Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Core Exemptions, Future Careers, Recruiting Strategy

It looks like there's been a spate of dings recently on the BW and GMATclub forums for CBS. Like everyone else, I don't know why this is the case, especially after they seemed to accept such a high percentage of the early submitters (yes, I consider myself extremely fortunate). My guess is that they may have realized how many people they were accepting and decided to become a lot more stringent and selective, knowing full well that the volume of apps at the very end of the ED cycle and RD cycle would be ridiculously high. I'm sure they've already started seeing signs of this. In an Accepted.com chat with the Dean of Admissions, Linda Abraham, several weeks ago, she revealed that ED apps were up "double digits" in terms of percentage points at that time.

As for me, the euphoria is slowly wearing off but of course I'm deeply appreciative of my situation. Let's just hope I pass the Kroll background check!

Anyway, I've been spending my last couple days researching the Core curriculum. I want to exempt out of either 1 full semester course or 2 half semester courses. That way I can take an elective (or 2) while still spending the bulk of my courses with my Cluster-mates. The electives will allow me to take something interesting or to take a course in preparation for my summer internship. Originally I wanted to exempt out of either Financial Accounting or Corporate Finance, both full-term courses. But after emailing people from the Hermes Society (CBS' student ambassadors), I realize that I should probably take those courses since I have no background in them. Instead, I'll try to place out (via exemption exams) of 2 courses that I am well-versed in, Managerial Economics (aka Micro Econ) and Managerial Statistics. Taking 2 half-semester courses might be even more interesting! Plus this will allow me to meet some 2nd year students which might be helpful for networking.

The great thing about this new plan is that I don't even have to learn a whole new subject. I can just brush up on what I already know a month before the exemption exam and I should be golden. In the meantime, I'm still going to learn some basic Accounting principles. I heard that the course really flies by and I don't want to be caught off-guard. Btw, kinda sux that CBS has grade disclosure.

In other news, thanks to everyone for voting on my poll (on the right side of the page!) ... I'm really surprised how much support General Management has received. This has totally changed my perspective on it and I recently learned that it's more than just managing people; it's also about managing the bottomline and thinking about strategy, marketing, pricing, etc. Sounds realllly interesting. At least that's what Wikipedia's description makes me think hehe. I'm gonna put investment/asset management on the back-burner for now. My primary 2 career paths I think will be Sales & Trading (more trading than sales please) and General Management. For GM though, I'd like to focus on the luxury retail sector- just sounds much more interesting unless it's something else I find interesting such as GM for basketball-related organizations. On the same note, my 2 areas of focus/concentration I anticipate to be Finance & Economics and either Entrepreneurship or Leadership/Management.

Work sucks but it's easy so I can't complain too much. I did learn from one of the Hermes members an important tip though (sidenote here: only 2 of the 4 I emailed actually responded which doesn't seem too good considering that they volunteered to be student ambassadors). She suggested that I have fun and do enjoyable things before b-school starts. She revealed that recruiting is less about what classes you take and what experience you have (since so many people are career-switchers anyway), and more about effort and interpersonal skills. She emphasized that if you want a job, you need to attend all their recruiting events and be a personable person when you meet the recruiter all those times. Basically the recruiter needs to think "this is a person that I'd like to work alongside". That means it's more important to travel and try new, fun things before b-school than it is to learn accounting. Makes sense especially cuz I used to interview candidates when I was a trading assistant at a bulge bracket bank. We basically took whoever we liked the most (aka fun and personable) out of those who met the competency/hard-working threshold.

In other news, the friend whom I've been GMAT-tutoring pro bono just took her exam on Monday. She did okay but didn't get her goal and is incredibly discouraged. We'll whip her back into shape though.

And on a final tangent, I started thinking of names for my future children (please stop reading now if you don't want to be nauseated). I think my top choices for girl names are Avery and Paige. For boy names, I think Penn isn't bad... or maybe TienyChesney Junior! I'm a big fan of naming kids after locations. Maybe one of their middle names will be Morningside :)

1 comment:

adekku said...

Maybe it's too late but congrats on your admit! You can email me if you have any queries about accounting. I'll be glad to help ^_^