Guns & Butter

There is always a way, and it usually doesn’t work.

It’s over.

The tsunami of ecstasy that washed over me when I set foot outside my last class (brand management — it felt somehow appropriate to have a reassuringly fuzzy marketing elective wrap up my time here) defies description. All the intensity and madness of the past ten months have brought it to me on Tuesday the 24th of June 2008; a dazed, slightly hung over, mildly overweight, utterly drained 34-year-old soon-to-be MBA graduate stumbling out of the halls of INSEAD, blinking in the sunshine, wondering what exactly the hell just happened (and banging on the steering wheel during one of my recent trips to Paris, screaming “I MADE IT I MADE IT YOU FUCKERS COULDN’T TAKE ME DOWN I MADE IT” through tears of relief as the built-up stress I mistakenly thought had gradually ebbed over the past weeks came pouring out. I fit right in with the French drivers.)

Not that the gradual winding down of my time here hasn’t been food for reflection on my experience. As I’ve previously mentioned, the exhaustion-induced relaxation of P5 really forced me to think through the haze of selective memory and reflect on the occasional bad times I experienced. My anxiety stemmed at first from a near-pathological fear of failing classes and having to repeat one of the courses that were making me miserable (massively amplified by lack of sleep, overwork and a deep frustration at not understanding more than a fraction of what was being launched at me.) During P3 in Singapore, I often felt lonely and directionless — possibly brought on by the unfamiliar scenery and the difficulty in figuring out how to socialize with people without going to bars and restaurants, at the same time as being stuck on campus past midnight on most days. The next low came about when I realized that my finances were a shambles, something I postponed to a date when I may be better equipped to deal with it by taking out a low-interest subsidized French loan (thanks to my wonderful girlfriend for signing as guarantor), and lastly I suffered quite a bit from the uncertainty of my job situation and the occasional seemingly obnoxious apathy I encountered when dealing with many alumni (bad luck on my part, I suppose.) Receiving at least positive feedback from a few potential employers let me relax a bit on that count.

It wasn’t all bad — in fact, the negativity was mainly self-induced, the result of my own demons taking over from time to time. I’ve often wondered whether the over-30 crowd has a tougher time here, at least partially as a result of many of us seeing this as a last, great white hope for advancement and change. This would mesh perfectly with something I witnessed with numerous previously gregarious, likeable colleagues at past jobs, who irrationally and nearly overnight turned hypercompetitive, losing all reluctance to viciously backstab their former friends in the interest of advancing their own careers at any cost. While I witnessed very few, if any, incidents of overt perfidy among my classmates, I did realize just by watching my own state of mind how fear could have the insidious effect of suppressing scruples among the best of people when it comes to surviving in the world. Thankfully this is not a feeling I ever experienced; I honestly don’t know how I would deal with the ambition to succeed, somehow, at any cost.

It was a powerful experience, more so for some. Reflecting on the past ten months with friends, pinions vary between the extremes of “hated it, made me miserable, had a few bright spots” to “best time of my life.” To everyone’s credit, I’ve not heard that particular worn-out aphorism in a while. Maybe even the most upbeat of my classmates are too exhausted to be chirpy. As such, I won’t be judgmental about whether INSEAD was “good” or “bad” — I’ll decide 5 years from now. It’s too early to weigh the intensity of friendships, the exhilaration of the biggest challenge I ever faced, the seeming impossibility of surmounting my intellectual and academic barriers, the emotional chaos, the occasionally crushing workload and all the other bits that made up my MBA.

Early in the year, when I was at a low point, Sandra from career services gave me a copy of Snapshots from Hell, an account of a Stanford MBA student with a similarly random background to mine, living through his own purgatory; it picked me up and put things into perspective when I found most of my own difficulties staring at me from the pages. Since then I’ve had numerous conversations with friends and colleagues going through similar problems; even the most confident among us sometimes feel rotten from whatever brand of strain they’re facing on any particular day.

I’m not joining the grad trip to Turkey; my laptop propitiously decided to self-destruct, just as I had numerous hefty deadlines coming up. Considering what it’d been through, I’m surprised the little bastard held up so long. Nonetheless, there went my grad trip money. Thankfully, at least, a friend happened to be in New York that weekend and managed to pick me one up, saving me the near-50 percent markup I would have paid for a MacBook in Paris. I don’t know how the French live, honestly. That said, Karin and I have a mad amount of excess belongings to move back to Switzerland, I haven’t seen my father in ages, and I’m utterly and completely drained of energy. I don’t think I could face another night’s drinking after the last few weeks; my strategy of cramming as much partying and socializing as possible into a limited time is paying off. At the beautifully relaxed pool party I attended last night after our last class, I could barely muster the energy to carry on a coherent conversation; having used up the juice left over from the concentrated double-hitter of school and “networking”, it’s time to wind down and recover a bit, get my life back in order and, hopefully, settle into a slightly more relaxed pace for a while.

To be honest, I’m ambivalent about the grad trip; rather, I’m a bit sad about missing my housemates’ sailing excursion on the Cote d’Azur the weekend after the final bash. My mother and grandfather are coming to town, though, and I’ve been neglecting Karin in favor of living out my relationships with friends and classmates to the fullest — it’s hard to not spend what little time remains of the year with great people you may never see again. It’ll be nice to pass a few days with family, and enjoy summer in Paris with Karin. It’s a bit of a corny admission, but had she not lived nearby, I can think of multiple occasions when I was close to just sitting in my car and driving off, or worse. Sometimes, much worse.

Listening as a skill was a bit in short supply when I felt down; I realize that everyone’s too overwhelmed to listen to the bitchy rantings of just one guy who’s having trouble keeping up, but it’s good to just have someone to dump on. I’ve tried to make it a point to be there for others who’ve felt down; maybe someone can take a hint from this and do the same for their classmates occasionally. It helps.

Dean Antonio unveiled a memorial recently for two classmates who drowned in Bali last fall. We of the Fonty crowd never knew Steven and Fabrice, who must have been great guys by all accounts. It was a bit of a weird feeling when we found out about it, knowing that people in Singapore who’d soon be our friends were suffering from such a blow. Apparently people left candles burning on their seats the week after they died. I don’t know whether I could have handled that, I felt gutted just thinking about those who’d grown close to them. I am just eternally thankful to whatever gods are out there that we lost nobody in our circle (and crossing my fingers for the grad trip) to traffic accidents or other stupidities — not a stretch, given how the local maniacs drive. Rest in peace guys, I wish I’d known you.

Sandra-she-of-career-services made an interesting comment today, to the end that the weirdness only sets in two months or so after graduation, when, according to her, you look around one day and wonder, “where the hell is everyone?” Maybe she has a point, but I’m determined to not miss people. I’m busy putting together my skype contact list; maybe Facebook will turn out to be semi-useful after all. If there’s one major thing I’ve learned from INSEAD, it’s the idea of regularly doing things with groups of friends as a matter of course rather than the exotic, rare pleasure it’s always been for me.

Cabaret came and went; poor Ben the organizer was the incarnation of tension during the week before the event. I’ve never seen him so on edge, even during stressful academic periods. The show was, on the whole, very entertaining, despite a few acts of questionable humor value. Or and I decided (something I had already started planning upon seeing the upper box seats during the cabaret last fall) to put on a Waldorf & Statler act, and to unleash the full fury of the FRED peanut gallery on our unsuspecting co-performers. Judging by peoples’ feedback after the show, the idea of hurling the hilarious abuse we’d stored up for months was terribly funny and well-received. I just wish somebody had actually laughed.

Over beers recently, I tried to help our English colleagues from the December intake come up with ideas for the British week in fall. The most promising one, in my view, was the “Dunkirk day” event — bus the entire INSEAD student body to the English channel, and ferry them over (but make sure to leave the French behind.) I love the concept of using a national week at INSEAD to cause offense to as many groups as humanly possible. Go to it, boys, that’s the spirit that built the empire. It’d mix nicely with the flagrant disregard for political correctness that’s contributed so much to making this an enjoyable experience.

Not much to report on the subject of academics, I suppose; we gave our final presentations in the media companies elective follow-up; these turned out to be 5-slide summaries rather than the elephantine 40-page full-bore strategic recommendations paper I’d been working on. I’ll still finish it, although I’m a bit loth to actually schedule a presentation date with the company concerned, since they acted like a bunch of weirdos the first time I visited — and generally behaved pretty unprofessionally with many of my colleagues looking for work there (missed deadlines, lack of communications, etc.) Maybe I’ll just mail it with an addendum for explanations.

Our power & politics class unfortunately missed a lot of its innate potential, mainly through the professor’s not-terribly-interesting presentation style and because of the fact that, craming a 16-session full credit course into the last 8 weeks of P5 due to the lecturer’s time constraints forced the school to schedule 8 double sessions, mostly in the evenings and late in the week. Not good if you want people to pay attention. I don’t know what it was about it, but as with many of my courses here, I would have felt more comfortable just being handed the readings and a few outlines by way of explanation. I’ll take some time to go over many of the lectures (hooray for bulk scanners) this summer.

Marketing (brand management), on the other hand, was worthwhile, if only for the counterintuitive insights it provided into why most of my (rather common-sensical, I like to believe) instincts about brands and products are plain wrong. I ascribe it to the stupidity and malleability of the average consumer — something the course did nothing to dispel. Surprisingly, few of my classmates had ever heard of P.T. Barnum — “there’s a fool born every minute”, indeed. After some of the objective information my various marketing profs presented, I’m no longer hell-bent on making sure they refer to “customers” instead of “consumers” — in my eyes, a customer is an autonomous person, who has a strong set of rights vis-a-vis a merchant, and who, as the adage says, is always right. A consumer is a sheep, to be fed crap in return for his money. I understand now where the frequent use of the latter term originates.

The job situation is looking a bit less grim; my one promising prospect, with a travel-related company for a position as head of market research and strategy for France (as best as I am able to translate the profile from French) seemed to be interested in continuing their talks with me. This is the firm, you’ll recall, to whom I proposed a case-based presentation in lieu of a second round interview — something they loved. The process so far resulted in a sort of pseudo-offer by phone (or at least, “how much salary do you imagine?”) I told them, and was met with a counter-proposal far below what I had originally envisioned, near the bottom end of the range of the acceptable for INSEAD grads, especially with my experience. I told them, very frankly, that the salary was not so much relevant for me, as long as it met certain basic standards, as the ability to pay off my loans, which they reacted positively to. We’ll see.

Encouragingly, I’m receiving calls and expressions of interest from other outfits in France that I contacted, either through friends or, in the case of a large media conglomerate, through the excellent “media trek” to Paris organized by Etienne and the media/high tech club. This particular company was highly welcoming, giving us a tour of their production facilities, and expressing a strong desire to stay in touch with INSEAD. They handled both this event, and my subsequent talk with an H.R. representative (contrary to my previous idea of never ever dealing with H.R., I decided to start trying different approaches for various companies, just to see what works best) with a friendliness and style that I’ve rarely seen from potential employers. Good form. I maintain that I will reserve judgment on the whole thing until 5 years from now. Maybe, in retrospect, it will turn out to have been the best investment I ever made, and the best time of my life. I’m open to (and hoping for) the former, but the jury’s going to be out for a very long time on the latter.

As I write these lines, sitting on the dock of a beautiful and tranquil forest pond in the Vosges, my colleagues are on a beach in Turkey on the graduation trip. Despite more than half the class not attending (due to a mixture of bankruptcy, exhaustion, lack of time and desire to see other stuff in Europe, but mainly bankruptcy), my negative reply when asked whether I would come along was always met with wide-eyed incredulity — something I never learned to comprehend at INSEAD. It’s a very sweet reaction when someone expresses dismay that you won’t be participating in an event — no, really, thanks, it is — but it does give one the feeling that many students can’t comprehend that someone would want to go off and do their own thing rather than join the group. It’s something I first encountered in Singapore, while deciding to go to Sarawak on my own after all the prospective attendees had cancelled, rather than on some other trip. The fact that I’d decided my travel plans were more important than some group event seemed to baffle many people. It’s something my housemate Andy, as I’ve mentioned previously, described as “FOMO” — Fear of Missed Opportunities; the average INSEAD student seems to frequently be paranoid about missing out on something better. I love the group at school, but life doesn’t entirely revolve around INSEAD. Let that be my lesson as an old fart.

I don’t think I would have managed to survive the grad trip, in any case. My plan (successfully executed) over the past few weeks was to indulge in 100% of the parties, dinners, barbecues and other social activities around campus, with the goal of growing so utterly sick and tired of “student life”, so completely physically and mentally worn out, that I would love a bit of down time to get my life back into order. One of the last great hurrahs was the epic Monday designated “International Bloody Mary Day” by Peter and colleagues. With a table on the lawn in front of one of the larger amphis (queue for the drunks to stand up and applaud the final P3 economics lecture when it ended), we ploughed through 6 bottles of vodka starting at 10 a.m.. Apparently one of the boys went and liberated another one from one of our professors while I was sleeping it off under a tree — just in time for me to re-join the fun. It’s a hard life, and I look forward to losing the 20 or so pounds I’ve managed to put on this spring.

To those of you, dear readers, poking around this humble blog and coming away with the impression that INSEAD is all about getting hammered at parties, honestly, it’s not. However, after a while, the academic life becomes fairly routine. It’s difficult to engage outsiders with a captivating description of something that, to you, is a regular part of every-day life. For me, the social life around school was merely the most prominent, exotic aspect of the whole shebang, followed closely by the difficulties stemming from the overall stress and workload.

And goddamm, that was hard.

The side with the simplest uniforms wins.

The academic landscape at INSEAD feels like it is becoming increasingly fragmented by the week. It no longer feels like a school per se, but rather resembles an odd combination of social club, military staging base, summer camp, rehab center and community college. People drift in and out, courses are completely out of sync, and despite the obvious pressure on those of us who’ve not sorted out their professional situation to work something out, I sense that the nervousness and strain of months gone by have just leeched most of us to the degree that we can no longer muster the energy to be really stressed out.

A good friend recently poured out her heart to me, recounting misery upon insecurity upon frustration from the whole experience. It hammered home to me how hindsight really seems to prettify peoples’ views of past negative experience; I look back on the months gone by and have to force myself to recall the bleakness I found myself going through regularly. As she vented, I found myself thinking “yup, yup, been there, know it, yup, welcome to my tree house” and trying to figure out a way to make her understand that, hey, I know _exactly_ how you’re feeling. No, really. I do. Without sounding trite and contrived. Good luck with that.

While a colleague and I estimated today that maybe 50 percent of our class doesn’t have concrete job offers in hand just yet, I’m stunned by how many people (not a large percentage overall, but still) have not started networking yet. I’ll freely admit that it’s been a very rocky, difficult road for me, and not a process I’d recommend for the faint-hearted. If I’d known the type of challenge I was going to face looking for work outside of “channels”, I might have just stuck to the easily-grasped, quantifiable and structured consulting type of interview. Not that any consulting firm would have a clue what to do with me, and vice versa. So, at the risk of sounding vaguely pompous and presumptuous, since I don’t actually have anything myself yet, I’ll offer a few tips to make life easier:

• Start early. Way early. Like the month you get here.
• Make a spreadsheet. I made one sheet per industry, with company names, profile & products, locations, types of jobs, web sites, “official” HR contacts, notes, alumni, email addresses, dates, whom I contacted, to-dos and any other information. I’ve stopped updating it since I narrowed down my focus enough to not need it any more, but it helped tremendously.
• Use any resources you can. I used the alumni database, linkedin, openbc/xing, friends, colleagues, family, former clients and a number of other paths. It’s interesting how a lot of professionals who tag their linkedin profile with “open to contacts” have never actually received a networking request. One of my more promising job prospects came via linkedin.
• Never ask for a job, never send your CV right away, just send short, polite emails introducing yourself and asking for some time to ask questions about the industry. The gentleman I first contacted (not an alumnus) for the aforementioned job on linkedin based on his online profile, forwarded my profile to someone at the company who’d just bought his employer, who ended up interviewing me for a completely different job than what they first invited me to discuss.
• Your first contact probably won’t have a job for you. He may pass you on to a friend, who knows a former colleague, who works in a team whose client needs someone.
• Make friends with career services. Yes, they could do better. Everyone could. Face the fact that you’re most likely over the average MBA age, and that unless you’re going for very structured recruiting (like consulting) you will likely not be all that interested in management traineeship positions or internships. This means that you’ll have to network, a lot. They can help you meet people, identify contacts, or work on your presentation, but not unless you build up a rapport.
• Building on the former point, I’m sure many great positions are advertised via the on-campus recruiting process or on company websites. However, I take a fairly jaundiced view of this; I look at it like apartment ads in the papers. I subscribe to the theory that most good apartments are rented quickly to dynamic, innovative, ruthless people who take the initiative; what goes in the papers is often what’s left. Maybe I’m just cynical that way.
• Have 8 different CV versions.
• Go to all the panels and alumni presentations. Host as many companies and events as you can. Make contact before the events start. This is your chance to have someone’s undivided attention for a while, and chances are greater that they’ll remember you afterwards.
• Talk to faculty. Sometimes they know people.
• Try to do projects with companies. My media companies elective professor is some sort of grand high muckity-muck at a major consulting company and knows, I think, every senior media executive in the entire world. Through her I was able to set up an interesting project with a mobile handset manufacturer. Others help professors write cases. Whatever. It’s brownie points.
• Make contact with executives on campus. They don’t bite. We hosted advanced management program participants for dinner twice during the year; everyone had a great time and got some nice contacts out of it.
• Go for companies that may be a bit off the radar — this gets said again and again, but several of aforementioned managers mentioned that they didn’t know where to find good people for management jobs. *Waves hands around wildly
• Give help and contacts to colleagues as much as you can. Sometimes it bites you in the ass, but even if nothing comes out of it, you obtain some perspective on what you have going for you.

Then again, who the hell am I to give out advice.

I recently made a number of job-related trips to Paris, including a media trek to a publishing house and a TV station, and for an interview at a travel booking infrastructure solutions firm. The latter job, organized through a linkedin contact who passed me on, would be a killer, although it had little to do with the position I was initially invited to interview for. It looks like I did exactly the right thing, taking some initiative and suggesting to my interviewer (who’d not heard of INSEAD, oops) that an hour-long chat plus CV were not great means for getting to know a candidate for a managerial strategy position, and that it might benefit both of us to let me put together a case presentation on a topic of their choice. Nice move — they loved the idea, although writing presentations in French on a topic you’re not too confident in while suffering from a miserable cold and trying to work on fifty other deliverables is not necessarily my understanding of “fun.”

Summer ball was last week; a magnificent array of pomp and extravagance, at the Fontainebleau chateau. A huge transparent tent in the center courtyard, light show out front, lounge music upstairs and a hall with live band and dancers made for some great entertainment; the magnificent firework over one of the small lakes behind the castle gave it a ridiculously decadent spin. That, and I finally had the opportunity to put my ninja-like bow-tie-tying skills to use for the benefit of all humanity. Apparently, despite the (for us) astronomical entrance price, the whole affair ended up substantially in the red; maybe the hundreds of alumni swarming around town for their five- and ten-year reunions ought to have ponied up a bit more. They certainly did a bang-up job draining the bar.

The Great Gatsbys

On a fun note, we seem to have chosen well to leave around 3:30. The breakfast-for-survivors must have run out insanely quickly; rumor has it that one of my colleagues kicked an alumn in the family jewels for attempting to steal his scrambled eggs. That’ll show him. At our 2 p.m. lunch the following day we still saw bleary-eyed stragglers running around town in tuxedoes, reeking of jet fuel. Stay away from open flames, please.

I decided to not join the grad trip, for its price (which, although decent value for money, is fundamentally incompatible with the fact that my poor aged laptop just blew up — shortly before a backup, and, naturally, right after I’d scanned in 2 periods worth of papers and thrown away the originals) and for the time. I really need to spend some time with my family and friends, organize the move to Paris, and generally wind down. It’s unfortunate that I’ll miss the Le Vivier sailing trip after graduation (July 3) as well, but spending time with my folks, especially given that my grandfather might make it over, takes precedence. Next time. I’ll just throw myself into the social scene with wild unfettered abandon for the rest of my indenture here.

The weather’s turned miserable again, leaving us enjoying any rays of sunshine on INSEAD’s lawn. The nice people who organized Latin Week didn’t let the clouds get in the way of having a mariachi band (I bet the Cadbury-Schweppes CEO lecturing in Amphi B wondered what the hell was going on.) I can now tell graduates of competing business schools with authority that my business school has more mariachis than your business school.

M. Dupeu’s geese have decided that my car is the antichrist, and a duck laid her eggs right by the main entrance of the Le Vivier medium house; smoker’s corner at parties and general high-traffic area. I built her a house so she wouldn’t fly away all the time. I’ll miss the animals here when I move out. Not the rooster, though.

I think I’ll try for graduation speaker. My poor performance grinding out yearbook profiles for colleagues (again, while filthily sick) didn’t make me feel that my writing skills are up to par, maybe I can use the practice. Let’s see what happens.

Incoming fire has the right of way.

Wow, nearly lost the contents of this page, thanks to a badly fumbled upgrade. Sometimes it pays to have picked up a few tidbits of sql and general database management knowledge. Nothing like a catastrophic loss of your diary while you’re low on sleep and trying to finish 9 (count ‘em) projects to up your stress levels a bit. Or to make you sit in a corner, sucking your thumb and crying for mommy.

P4 is over.  So far, at the start of each of the past two periods, most of us had promised ourselves that we would relax, that this would be better, and that finally, the workload would peter off.  HAH!  At least the stress is no longer accompanied by the same amount of frustration and grief many of our class experienced before — maybe that’s just resignation kicking in.  In my case, it didn’t help that all of my class work was back-loaded to the second half of the period (with both of my half-credit electives only starting in April.)  Combined with the reluctance of group members busily engaged in consulting interviews, this translates to “a whole shitload of project work jammed up against the end of the period.”  Sort of an academic doppler effect.

At least some of our courses wound up agreeably, most notably Markus Christen’s marketing class. While I wish the session hadn’t focused so strongly on a thoroughly buggy simulation software (three cheers for spending 2 hours working on a market strategy decision, only to lose the fucking thing thanks to a broken submission mechanism and subsequently having the least competent, most tired member of your group — me — frantically trying to re-create your results the next day. That yielded some amusing results) the lectures were nothing short of amazing. I am astounded at the man’s energy and enthusiasm; I’ve had some pretty good professors, but none received multiple standing ovations. Then again, none gave out champagne and Asterix comic books at a mock awards ceremony after their class either.

In fact, yesterday night was the first weekday in three weeks when I managed to stumble home before 02:30 after knocking out page after page of beautiful, tear-jerking prose for my various assignments.  Yes, it’s all a bit lacking on the quantitative side, but as I told our strategy professor in response to his question whether we had run financials on competitors to the company our Industry & Competitive Analysis case focused on, “I’m not the numbers guy.”  The numbers guy was away interviewing for jobs.  Natch.

We also seriously underestimated the amount of work required for our media presentation, but thankfully we were finally able to draw a line under it and send the damn thing in.  What a fantastic class — I wasn’t terribly keen on the lectures (i.e. “how to make money from advertising”) but the prof, the former head of McKinsey’s media practice, invited an amazing line-up of senior executives from media heavy-hitters around Europe.  I have rarely been so impressed by the repeated willingness of top-level managers to openly engage a bunch of students in discussion.

Just a minor thing about final presentations: I realized that describing CEOs as “swaggering, egomaniacal windbags” while giving a slideshow really goes over well with a lecture hall full of — aspiring CEOs.

Speaking of top-level managers, I recently went through a fairly surreal experience, after being invited to a sort of gala dinner at chateau Bourron-Marlotte with a bunch of heads of alumni associations and other assorted grand high muckity-mucks.   I was tremendously fatigued, and my mood wasn’t helped by some of the surreal conversational dynamics — I counted at least 5 people who turned their backs on me, literally in mid-sentence, to chat with their friends.  Whatever — I suppose that, attending these kinds of events, one would rather schmooze with long-lost friends than with a couple of job-hungry MBA candidates hanging onto your every word like a proverbial lifeline (hey, gotta whore a bit to pay off the damn student loans.)

At last I did break down and get myself a loan, at a ridiculously low, probably government-subsidized rate, from my bank, once I finally managed to corral my account manager into sitting down with me.  I’ll use the 7 days “backing-out” period to review the contract for any cleverly hidden bits about rights to my kidneys in case of default, that sort of thing.  Feels good to finally have my financial situation sorted out; the money people at INSEAD were indubitably growing antsy about my inability to pay my last tuition installment.

Small observation:  it’s so much easier focusing on what’s relevant when one sees a glimmer of hope on the horizon, this particular one in the form of two job interviews.  Both came about relatively serendipitously, although I did an inordinate amount of research and networking before I finally started receiving positive feedback.  A gentleman I contacted on linkedin, after searching for key people in his particular company, was kind enough to spend a bit of time talking to me about the particular area of strategy I was researching as a career path, and passed my details on to his parent organization — who want me to write a CV in French.  That’s real fun, and making me realize that, despite what I thought was a reasonably decent command of the language, my business French is, well, English.

My second interview is the direct result of my hosting the company in question for their career presentation on campus.  There’s not much to it — welcome the speakers, make sure everything is reasonably well organized (taken care of by career services), put up some signs, help set up, do a small introduction — but the opportunity to have them to yourself for a few hours leading up to the main show is priceless.  This being a fairly high-profile outfit, I was tremendously surprised that nobody had signed up to play master of ceremonies — I suppose everyone was too busy getting dinged by consulting companies to realize that there are other ways to go about finding a job than applying to MBA recruitment programs.

In fact, I somehow get the sense that quite a few people haven’t gotten the hang of this whole networking thing yet — one colleague came up to me after abovementioned company’s presentation and complained that it was difficult to write a motivation/introduction letter for a job that doesn’t have a posted description.  Dude.  Please.  Give them a call, say hi and thank you, introduce yourself, tell them you’re interested in them, ask intelligent questions, and see where it goes from there.  The two alumni who tagged along to this particular evening were extremely approachable (thus nicely balancing out some of my other experiences with INSEAD alumni) and asked me to stop by.  Whatever happens, I’m doing a project with them for my media course’s continuation session next period, and it was certainly a pick-me-up.  A badly needed pick-me-up; I seriously wish these guys had stopped by before the consulting dog-and-pony show came to town.

Seems like I’m the grief counselor for people “dinged” by consulting firms these days.  I’m tremendously happy for those among my colleagues who got offers, especially one gentleman with a particularly exotic background who was sweating bullets about his career options — despite putting on one of the calmest faces I’ve ever seen.  He’s set with an offer from his first choice in London — proving that something is right with the universe.  Nonetheless, I must have had similar conversations with advice (imagine that, me giving advice to anyone, there’s a pretty mind-bending load of chutzpah for you) on how to go about  networking.  Maybe it’s because I’m already desperate, or because I’ve been giving it a go nearly from day one, but I think I’m getting the hang of it.

On the topic of dings: there is now a bell in the bar area. That’s cruel, or funny, depending on how you look at it. I’m actually more amused at the fact that I haven’t heard the thing ring more than once to date. People need to start reveling more gleefully in rejection — one of my colleagues received the following gem:

Nous avons bien reçu votre dossier de candidature en réponse à notre annonce et vous remercions de l’intérêt que vous portez à notre société.

Nous vous souhaitons de trouver rapidement un poste qui vous convienne et vous prions d’agréer nos sincères salutations.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that he hadn’t actually applied for the job. Genius.

Short note about our house; I’m a bit worried about the transition to next period.  Just received a furious note from our landlord via my colleague who’s our de facto den mother.  Some of our friends from P2 did a bit of a number on the place during a recent party, with the result that he is absolutely livid.  I’ve always been on good terms with the guy (and I suppose having been around a grand total of, what, 3 hours the last few weeks might help) but I am worried about our relationship with the man.  He’s a very nice gentleman; when we moved in, he mentioned that he appreciated someone a bit more mature (that’s me, dammit, stop smirking in the back) holding at least one of the leases.  I hope he wasn’t expecting me to keep the inmantes under control; I’m not good at that sort of thing.

One more strategy paper (also known as “technique for avoiding nightmarish exam full of esoteric concepts you’ll never use again, such as Herfindahl indices”) to go, and I’m off for the week, first to Paris, then to Amsterdam, with an interview stop in between.  Wish me luck and luxury.