firms to try and get access to their summer internship programmes. The macroeconomic climate certainly seems to be affecting the way people are approaching their job search. With investment banking in a state of flux, more people are applying to consulting firms such as McKinsey, BCG and Bain.
Rumours about the number of applicants to these firms and the number of interviews and probable hires have been rife.
I am trying to strike a balance between finding any job and finding something I am interested in doing. One of my main goals from the MBA experience was to find some way to leverage both my technical background and the skills that Wharton is teaching me, so I have been exploring multiple different possibilities. Strategy consulting firms sound like they might offer a good way to combine these two different worlds and, as a result, I will be interviewing with both McKinsey and Bain next week for summer jobs in Toronto and San Francisco. One of the other areas I have been exploring is early-stage finance and venture capital, where the job search is very self-directed. I have been doing lots of e-mailing and cold calling, trying my best to get on the radar of various firms. Some of my professional networks have been very helpful here, such as Wharton alumni and Enterprise Ireland’s Silicon Valley office and their connections into the VC community.
Unlike the structured programmes offered by traditional employers who hire from Whartons student body, VC hiring is likely to be spur of the moment and very opportunistic – a case of being in the right place at the right time with the right skillset. Apart from the stress of job hunting, we’re also back into the crazy academic pressure cooker that is Wharton’s first year. My course load is not quite as heavy as last semester, so I have a couple of slots in this quarter that I have been able to fill with an elective course on environmental sustainability and value creation. The auction system used to allocate spaces in Wharton courses was pretty kind to me and I managed to secure a spot in Jeremy Siegel’s Finance 602 course, Macroeconomics and Financial Markets.
This course is very popular, as Prof Siegel gives a market commentary for 10-15 minutes at the start of his lecture every day. Students who did not get places in the class come just to listen to this, sitting on the stairs or standing at the back, and then leave once the class proper begins.
The course itself has been fascinating so far, as Prof Siegel has been working through some basic macroeconomic concepts and linking them to current events in the market.
He keeps a Bloomberg screen running on one of the overhead projectors in the classroom (we even start and finish the lecture based on Bloomberg time), and uses the market data in real time to illustrate concepts and historical trends.
This can also be somewhat distracting as the Bloomberg headlines and market information gets constantly updated, but it does make for a very dynamic classroom environment. Outside the classroom, things are also as busy as ever. Philadelphia’s American Football team, the Eagles, made it to the NFC championship game where they lost to the Arizona Cardinals. Their playoff run meant that all of us adopted Philadelphians spent the last few weekends cheering them on.
It is probably just as well they didn’t make it any further, as the city still hasn’t got over the excitement of the Phillies winning baseball’s World Series in October last year. Our cohort’s social chairs have been keeping us busy, and between these events and the demands of classes and job hunting, my new year’s resolution had to be simple – get used to less sleep.
Gareth Keane, from Moycullen, Co Galway, is studying for an MBA at the Wharton School of the University of Pennyslvania gkeane@wharton.upenn.edu
