angel angie in London

back at London Business School tonight!

2011-10-03T15:30:00.001+02:00

I am excited to be going back on campus tonight for the launch of the Women in Business club at London Business School! I can't wait meet the MBA class of 2013 (oh my God, five years have passed since I started my MBA!!!) and see what their dreams and aspirations are. If you are there, give me a shout!

projects i'm working on right now -McKinsey book coming soon (hopefully!!!)

2011-09-21T22:58:00.007+02:00

hi all - it keeps on amazing me how many visitors this blog still has! i am glad the content on McKinsey, hedge funds, trading, interviewing and life at London Business School is still useful for many people - at least I know I didn't waste my time blogging (I knew anyway since I won the ipod for the best MBA blog in 2006, the ipod still works by the way :-) - thanks clearadmit.com!!!

I remembered this blog yesterday when I was filling in the FT Alumni Survey about my MBA at London Business School, hopefully we will be again number 1!

I told you to watch this space, and much more time than I expected has passed and I am still nowhere near where I wanted to be on my projects. Life has been busy. The markets are crazy. Not crazy, but volatile. I have a new website for women in business, it doesn't have much content yet but I am hoping to add a lot more over the next couple of weeks. The address is www.highflyingladies.com - check it out! I am working on writing several books actually. One is my McKinsey diaries combined with lessons learnt (you could say "how not to do it at McKinsey ;-) ), and another one is on my life in trading during the financial crisis - the problem is it is a never ending story :-). I was thinking of finding a publisher and all these things but have now decided to just design ebooks myself and self-market them eventually, there is so much for me to learn! I can't wait to finish them, I enjoy writing so much and blogging has always been fun but it would be great to publish a couple of books. I wish I had more time.

I am hoping to let you know soon once the McKinsey book is finished. Leave a comment here if you are interested - maybe I could have some of the readers of this blog to get a free preview of the book and let me know what you think about it?

Hope you're all well!

watch this space

2011-05-26T19:45:00.002+02:00

Hi all. Haven't posted in a LOOOOONG time, I know. You can see trading really is a full-time job. A lot of my MBA classmates have switched jobs and countries by now but I am still in London, still trading away :-). I was just checking and realised that there is still a pretty decent stream of visitors to this blog, I am amazed. Unfortunately a lot of the comment sections have become hijacked by spam so I need to enable comment moderation again and delete a lot of spam.

anyway, I just wanted to say I am finally working on something new and hope you will watch this space. It will be something completely separate, but very much related (remember my original "about me" was about finding money and happiness, and these are still very much aspirations I follow and I think a lot of readers strive for. It may take a month or two or three till I can share a new link, but I just wanted to say watch this space, angel angie is alive and kicking.

update

2009-01-25T21:22:00.003+01:00

hello my friends... you can imagine my life has been very exciting over the last 6 months, and i decided to give everyone a short update, just in case you were wondering what happened during the financial fireworks over the last months. times have been very tough and it has been very difficult to keep going and hope for the best while watching the financial world crashing. It has been an incredible experience watching the crisis unfold from inside the trading floor, and I am happy to say that I still have a job and was able to land a position as a trader, so I am very very very happy and lucky. I will not share all the crazy stories on this blog or any other blog, but am writing down all my stories and hope to publish a proper book some time next year, if I ever get time to finish it - life is very busy now. Hope you are all well and keep your spirits high! all the best!

Last party of the MBA and the end of my blog

2008-07-07T22:07:00.003+02:00

My friends, the MBA is over. The summer ball on Saturday was the final party at London Business School that I will attend in a long time. Of course, I may come back to Tattoo or Diwali next year, but it will not be the same anymore. I will miss those friends of mine who have left London for the Philippines, Italy, Russia, India and other places. Luckily, most of my friends remain in London, but we will hang out less than before.

This is not only the end of my MBA, but also the end of this blog. I want to keep writing, but since I now start my job I will want to have an anonymous blog so I can express my ideas freely without being associated with a specific bank - I would not be able to write what I really think. For the same reason, I have always maintained this blog rather than blogging on the official London business school blog - simply to write whatever I felt without feeling I need to censor my thoughts. I am starting my new job on Wednesday, starting with a training in New York, and then joining the trading floor in London in October, and therefore this is my last post.

Thank you all to those who have followed this blog and sent messages of support over the years. I wish you all the best in achieving your dreams. I close with my favourite quote by the Nigerian writer Ben Okri:

OUR FUTURE IS GREATER THAN OUR PAST
- Ben Okri -

All the best,
angie.

Graduation from London Business School

2008-07-05T00:09:00.005+02:00

Can you believe it? Angel Angie, who two years ago was blogging about her miseries in the consulting world, then came to London Business School to move to London and find a new career has graduated today! I had a beautiful day celebrating with my friends! You can see all you need to see from these pictures.

MBA finances

2008-06-02T22:48:00.005+02:00

I am graduating in 4 weeks, and am quite impressed by the cash flows I projected before starting the MBA. Though there were lots of deviations along the way, I had estimated that I should end the MBA with a balance of approximately 0, and this is what happened. I am disclosing my "profit and loss statement" for the 21 months of my MBA at London Business School. It is obviously rounded and approximated to the nearest 1000, and I have omitted holidays, clothes shopping etc.

Overall, you can see that I have managed to end the MBA without any debt. Actually the balance is higher than what I show because in reality my husband found a good job here after a while and we split the rent and other living expenses. So if you are coming to London Business School and want to make estimates, here's my recommendation for adapting the numbers to your situation:

- obviously, most of you won't be lucky enough to be paid by McKinsey without obligation to return ;-)
- if you have a partner, expect him/her to find a job after 3-6 months and enjoy :-)
- most banks and consultancies pay the sign on bonus tax free, somehow my bank refused to, so it was taxed which makes a big difference unfortunately
- Rent is one very big factor which will change the outcome. Even though I came here with my husband, we started off sharing, since he didn't have a job yet and we also didn't find studios that were cheap enough (we were willing to pay up to 230 pounds per week). I only knew one other couple that did that for the first year, and I think we were the only ones who did that for the two years. It's not easy of course, but that way we paid a rent of 837 pounds per month instead of 1200-1500 that we would have had to pay for a studio/1bedroom in this area. There were a lot of couples who had no income (and no McKinsey sponsorship and no scholarship) but opted for a 350 per week 1 bedroom. Of course it is more comfortable, but then I would have had about 15,000 pounds debt upon graduation, and now I am debt free, which feels great

So you see what to focus on: on the income side, internship salary, scholarships and bonuses are very important (I did two internships and obviously earned more than others), on the cost side, rent in London is the major factor (given that tuition fees are beyond your control).

I hope this helps. All numbers are given in GBP.

Net Income
McKinsey living expenses 15,000
Scholarship for tuition 20,000
Internship salary (20 weeks) 22,000
Internship bonus (so far) 15,000
Second year project 2,500
Total income 74,500
(excludes around 7,000 GBP in outstanding summer bonus and relocation allowance)

Cost
Tuition fees 41,000
Rent 17,640
Living expenses 18,900
Bills, phone etc. 1,050
Transport 1,050
Sum 79,640

Israel trip

2008-05-27T23:31:00.006+02:00

The MBA is drawing to a close - we will graduate in little more than 5 weeks - and I have saved the best for the end. I have just come back from one of the most amazing experiences of my MBA - a trip to Israel organised by some of my fellow students. There have been many trips organised from students for their classmates - to South Africa, Japan, India etc.. Though I had plans to go on most of them before the MBA, once here I realised there was very little time and also the trips were expensive. So finally I made it to one trip to a country that I had wanted to visit for many years but always felt afraid to visit due to the security situation and the tensions there. I am so glad I was able to go with the school trip because it is just a beautiful and very inspiring place. See for yourselves, here are some of my pictures from the trip:

Amazing Jerusalem

Walking on the Sea of Galilea

Hiking in the Negev desert

Jaffa

The Dead Sea

Tel Aviv

London Business School wins hattrick in Paris

2008-05-11T22:41:00.003+02:00

We won in 2006, we won in 2007, and we won again this weekend! London Business School rules European sports! We won the MBAT tournament of the top 15 European business schools for a third time this weekend!

I couldn't go this time, so thanks to Rusgirl for texting me from Paris. She won Rugby and Swimming, so congratulations to all the MBAs and Masters in Finance student who fought for the trophy once again! We are proud of you!!

McKinsey nightmare

2008-05-09T15:53:00.005+02:00

I had a bad nightmare last night. I had just finished my MBA, and for some reason, I was starting back with McKinsey! I was at a welcome dinner in London, ready to start my associate training, and they told us there were different training locations where we would have to go the next day. The locations were London, New Jersey, and Frankfurt. We each had to draw a card that would tell us where we were bound. The director (who happened to be a serious German guy wearing a grey suit) handed out the cards. I told him I wanted to stay in London, that since I lived in London I saw no reason to fly of to some other place just to do a training. He said these were the rules and I would have to show flexibility as a consultant. I refused and finally managed to force him into giving me a card that gave me the right to stay in London. But he told me that I would regret this, that I had the wrong attitude to be a consultant, that I would have to show flexibility and be delighted being told to fly around. He would take my attitude into account at the next "people's performance committee".

After that, the dinner continued. I was sitting opposite an associate principal who I had actually known during my time there. She told me that she was pregnant and would probably going to stop working for a year when the baby came, because, after all, APs didn't earn that much and it wasn't worth it. Then suddenly I was just myself and told her that that was true, that I was very happy with my decision to become an investment banker, and that taking into account my bonus I would probably earn more than her as an Associate, hehehe.

Then I woke up, the sun was shining, and I was in London. I didn't have to fly away. I just took a long walk through Hyde Park, bought fresh juices at Wholefoods, came back home, read a book about 19th century explorers to Tibet, and then took a nap on my sofa. Life is good.

London Business School partnership with Hong Kong University

2008-04-23T09:59:00.002+02:00

For those who want to gain a strong network and experience and Asia but are also looking for a back door entry into London Business School, you may be interested in the MBA program of the University of Hong Kong, HKU. Since last year, the is a partnership between HKU, London Business School and Columbia Business School. All MBA students at HKU do their first year core in Hong Kong, and then all transfer to either London Business School or Columbia Business School in New York for their final term, where they can take four to five electives.

Right now, we have 40 HKU students in our second year at London Business School. Together with Masters in Finance and MBA students, this brings our class size to about 450. I would imagine that for the purpose of finding a job in London, the programme is not ideal, since the last term of the MBA is quite a late moment to apply for jobs. However, that for those who plan on staying in East or South East Asia, this is a great opportunity to build up a network in Hong Kong and also get to study a term in London or New York.

Since I have many readers from Asia, I thought you may be interested.

Back on campus for the final showdown

2008-04-21T23:10:00.007+02:00

It had to happen, the final term of my MBA has arrived! Only 10 more weeks of school, then we're officially done with the MBA! I have just come back home from my first day at school, and this term will be hard work and very exciting and enjoyable!

I started the day running in Regent's Park, and then doing readings for my International Finance class with professor Raman Uppal tomorrow. The first sessions will focus on the behaviour of exchange rates and hedging decisions of multinational firms. I have already taken a class on currency markets and on derivatives, as well as having worked in sales & trading last summer, so I am taking this class mainly because I heard the professor is brilliant and inspiring, and also to get a more qualitative high-level view of hedging and financial markets.

During spring break, I had the chance to read two of the books the professor had recommended to contemplate what is important to us in life (see previous post). I chose "Tuesdays with Morrie", a book on a wise college professor who chose to share advice and experience and spend time with all those who were close to him before his death, rather than hiding away in shame. The book deals with how much pain is caused by the taboo around death, and by the hypocrisy of people who live life pretending they will not die. The book shows how relieved relatives and friends are when someone puts the cards on the table and actively says goodbye before dying. It's a simple book, but a beautiful story nonetheless. The second book I chose was "Three Cups of Tea", about an American hiker in North Pakistan who was so touched by the hospitality of Balti villagers after an accident he suffered while climbing K2, that he dedicated his life to building free schools in remote mountain regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, villages neglected by the central governments. The guy's dedication and his achievements in inspiring illiterate children are admirable, and I particularly enjoyed this book.

In the afternoon, I went to the library to do readings for my Credit Risk class, but bumped into too many people I hadn't talked to in a long time - people from my stream that I haven't seen since the first year, some friends who have just returned from exchange, some MBA 2010s that I know from my previous life as a McKinsey consultant and so on and so forth. No time to read in the end, but it was great to catch up with people, and it was a sunny day, so everybody was cheerful and happy. I also arranged for a Chinese lunch tomorrow with one of my great friends here who just returned from exchange in the US, I am happy she is back. I will be working with her and two other girls in a team for the International Finance class, it will be fun to have a group of four girls who are also close friends to work on the cases. We will disguise lunches and dinners as important working meetings and thus enjoy ourselves :-)).

Then I had the Credit Risk evening class. I chose the evening over the morning class so I can always go away on weekend trips without having to be back on Monday mornings :-). It's tough sitting in class till 9pm but what can you do... So far the class is very good and I am learning a lot. Credit Risk modeling is not easy, so you really need a teacher who explains well. I took the class because I heard Viral Acharya is one of the best finance professors, and was at first upset when I heard that the first three lectures would be taught by Professor Stephen Schaefer instead. After attending the first lecture, however, I am very happy, Professor Schaefer explains very well and goes step by step, we covered a lot of material but it seemed much more manageable than what I had feared after looking at the course materials, so I'm relieved.

On Wednesday, I will have my first Financial Engineering and Risk Management class with Professor Suleyman Basak, which I am also looking forward to, although the course material suggests it will be hard core. I learned a lot in his Fixed Income class though, so I expect that I will understand the material much better after attending the lectures. Lots of work ahead! It doesn't help that I am going on a 10-day trip again during term next month (I did the same last term and catching up was brutal!), it will be very tough to catch up with all the assignments afterwards, but I just had to take advantage of going abroad with friends once more, since I will start work straight after graduation.

With all this excitement, unfortunately it looks like time will race ahead even faster than before, and in no time the MBA will be over. At least I will know that I have thorougly enjoyed the experience, and that coming to London was the best decision I ever made. But it is still too early to talk like this, I am still a student :-).

The Mood in the City

2008-04-12T00:33:00.002+02:00

The mood in London financial markets is not good. House prices are going downtown, and with them the British pound (great for me and all the poor foreign tenants, but apparently bad for the majority). Investment bankers within UBS are looking around for jobs, and the Royal Bank of Scotland is sweeping ABN Amro's trading floor clean with incredible lack of style:

ABN’s structured credit traders were apparently told on Thursday that they should report to RBS’ London office in preparation for a move there on Monday. Terminals needed to be checked and such like. And when they got there… they were all fired (full story).

Luckily, the British have a great sense of humour, and I couldn't stop laughing at this economic assessment of London 2010 from the price of everything blog:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
London, April 2010 – Wall Street firms have just announced their latest results for FY 2009;

300 million staff have been “written down”, leaving just two (Sid and Doris Bonkers) to manage the investment banks’ remaining worldwide debt, equity, merger and advisory, securitisation, syndication and prime brokerage businesses.

Marti Peeps, sole analyst at the last remaining research house, Teletext, welcomed the results as “a bold step in the face of ongoing bad debt provisioning,” though conceded that the City’s newly “rightsized” payroll might struggle to take on board the burgeoning supply of new issuance, namely the packet of Walkers Crisps rumoured to be hitting the primary market in late summer 2012.Hopes for a recovery in Wall Street earnings have for several quarters hinged on the prospects for the successful completion of a 40p private placement of a bag of Salt and Vinegar flavour crisps on behalf of the Walkers Crisps Company. Lead underwriters JPCitigroupMerrill, a subsidiary of the US government, and Northern Rock SocGen KFW Nomura, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tesco plc (Neasden branch), are rumoured to have “solid” interest for the underwriting, most notably from Asia, itself a subsidiary of Texas Pacific Group, but declined to go into further detail.

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(click here for pdf version). Enjoy!

People are starting to leave

2008-04-02T00:41:00.004+02:00

Tonight I attended the second good bye party of classmates in a matter of 3 days. Due to the flexibility of our programme, the MBA at London Business School ends in a gradual fashion; there are people I haven't seen since mid-December, who have been working now in Dubai, Hong Kong, New York, or London since January. There are people who finished up last week and are moving back to Bombay or Hong Kong tomorrow. And there are people who are luckily staying to work in London, but will travel around the world for the next three months, while some of us continue their studies.

The good bye evenings are a great way of catching up with people - to be honest I have not been very sociable through the last term. On one hand, I simply read and thought a lot over Christmas and enjoyed staying at home reading rather than going out - probably I needed to relax. Then I traveled through Southeast Asia and Scotland for 3 weeks during term and struggled to catch up. And then I prepared for the Fixed Income Exam, which was quite something. It is only since a week that I have come out of this haze and am "reintegrating into society", and I must say, I like it :-). As I just said, the goodbye evenings are great, especially since I am not leaving. All my best friends are staying in London at least for the next 2 or 3 years anyway, so there is nothing to be sad about.

It will be worse in 3 years when people start leaving to their home countries to found families, because I do not have a home to go to in the sense that others do, who go abroad only to boost their credentials for a few years and then happily return home. It is wonderful how people from India or Italy are sure that in the end they will surely go back to their home countries. Although Hamburg is a great place with a high living standard, I feel too far removed now in terms of mentality to consider going back to Germany. Working at McKinsey already alienated me from the general discourse of the country, and since living in London I feel more and more estranged at the media and the opinions I encounter. I am so upset they do not fix the education system, among many other things that need to be fixed, and that the way the system was designed after the war makes any changes impossible. Anyway, I digress. The point is that for now, I am happy that all my friends are staying in London for the next years, and by the time some leave, I assume for all who leave there are more to come to London. That's the beauty of living in the greatest city in the world :-).

I have also realized over the last week how many great people I have come to know over the last 18 months. These days, people are especially nice because many are sentimental, and because some know they won't see each other anymore, so the conversations get less automized and more personal. Things are good. I am happy I am staying in school for another term!

Buy side/sell side joke

2008-03-30T19:38:00.002+02:00

Passed on to me by a friend on the buy-side (if an investment banker ever asks you to tell him a joke in the job interview, this may a a great one for him ;-))) ):

"What is the difference between a buy-side and a sell-side trader?"
"One says "f*** you" and hangs up the phone - the other hangs up the phone and then says "f*** u"

hehehe :-).

Welcome message from the finance professor

2008-03-18T00:48:00.003+01:00

What a great school where you get greeted to an upcoming course like this!! I am copying a shortened version of a message from our International Finance professor, which he sent about 6 weeks before the start of the class. What I really like about our finance and economics professors is that they really love their subjects, some to a somewhat crazy extent, but that's how you spread enthusiasm and advance knowledge. Here it goes:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Friends,

I am the professor for the elective course on International Finance, which is scheduled for Summer 2008.

Why am I writing this email to you? I am writing this email to welcome you to the course and to tell you a bit about my objectives for the course so that you understand what I wish to accomplish in the time that we spend together.

I have been teaching in business schools for about 20 years now, and about 10 years ago I decided that I wanted to do more than just teach "Course X" -- given how short life is, this was simply not sufficiently rewarding for me. And, after some contemplation, I realized that given the opportunity cost to you of being in school, you should also expect much more than just learning about finance, or accounting or some other subject while you are in school.

What are my objectives for the course?

So, I now have two objectives in teaching the course on International Finance. First, I wish to imbed in your head a systematic structure for thinking about all issues related to international financial markets and international corporate finance. With a little bit of cooperation from you, I am confident that we will achieve this objective. My second objective is to help you to think about your life and to help you change it in a direction that you want. To accomplish this, we will spend the last 10 minutes of each class talking about issues not related to finance. The topics covered during this time will range from philosophy, physics, anthropology, biology, psychology, mountain-climbing, baseball, genetics, bike-racing ... and whatever else I need to talk about in order to rekindle the fire in you so that your dreams are about achieving extraordinary goals rather than just finding the best job in consulting or investment banking.

What else you may wish to do before the start of the course?

The best way to get value from the course (and your time in school) is through introspection and contemplation about the issues that are important for you in life (not just in finance). To help you do this, I have enclosed below a list of books (all of which are unrelated to finance) that will help you think about the important issues in life. I strongly encourage you to read at least one of these books. Other than reading these books, I suggest that you spend some time walking (and thinking) in Regents Park.

Best wishes, and looking forward to seeing you in class.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Due to popular request, I am adding the list of recommended books. I have bought "Three Cups of Tea" and "Tuesdays with Morrie" and will read them over spring break:

1. How each individual can have a tremendous impact on life on Earth

- Mortenson, Greg. Three Cups of Tea.

2. Thinking about what you wish to accomplish in life

- Hess, Hermann. Siddhartha.

- Albom, Mitch. Tuesdays With Morrie.

3. An example of accomplishing a lot despite a very modest starting point

- Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom.

4. Examples of accomplishing what seems impossible

- Weihenmayer, Erik. Touch the Top of the World.

- Armstrong, Lance. It Is Not About The Bike: My Journey Back To Life.

5. How to walk the path in order to get to where you want to go

- Zander, Benjamin and Zander. The Art of Possibility.

- Herrigel, Eugen. 1999. Zen and the Art of Archery, Random House.

- Suzuki, Shunryu. 1970. Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, J. Weatherhill Inc., New York.

Tick tock tick tock - the second year

2008-03-12T23:37:00.004+01:00

Yes, I am still here, even though I don't write much anymore. There is just too much going on. As always I was hoping for a relaxing term but I have the ability to always end up doing lots of exciting things that keep me busy. The downside of this exciting life is that time is passing much too fast, the term is as good as over and there are now less than 4 months till the end of the MBA. It feels even less because lots of my friends are taking the summer term off to go traveling, so there are a lot of people now in the classroom who are finishing up.

I have been traveling a lot this term, working on a consulting project in the Scottish highlands, and going to Southeast Asia with three friends, I absolutely love Thailand!! I have been reading a lot this term, something I used to do a lot when I was younger and almost gave up while I was working at McKinsey, and now I am getting into the habit again, which is great. I have also just spend a few lovely days with my family in Hamburg, enjoying the great food and spending time with my grandmother and parents. Hamburg is such a great place to live and so cheap compared to London. No wonder it has won 3rd place as one of the best places to invest in for 2008 (along with Moscow and Istanbul) :-).

Now there is one week left of the spring term. I am working hard to finish up the consulting project for the Scottish tourism venture that I have mentioned before, and other than that really need to get started with my take home exam for time series analysis due on Monday. It was handed out 1 or 2 weeks ago but I just haven't had any time to even look at it so far. I also need to prepare for the Fixed Income exam next week, and since this is a course I have enjoyed a lot, the outcome is much more important to me, so I will need to prioritise my fixed income preparation over the rest for the next week.

On the side, I have also joined a team of classmates for our inter-school Tennis league, and we have won the first round, yay!! Playing Tennis in Regent's Park on a Friday morning is just something I need to enjoy as much as possible while I'm not working.

That's it for today, I will keep writing once I get all the exams and papers out of the way!

the job market in finance (and equity markets): should have listened to the Harvard MBA indicator!!

2008-02-25T20:49:00.003+01:00

In the mid of frantic interviewing for summer positions in investment banking a year ago, the president of our finance club posted this interesting article on our discussion board:

If 10 percent or less of a given year’s graduating class take jobs in investment banking, investment management, trading, venture capital, private equity or leveraged buyouts, that is a long-term “buy” signal. If 30 percent or more take such jobs, it’s a “sell.” This year, the indicator doesn’t look good, with 37 percent of H.B.S. grads taking jobs in the securities business.
(full version here)

The article had actually been published in November 2006, but we were discussing it in January 2007. The first sell-off in equity markets and then in credit markets started few weeks later, and really gained speed in August. So the indicator was a few months early, but it is very impressive.

I remember my thoughts when I read it: that probably it was true, but that hopefully the bubble would continue for another year or two and burst only then. Greed is what keep bubbles growing: you know it can't last, but if others had benefitted from the bubble, perhaps I could also have a little bit more before the party was over? Greed makes people grab for overpriced assets hoping they will appreciate further. But in the end it all ends the way it has to end. Probably this year the numbers will be down to below 30% (although for the class of MBA2008 at least at London Business School we will certainly be more than 30% going into finance I believe).

Talking of bubbles, the UK housing bubble is also bursting these weeks (finally!!). Today's FT has a very insightful commentary on the UK economy. I am quite happy about the bursting housing bubble (all else equal, obviously), as I am planning to move closer to the financial district, the City, in a few months, and the rental prices are just plummeting. Housing near the City is a big bubble, in recent years they are building housing like crazy for all the investment bankers supposed to move there, but this year most likely people will be moving out rather than in, and hundreds of new units will come onto the market.

I have watched the rental price of a 2 bedroom flat that I have my eye on in walking distance to my future job drop from $3,000 per month to $2,700 in the last 3 weeks, but I will wait another couple of months and am fairly sure things will go down - or DOWNTOWN!!!, as our fixed income professor likes to shout :-). The fixed income class is very heavy stuff by the way, first time I am doubting if interest rates are a good area to go in, it's complicated!! I'm a bit of a macro person I guess, I always think - what difference does it make if the interest rates are 4.17% or 4.21%? Really, it is so removed from reality. But the class is great, I am learning a lot, especially I am learning to be more humble about my intellectual abilities :-))). That's certainly a good thing.

london, the markets, and the second year MBA

2008-01-26T17:47:00.000+01:00

Well, life in London is as exciting as ever. The big story in the markets is obviously the alleged $7 bn fraud at Societe Generale, though I am very sceptical about their version of the events. At least, the story solves one mystery I heard about at the end of my hedge fund internship. We, the analysts, would look at investment ideas, while the traders would manage the open positions and talk to sell-side traders to see what's going on in the market. I remember we had running gag for a while, as some traders in the market were telling our head trader that there was a mysterious "DAX man" in the market, that somone was buying up billions of dollars worth of DAX futures, and everybody was wondering who this crazy guy could be, buying billions of DAX futures while the market was so volatile and headed for a strong correction. We would speculate if it could be one of the Middle Eastern investment funds, or if it was someone who knew something. Or we would dismiss the story and think the story about the mysterious DAX man was a big joke. Well, it seems it wasn't a joke. It might be a mere coincidence and it might be that this was an unrelated event, but I somehow feel this new "rogue trader" might just be him.

And if that wasn't exciting enough, summer recruiting is starting off next week and the first years are freaking out. It is very stressful, especially with markets as they are, banks seem to have less slots for the summer and some people are disappointed not to have many interviews lined up. I have done some mock interviews over the last week and am happy that some people are really well prepared, but I still feel that some people are overconfident and should prepare harder, this year it won't be easy to land a, investment banking internship. So please prepare as hard as you can!! You have been warned :-).

In the world of academic finance, I am enjoying my course in Fixed Income Securities immensely. The professor, Suleyman Basak, has set himself a very high standard of making sure we know more "than the average smart guy on Wall Street who has read Fabozzi". In fact, two alumni from my school who work as prop traders now both told me his course was the best course ever preparing them for landing jobs at the most desired trading desks, so I am hoping to get a lot out of the course. I enjoyed the first two lectures so much that I dropped an advanced financial analysis course that I had signed up for for next term, and have signed up for a Financial Engineering course with professor Basak instead.

As a distraction from the world of finance and investment, I am working on a great paid second year consulting project for a tourism venture in the Scottish highlands, which we are very excited about. In a few weeks we will go up to the highlands for a week to check out everything on-site. From hedge fund internships to consulting projects in the Scottish highlands, Diwali parties and making friends from all over the world, I cannot believe how varied my MBA experience has been so far. Luckily it is still not over :-). Next week I'm setting off for a short holiday in South East Asia with three friends, followed by a trip to the Scottish highlands and then spring break! Life is good.

Interview questions to prepare for Sales&Trading

2008-01-08T18:59:00.000+01:00

I have written up this list for the MBA2009s from my school but thought I might as well share it with others applying for summer internships in Markets. Writing it up, I realized there is a lot to prepare actually. Lots of questions are easy if you follow the markets and have been in the field before, but for career changers there is actually a lot to prepare! Here it goes:

Technical questions

How are bond prices and yields related?
How do you price a bond?
How do you calculate implied forward rates?
How do you price an option?
What is a Credit Default Swap? How does it work?
What is a CDO? How does it work?
What happens to bond prices when interest rates rise? What happens to equity markets? What happens to currencies?
What is an inverted yield curve and how do you interpret it?

What is a carry trade? How does it work?

Market awareness

Know the price of oil, gold, the level of the FTSE, S&P500, Nikkei, Dax, know FX rates USD/EUR, USD/Yen, EUR/GBP, what have these been doing over the last months?
Know central bank rates of US, Euro area, UK and Japan, what have they been doing over the last months, what does the term structure look like, why?
How would you invest $1million?
Have you ever invested money?
Tell me a trade idea?
What stocks do you like and why?
What do you think the Fed/Japanese Central bank etc. will do at their next meeting?
(A really good source of commentary on rates and currency markets is Daily FX)
Where do you think interest rates are going?
What happened in the markets yesterday?
Draw me the US yield curve. Draw me the UK yield curve. Why is it inverted?
(check Bloomberg rates for the graphs, much easier than looking up the yields in the Financial Times and drawing it yourself. Wow, the UK yield curve looks funky right now!)
What do you think about the current credit markets?
What's your view on the US economy?
What do you think is the next big investment opportunity in the markets that can offer spectacular returns?
etc. (all questions like that to check if you have an opinion and read the newspaper, answer can be short and concise, there is no right answer as long as it is logical and moderately well informed)
+ questions that you provoke -i.e.
If you say you are interested in emerging markets, they will ask you about which EM stock you like or what happened in Thailand last year,
if you say you are interested in oil they might ask what's going on in Venezuela or Kazakhstan,
if you say you come from financial engineering they might ask something more technical,
if you say you want to do sales they might say “sell me something now” and so on

Fit

Why do you want to do this?
Why do you want to leave your previous job?
We have invited 15 of your classmates for the final round. Why should we take you and not your classmates?
How will you decide between different offers?
What do you like about Deutsche Bank/Lehman Brothers etc.?
Why Sales & Trading and not Investment Banking?
Tell me about a time in your work when you really felt the power of a team and what a team can achieve

Teaching yourself programming for financial modeling

2008-01-02T00:49:00.000+01:00

In preparation for my trading (or structuring) job, I have decided to finally learn programming. In case there are people out there also considering to learn programming for financial modeling, I have started a separate blog

C++ for financial modeling

I intend to keep it as a sort of diary to document how to teach oneself programming, and to discuss the roadblocks on the way. I have wanted to learn programming for a long time and have realized that the main reason I never did it was lack of self confidence and doubts about lots of things. I think I have finally overcome these doubts and hope I can encourage others who have been shy or hesitant about learning programming. My main learning from today is that it is really nothing mysterious once you get started, so I cannot believe it has taken me so many years to get started. But I will keep all this in a separate blog, since it is of no interest to most of my readers.

Read the Gloom Boom Doom blog for sales & trading interviews

2008-01-01T19:54:00.000+01:00

Interviews for summer jobs are coming up, and I have talked to some MBA2009s concerned that they still don't have an opinion on the market or much overview of how to understand the markets despite reading the FT for the last months. I strongly recommend Marc Faber's blog "The Gloom, Boom, and Doom Report", which gives a very independent and insightful view on the direction of the markets. Journalists can be short sighted and like to regurgitate consensus opinion rather than give insights, so it is good to have an investor with excellent writing skills covering the markets with a monthly column. I like this part of Marc Faber's current column:

But how can a responsible central bank cut interest rates and pursue an expansionary monetary policy when the stock market is close to an all time high and when it is faced with a weak currency and soaring food and commodity prices?

'Only in America' one should say because the US-infected IMF and World Bank would advise any country under these conditions to 'tighten' monetary policies and to raise interest rates. But since the Fed's only objective today is to 'inflate' asset markets further at the expense of totally debasing the currency we need to look at a new currency as a 'unit of account' and as a 'store of value'. (continue reading)

Thoughts for the new year

2007-12-29T22:12:00.000+01:00

I have not been writing much recently, but that does not mean I am not thinking :-). I have mentioned before that the key switch in my thinking over the last year has been that I do not see myself as an employee anymore, and I do not care about finding the perfect company or the perfect job that someone gives me to make me happy. It is a combination of thinking more and more like a shareholder or entrepreneur during the MBA and of reading the book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" several times over the last year, which has influenced me a lot. As a result, I see a job as something I do for a considerable amount of time of my day for different reasons, mainly to acquire skills and experience that will help me become independent in the financial and personal sense. From this perspective, looking for a job is a very different task than how I understood finding the perfect job only one year ago.

Looking back one year, I cannot believe how my thinking has changed. One year ago, I was still unsure if I should quit my consulting job - a job that made me unhappy and miserable 90% of the time I spent there and that today I would not consider going back to even for a week! I was asking myself every day what to do with my life, a question so vague and all encompassing that answering it was beyond my horizon. I was stuck in the belief that I would never be rich, since I hadn't been born rich, and that the world in general and work places in particular were unfair.

Today, I see everything very differently, and I hope that this stays that way - I have a little fear that my free mind does not only stem from the comforts of happy student life - everybody has heard the complaint about MBAs who graduate thinking they should go into companies at least as CEOs and really know nothing, and partly that's true, so I don't want to fall into the trap of being one of thousands of megalomaniac spoilt MBAs. But what I can say is that I absolutely recongnize that I know something between nothing and 5% of what I need to know for future jobs, and I'm very happy about this fact, because work is more interesting when you learn something new, and the less you know about a job the more interesting it is.

With all this in mind, I am very excited about the next year. I have half a year of student life ahead of me, and of intense learning. I have six electives left, all of which are either in finance or related subjects:
- Times Series Analysis for Forecasting
- Fixed Income Securities
- Financing the Entrepreneurial Business
- Credit Risk
- International Finance
- Advanced Financial Analysis

For those who think this is overly technical (I have decided to miss out on courses like Negotiation & Bargaining or Creativity and Personal Mastery or Brand Management...), I must say that I have spent all my undergraduate and postgraduate education in psychology and political sciences, and that as much as I enjoy the literary side of life, if I pursue it I like to pursue it properly, not at an MBA level, which is quite superficial, so for now I have noticed I get much more out of technical subjects. Last term I have done the same, and probably unlike 95% of the class, the course I have enjoyed the most has been Options & Futures. I have enjoyed setting up Excel files to do options pricing and hedging, and being honest about what I enjoy, no matter how geeky it sounds, has been very helpful for me to be happier and clearer about what I want to do. Apart from learning, I will also travel a lot over the next six months and enjoy the freedom of student life.

The second six months I will be trained for my new job - first on classroom training in New York, and then in severla rotations through trading desks in London. I am very excited about this as well, and can't wait to find out which desk I will be working on full-time, but luckily the wait will be easy because student life is sweet.

Obviously then, I am looking forward to the next year, and I wish my readers all the best for the new year, may your dreams come true!

Santa Claus pub crawl in Soho

2007-12-04T02:25:00.000+01:00

Leaving our beautiful school on Park Road

Causing surprise at Baker Street tube station

Taking over Piccadilly Circus

Ready to party!!!!

Sales & Trading and Hedge Fund reading list

2007-11-28T13:36:00.004+01:00

Even though I should be studying for my Options & Futures exam coming up next week, I am meeting up with lots of first years interested in working on the trading floor or in hedge funds to give them advice on CVs and interview preparation. The question on what to read in preparation keeps coming up, so I will make a post with all the books I find very helpful to get inside into trading and investing, as well as the technical knowledge required. I recommend the following books. Obviously, you don't need to read them to pass interviews. If you are lazy, you can get by with your introductory finance class, the Wall Street Journal, and the Vault Guide to Finance Interviews. Still, I believe that if you are not interested enough to pick up a good book on investing or the markets in your spare time, it is questionable if you will enjoy working in the financial markets, and thus it is unlikely you will be successful or happy if you work in this field. So at the least reading these books will give you an idea if you are really passionate about markets.

Technical knowledge
Inventing Money: The Story of Long Term Capital Management and the Legends behind it

This is the best book on the lives of Fischer, Black, Scholes, and Merton, the fathers of modern derivative pricing. It gives an excellent introduction into how and why derivatives were developed and how the industry grew. It might be a bit heavy if you have no background whatsoever, but even then I think it will familiarize you with the concepts important in trading.

Derivatives

We have had some readings from this book in our Options class, and as an introduction it is much easier to understand than the classic John Hull book on derivatives that everyone recommends but probably not many actually fully understand. So if you want a book on derivatives that is easy to understand and study by yourself, with a very good depth and practical and intuitive explanations, this is really good. It is written by the NYU Stern professor Rangarajan Sundaram. It is more expensive than the Hull book unfortunately.

Now on to lighter things :-). There are a lot of books on investing, the hedge fund world, and trading, but these are my favourites. Depending on where you lean and what you are interested in, you may have other choices, here are my top choices.

Easy reading
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

This is the autobiography of one of the first speculators in the 20th century, who made his fortunes in the 1929 crash shorting stock prices. He seems to have had a very unusual gift for interpreting stock prices and where they were likely to go, so much so that brokerages would refuse to take his orders, forcing him to operate anonymously even when he was in his teens. His insight on trading and investing are as true today as they were 80 years ago.

How I made $2m in the stock market

Despite the dodgy title, this is actually an excellent book on stock picking. It was written by Nicolas Darvas in the late 50s and follows a very similar investment style to Jesse Livermore, the author of reminiscences of a stock operator. It is a great introduction to technical analysis versus a fundamentals based approach to investing. It is also a very easy read and a great way to get started on investing.

Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in the Global Markets

As stupid as the title sounds, this is actually a great book full of interviews with macro traders, i.e. investors who analyze global economic trends in currencies, interest rates and commodities to take positions on large movements and trends. It is fascinating how they interpret current events and what connections they make. You have to be interested in macro investing to like this book, as it is unrelated to corporate finance or technical aspects of trading.

Market Wizards: Interview with Top Traders

This is something like the original of Inside the House of Money, a collection of interviews with successful traders from the 70s. Lots of their stories are focused on how they made money shorting soybeans or wheat in the Chicago trading pits, but there are lots of characters here that became famous hedge fund managers later. It does get technical when they describe exactly what they sold when and why, so again you need to be interested in investing to read this book.

Hedgehogging

A much lighter read, this is quite an entertaining book on the hedge fund industry and the characters in it (managers, investors, wives, journalists, funds of funds etc.). It is written by Barton Biggs, formerly head of Morgan Stanley investment management. He has a degree in literature, is well-read and has a healthy distance to money and the finance industry. He can be quite sarcastic at times and I laughed a lot reading it.

Beating the Street

Written by Fidelity star Peter Lynch. This is about investing in stocks and quite useful personally. There are a lot of interview questions like "how would you invest $1m" or "which stock do you like and why", so this comes in handy.

I don't like any of the overhyped books such as Liar's Poker or When Genius Failed and think they are quite useless and won't give you a good idea of what trading floors or hedge funds are about. I do think reading the Wall Street Journal and the Economist helps a lot as well. The FT has some advantage in their coverage of political issues, but in terms of finance and business the WSJ goes into greater depth and technical detail, which is very helpful if you want to go beyond the journalist ling

Lots to read over the Xmas holidays!!! ;-). I didn't do it last year but in retrospect I must say I was not well prepared for the interviews, I didn't even know how options were priced, so I really recommend the following class to prepare better than me and know about option pricing and the general idea of hedging trading positions.

Surprising career choices

2007-11-21T12:35:00.000+01:00

Many people have been asking me which job I ended up signing, so it is time to talk about it. I made a perhaps unusual choice. I signed with an investment bank instead of taking the offer from an established multi-billion dollar hedge fund. And I did this even though in terms of the internship, I enjoyed the work at the hedge fund more. Where shall I start to explain and justify myself? I myself was wondering once in a while if I am crazy. But I believe I did the right thing. Here's why.

Content and style of work: in terms of the style of working, the hedge fund was fantastic. It is quite creative and independent, and you never have to worry about selling anything or pleasing anyone. You just try to find out what is the right position to take, if there is a trade or not, and if yes, how to structure the trade in an intelligent way, and you are very free in terms of the opportunities you explore. Banking is very client driven, so obviously it will be more rigid and focused on selling products. The advantage of a bank is that one can move around quite easily and explore different areas, as well as switch desks or divisions. In a hedge fund, once you do merger arbitrage with European equities, it is unlikely that you will ever do anything else. The freedom of moving around and seeing different asset classes and regions was one of the reasons the investment bank seemed more attractive to me

Macro versus micro: the specific job I would have been hired for at the hedge fund required going into deep details of the financial reports of companies, finding inefficiencies and mispricings in their assets and liabilities. The trades were then structured in a market neutral way, so as to take a position only on the mispricing, while hedging out all market risk. Unfortunately, market risk is exactly the part I find most interesting, while accounting is what I like the least. Again, I prefer to work in commodities, interest rates, FX or emerging markets, rather than reading annual reports. This was the strongest reason of all.

Continuation of business school: another attractive element of the Associate programme in a bank is the fact that you are part of a group of 40 associates and about 80 analysts, and have the first 2 months together in New York of training, living in Manhattan, enjoying New York, making lots of friends. If you want to make money in the future, it helps to know a lot of people in different areas, and especially as a career changer I felt that so far I have very few contacts and know very little. Judging from last summer, I know I will enjoy having a large peer group of people in the same situation as I am, as it will make the transition from lovely student life to hard work easier.

Let's see how it all works out. I am meeting with lots of first years these days to explain them what Sales & Trading is all about, so I will probably make a post about it soon. At least I will post my reading list on how to prepare. This is a very busy week with lots of assignments, plus the final exams are coming up, so I have no time to get bored!

Tick tock tick tock: enjoying student life for 9 more months

2007-11-16T16:50:00.000+01:00

Tick tock tick tock - I signed my job offer last week, next year July I will start working again. Now it is time to travel and party as much as possible!! Well, obviously I am also planning to learn as much as possible of the things I won't have time to learn once I work. Having worked in finance for 6 months over the summer and getting the sign on bonus are helping me a lot to enjoy London fully without feeling so poor anymore. It's the first time in my life basically that I don't have financial or personal worries and it feels great. I feel grateful everyday and thank God all the time, even though I am an atheist - I have to thank someone!!

Life has been very good here, we've had the Diwali party on campus which was lots of fun. I managed to organize a Sari and get help from my friends to put it on. I am so happy we have the Indian community on campus, they are fantastic and organize a lot of great events.

I'm also quite active academically now, since I have a lot to catch up!! I noticed over the summer that I just haven't learned enough in the first year. When I walk out of the school with an MBA next year, I want to know the basics of macroeconomics and accounting, and I just don't. I want to know how exchange rates work, how global trade works and so on and so on. I know in the end academia seldom has the answer, but it will be good to at least know the theories and frameworks to know where to start. This summer I truly felt that I do not know even 5% of what I should know about accounting or finance or economics before walking out of here. This will keep me busy!

I'm very happy for some of my best friends who have gotten job offers these days. A lot of interviews are still going on, but knowing that two friends who were less lucky for the summer internship this year now have full-time offers from the McKinsey London office makes me very happy. Then, I'm spending a lot of time right now talking to our first year students to advise on job search. As so many time before, I feel the main difference between those who will be successful and those who won't is that the former know exactly who they are, what they want and what they don't want. You cannot stop someone who is determined (yet humble!) and knows where he is going! On the other hand, others are very smart but full of doubts, and unfortunately nobody wants to hire people who doubt if they will do the job for more than a year. I had the same problem last year, and I got quite a few rejections because of that (Goldman explicitly told me after the final round last year that the only reason they did not make me an offer was they didn't believe that's what I really wanted). And I think they were right at that time, I was not well prepared and did not have a compelling story when I interviewed - I am embarrassed to think about it now - I interviewed for trading jobs but couldn't tell them how to price an option and not even what factors went into pricing of an option. If I hadn't spent 4 months wondering if I should go back to McKinsey or not in the first term but had prepared for the interviews instead, the story could have been different.

So my advice as always is that you have to be honest with yourself and speed up the decision process on the summer internships, don't wait till January to decide because it is very easy to spot the difference between people who have known what they want and prepared for it and people who stumble into interviews trying to fake interest for the job, it won't work.

This is my wise advice for the day (though it's becoming repetitive, I know), now I'm off travelling for the weekend :-).

On freedom

2007-11-09T17:49:00.000+01:00

This is the end of my first week in freedom. It has been one of the best weeks in a long time. It feels so great to be a student again, especially a student without financial worries taking very few classes this term!! Now I understand why the MBA2007s seemed to be partying all the time last year :-).

I've used my spare time to catch up with a lot of my best friends during the day and to do sports. If you want to know what freedom feels like, go running through Regent's Park in the very early morning. It is so beautiful and so much better than going to the office on a Monday morning. I also go to the gym a lot, which is less beautiful but more social, since quite a few 2nd years without much to do hang out there :-).

Other than that, I'm also trying to be helpful to first years exploring opportunities for the summer internships, I have met with about 5 by now to talk about Sales & Trading. I'm quite impressed by how well prepared first years are this year, or maybe I only get to see those who know what they want already. It is funny remembering how I was in their shoes last year, asking the same questions, exploring the same issues - it shows me how much has happened over the last year.

One very big difference now I have noticed is how broader my perspective has become, which is the main reason I have been neglecting this blog recently. I am finding it less and less interesting to talk about jobs, career choices, MBAs, parties etc.. I much prefer to think and talk about other things in life which are much more important. So I'm not sure yet what I should do from now on: either I will shift quite considerably what I write about, which might disappoint some applicants or first years (although they can always go back to the old posts), or I might simply write less often but focus on the issues that this blog was set up to cover. Let's see. At least what I have noticed is that the MBA funnily has allowed me to spend more time on what I want out of life, and it has raised my expectations of life high enough that the solution for me is not finding a job in an investment bank. It may be a nice thing on the side, but it is not going to be my central goal. I guess it is just an effect moving higher up on Maslow's pyramid, now that all existential problems have been solved.

Someone asked a few weeks back if 2nd year is really as relaxed as I describe it here. The answer is that it depends on each student. You can take more courses or less, you can aim to finish earlier or later, you can work part-time, study hard and do all the readings or only get by academically, you can contribute a lot to your teams or you can choose to work less etc. etc. In my experience it depends completely on personality, there are people who will always be super busy and stressed no matter how small workload is objectively, and there are people who will always be relaxed no matter how stressed everyone is. I've decided to take it easy over the next year, I'll just take 3 courses each term, I've dropped out of the exchange to avoid the hassle of applying for a US visa (among other reasons), and I plan to spend more time on things that I really want to do. I really dislike more and more having my daily activities dictated from outside (through course assignments etc.) and much prefer to shape what I want to do or learn. At least for the next 9 months I will do that, because afterwards it will be hard for a few years.

Did you miss me?

2007-10-27T13:12:00.000+02:00

Hello my loyal readers - did you miss me? Do not ye worry, the end is nigh! angie will only be working one more week and then I will have all the time in the world. I will continue to have only 3 evening classes, which means I will have all day free all week, this is so amazing! I am planning to do the same next term and just take the time to read, go to the museums, go to the gym, party, travel.... I have already planned a trip to Berlin and another one to Istanbul, and there is definitely more to come. It's time to enjoy my spare time!! One very valuable lesson I have learned from the MBA is that the idea of being an employee sucks, and it is important to get out of that role as fast as possible.

On the weekends of course, I try to enjoy my freedom as much as possible :-). Last night we went to a great Iranian rap concert (mixed with traditional music), especially the first group was amazing, their name is Simorgh and they were outstanding, luckily they are from London so it will be easy to attend all the concerts in the future :-). That's the impressive thing about London: so many talented people from all over the world come here to find their way, be it musicians, comedians, or just ambitious students looking for money. I for one have great admiration for people who have the courage and the talent to make it as artists in this city, which is so so so expensive and so competitive. Unfortunately I'm not talented enough to go that way, so I have to do other things. But no problem, I'm happy!

Now I'm off to Bayswater to meet a Filipina classmate for Chinese food, yuuuuuuum!! Watch this space for what's been happening in London, some eager MBAs might want to hear about the job market in finance which is not easy for those who didn't make it in the summer, from what I know in the US the firms have started firing lots of people already, and many investment banks have hiring freezes. I for one am almost happy, hoping that the house prices in London will finally come down, but let's see what happens over the next months.

angie is back to school - but still working!

2007-10-04T23:46:00.000+02:00

I am back at school, yay! This is me in front of our beautiful London Business School on Park Road this evening. As you can see the sun in London is shining again! I am still working full-time from 7am every morning and am taking three evening classes now. Studying in London makes this possible. I have another friend and classmate who has been working full-time at Ferrari throughout the first year - don't ask me how!

What I really like about working and taking classes at the same time is that I can apply what I do at work in class - and I realize just how much I have learnt over the last months of work - but also I can apply what I learn in class at work every day, and that feels great.

My three classes this term are great so far, even though it is tough sitting in class from 6 to 9pm, particularly today when there was Sundowners at the same time - and I missed it! No drinks for me yet! Let's try to forget about drinks for now and talk academics :-):

Options & Futures: one of the most dreaded courses at London Business School, this is supposed to be the toughest course. The first lecture was very introductory though - how do forwards and futures work and things like that. After two months on a commodities structuring desk over the summer, you cannot scare me with terms like contango or backwardation! I had trouble shutting up in this class because there is a big divergence between theory and what happens on the trading floor - but I know how annoying people who think they know everything better than the professor are, so I didn't argue about certain things. I don't think my classmates could care less about the reasons for roll yield in commodities markets ;-).

Global Currency Markets: Macroeconomics suffers from the same divergence between theory and empirical evidence or reality, but it is great to think in a more systematic way about exchange rates, trade, budget deficits, what happens to the dollar, how Chinese foreign reserves affect the US and things like that. The professor is very experienced and knowledgable and it seems he is well connected, because we'll have some amazing guest speakers over the next weeks - among them Jim O'Neill, chief economist of Goldman Sachs, as well as the top FX strategist of Goldman, and then a good mix of policymakers, financial journalists and practicioners active in the currency markets.

Mergers, LBOs and Corporate Restructuring: as with the other classes, the class today was introductory and basically a recap of what we have done on M&As in the first year. But the professor, Paolo Volpin, is highly entertaining, smart and knowledgable. I must say each and every finance and economics professor at our school has been amazing. Joao Cocco was brilliant, I loved Marco Ottaviani in Microeconomics, and Paolo Volpin promises to be highly entertaining as well as intellectually challenging as well.

Tomorrow morning at 6am I have to get up again, but soon it is weekend! I will have to do the Options & Futures assignment and some reading for my economics class, but there is also a housewarming party and a dinner with friends lined up, so I am slowly making the transition to student life again.

I am alive!

2007-09-22T09:10:00.000+02:00

Believe it or not, I am still alive, though with the nagging feeling at the back of my head that I have neglected my blog recently. Patxi as always was visionary and made a post about how social networking sites would reduce the importance of blogs. In my case I can say that since I am a facebook user I have drastically reduced the time I spend blogging. But last night I was reminded of my blog by bumping into a reader, it was incredible.

During the summer, I was lucky to land on a desk with incredibly friendly and cheerful, open-minded people, so we stayed in touch. Even luckier, there was another intern at my desk, who was the nicest and most entertaining person you could imagine - we spent a lot of time talking about "God and the world" (it's a German expression, I guess) whenever the others were busy and we had little to do. This intern only finished yesterday, so I went back to the City to meet them up for drinks. There was a young guy from India with them who just joined the desk (a few weeks after I left), and he suddenly asked me if I was angelangie. How weird!! I asked him how he knew my blog, especially given that he was neither thinking of an MBA nor anything like that. Now I wonder if it is the same guy who made a comment on my blog a few months saying that he suspected we might be working in the same bank?? Well, to get to the point, it is great to see I still have readers out there, even though I don't blog much these days. It inspires me to keep going, though till November I won't have much time.

Life is wonderful here, I am learning a lot every day and having a good time. I still enjoy my job at the hedge fund, and this is quite unique, because the people who know me, they know that I am usually enthusiastic for a week and then ask myself "what am I doing here?". I have never had a job in my life that I actually found interesting and that I actually thought I could do for a long time. And incredibly, three weeks have passed and I still like it! I am not a hopeless case after all! I think what I like most is that it is very difficult. It is also frustrating because I am not used to feeling stupid, but now I do, which makes me learn a lot and ask a lot of questions. I think I already mentioned that my boss always has time to explain me how the trades work, and he gives me some tasks that he knows are beyond my skills to test me and then explains me how to do it, and that way I keep my brain working and learn a lot. This is quite different from busy MDs at investment banks, who always seem to busy to explain much to you, you just have to go there and figure things out for yourself, and if you're lucky some associate on the desk might take ten minutes to explain you things. It seems that people are more relaxed on the buy-side and they can actually take the time to teach others how to make money, which is great.

Apart from the content, I like some of the other benefits as well. One gets invited to investor lunches, and though I guess they get boring once you have done a lot of them, I still find it quite interesting to see how the management is, how the other investors are, what questions they ask - and the food tends to be excellent! Last week, I went to a lunch of a luxury company, which turned out to spend more time showing us their new collection of jewellery and watches rather than talking about the numbers, which was unusual but certainly entertaining.

So this is what keeps me busy these days, after work I just eat and fall asleep immediately. Sometimes I go out for dinner with friends during the week. Actually one dinner this week was a lot of fun. Believe it or not - following angelangie's path ;-) - this year there are 3 German McKinsey girls in MBA2009!!! It feels like I am multiplying, which is good :-). The four of us went out for dinner and had a lot of fun! They were very interested to hear about those mysterious jobs where you can actually go home at 7pm! Mmh, thinking back now and realizing how tired I am even when I get home at 7 or 8pm, I can't believe that I actually spent 2 years working till midnight if not longer and commuting by plane every week. My poor body!! And I was so young then. I cannot imagine how I survived it. I am so happy and grateful I do not have to do that anymore!

One day at a hedge fund in London

2007-09-03T22:58:00.000+02:00

I told you guys I had some more tricks up my sleeve when I left the investment bank in August, and now I can share it. Actually, I had two offers for summer internships, and I wanted to do both, so I accepted both. The second offer was from a large hedge fund in London in their event driven group (my loyal readers might remember my posts on hedge fund interviews). I started today and cannot believe how much I have learned in a day. Compared to working in a bank it seems much more creative and intellectually challenging, I will really need to work hard and switch my brain on. I am quite intimidated right now by all I have to learn as fast as possible, but I hope in a few weeks I will know much more.

What did I do today? I came in and immediately sat down with the head of the fund who told me what he wants me to work on over the next few weeks. I need to analyse certain aspects of three companies they currently hold live positions in. The tricky part is that being a "market neutral fund", they never hold a naked position, but instead have a position hedged against all kinds of effects they do not want to have exposure to, and therefore might go long on a stock but then short on some currencies, commodities, other stocks in the same industry or sub-industry of some of the business units etc.. So essentially, even when you cover one company, you actually cover 5 companies, some currencies, markets, interest rates etc.. I was instructed to work only on the first company (which given the basket turns out to be four companies and 5 main currencies) over the next days, and then they will add the other two live positions in the middle of the week, as he said I have to learn covering 3-5 live positions at the same time, as they do.

There was not much time today to cover even that position though, because there was a lot going on on the side. Of course I had to fill in lots of forms on compliance, insider trading etc., learn about the policies, the intranet etc.. But the main distraction came from somewhere else. The CEO of a bank was hosting an investor lunch in the City today and a guy who has a position in that bank needed the investment memorandum. He had another meeting though, and they asked me if I could go to the City, attend the lunch and get the booklet. I confirmed that I do not need to know or say anything and agreed to attend, no problem for me getting a 3-course meal with delicious wine and listening to a CEO! Of course, when I arrived there were 15 old men in suits in the room and me in casual clothes, pretty funny. I got all the info and listened attentively, and then went back to Mayfair happily. In the afternoon a CFO of a small company the fund is invested in came to our offices and the head of the fund also asked me to attend, their stock went down 50% over the last weeks and he said it would be interesting for me to see how the meetings with companies whose stocks are down 50% go. So I attended that as well, and then I was talking to the manager afterwards about how they have been affected by the turmoil over the last weeks, and he explained to me why even "market neutral funds" lose money in downturns.

By the time we were finished, it was 7 pm and everybody had left, so I left as well. Tomorrow I really need to advance on my first task though, because on Wednesday they'll throw in additional tasks for me. I'm absolutely thrilled though by how interesting it is and how much I am learning. After a short holiday, angel angie is getting up early again!

Happy ending of my summer internship

2007-08-17T18:00:00.000+02:00

It's time to take a rest. After 10 weeks of getting up at 6am in the morning and spending my days on the trading floor, I am officially on my well-deserved holiday!! I got a fantastic full-time offer, which has surprised me quite a bit in terms of the bonuses offered. Definitely very tempting! I do not want to make the same mistake as with McKinsey and sign something because of the money, but when you are in the situation, it is not that easy, especially when the tuition fees are due in October! But let's see, I will go on holiday, think, relax, meditate, and then take a good decision. I have another trick up my sleeve but I will not share it till September. More on that later :-).

The summer has been fantastic. I have learned about leveraged buyouts, infrastructure, commodities, credit markets, and derivatives. I have made friends with my lovely fellow Summer Associates. I have had amazingly friendly, helpful, cheerful, smart, funny and diverse colleagues from all over the world (yes - even one real English person was among them!!!). I have been invited for drinks and dinners over and over again. I have been able to watch the market action live. Especially this week has been amazing. Imagine sitting next to the FX traders in the bank that is the biggest FX house in the world in London, the global centre of the foreign exchange markets, during the week that the carry trades unwind. To see the action among the traders when the ozzie dollar plunged yesterday has been unprecedented. Some people have lost a lot of money, and others have made a lot of money. I don't know if it is true or not - one trader on my floor is supposed to have made $40 million yesterday. At least the whole desk was clapping and cheering (that was when the yen rose and the high yielding currencies plunged), and that was the number I picked up, but I cannot be sure.

But overall people on the trading floor are worried. During the last weeks, nobody was too worried and everybody seemed to be making money happily. But this week has been different. They have seen their clients lose a lot of money, and this eventually comes back to hit you if you are a financial services firm, no matter how good your proprietary traders are. I know the emerging markets and credit people weren't too happy. I guess only the Distressed desk is open for business now. Commodities also seemed to be going well so far. Nobody knows how it's going to evolve, which is exciting but also worrying.

Tonight I will celebrate with my best friends with a dinner and drinks (even though many of them have another week to go in their internships with other banks), and tomorrow I'm off on holiday for two weeks. I just noticed this has been my 100th post. It's nice I kept the 100th post for special news!

Advice for incoming first years

2007-08-12T10:34:00.000+02:00

Well, the admits are arriving now and there can be no denying it anymore: yesterday, I had breakfast on Baker Street with a friend, when a girl I knew from admits weekend passed, and I think she introduced herself to my friend saying that she was a first year, and that's when we realized: we are second years now. How fast time passes! How can we be second years already? Now there are other people who are first years who don't care about us, because they know we'll be gone soon :-(. And in our class people will be going on exchange, working part-time and finishing early, so it won't be the same.

The good part is that now that I count as a wise old second year, I can pass on advice :-). There's quite a few things I wish I had known, and I wouldn't be able to call myself an angel if I wasn't there to make other people happy in their lives - while suffering the grave consequences of my mistakes ;-) - just kidding, I'm pretty happy right now, and the only thing that worries me is that somehow I know that one cannot be that happy forever, right now is probably the luckiest period in my life, so I better enjoy it. Okay, back to my advice:

Flathunting/flatmates: First of all, sorry to say that rental prices have skyrocketed this year (and you thought they couldn't go any higher...), so expect to pay a bit more than the '08s who may have quoted you what they pay. Sharing with 2 others is the best if you want to be economical (around 200 GBP per week), while living on your on will cost you around 300 GBP pw if you want to stay close to school, which is what you should in the first year. Even more important than money is happiness (can you feel the wisdom flowing through my words???), and for that I really urge you to choose your flatmates wisely. At the flathunter's pub crawl, you might sometimes think you just want to get it over with, and just agree to live with the first person who asks you, but I can tell you from experience this can turn out to be a nightmare. Make sure your ideas of how to live more or less match, and stay away from people who seem to try and shift all the responsibility of payments, contractual obligations etc. on you. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a good personality match, otherwise it can turn out to be very nasty, and unfortunately in my case I had to live with one of the nastiest guys in the MBA for a year. Luckily that's over now. But don't expect all people to be decent and honest, just because they are in your MBA programme. Most people are very nice but there are a few outliers, and you don't want to end up sharing the bathroom with them by mistake.

Study Group: don't worry about this, and don't freak out. At Orientation, they will make it sound as if you will see your study group more than you will see you boyfriend or best friends, so you will freak out and look at these new people and think "but I don't want to spend more time with them than with my boyfriend!", and everybody will be tense and unhappy and have very high expectations which are bound to be disappointed. Luckily, it will turn out to be nothing like that after the first one or two months, it's not a big deal, and it has its advantages, in my case all people in my study group happened to be some who I might not have become friends with otherwise, but because we spent time working together on projects, having lunches and dinner together etc., actually these are people I know very well now, people I can trust, and people I am always happy to bump into now that our study group ceases to exist (just last night it happened I was stranded in a club in Shoreditch and bumped into my Egyptian study group mate who was also stranded there, since both our partners have gone on holiday already leaving us to finish the investment banking internships alone, which obviously makes a lot of sense). So, see it as a chance to get to know some people you might otherwise not have known, and try to stay relaxed about the whole thing, people freak out and are very tense at the beginning because of high expectations, and this can create a lot of conflict.

Parties: yes, there will be many parties. All I can advise is to go everywhere almost every day in the first term, particularly if you're single (if you have a partner, just take them along every time, or sometimes spend a quiet evening with them instead, which is also very relaxing), because the first term really is when all the things are going on. I was quite active in September, but then a bit more relaxed thinking "well, this will go on for two years, so I don't have to go to each and every event, I can go next term", but actually you will notice that suddenly starting in January recruiting will start, and cliques will form, and there will be less and less big parties involving the whole class. So my advice is for you to party as much as possible in the first term and meet all your classmates, because later people become absorbed in their own world and it is harder to get through to them.

Jobsearch: I was one to spend months trying to decide what to do - though in the end I decided on Sales & Trading, which had been my plan when I came to London Business School and long before. But all I can say is try to know as fast as possible and get ready. I think I've said this before: most of the people who knew what they wanted got great jobs, but the people who were clueless and didn't know what to do with themselves even in February and randomly applied to McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, Google and everyone else in the universe, usually didn't make it and were less lucky (though they found good things later). But try to be focused early, talk to all the 2nd years who will be a great help, and also, don't confine yourself only to companies that come on campus. Some of my classmates are interning now with really good private equity firms, such as Terra Firma and Actis Capital, and believe me it is not because they came on campus! Some people say "but they don't come on campus" as if that meant you are not allowed to apply, while actually you are. UBS Asset Management also didn't recruit on campus but somehow two of my classmates are interning there. Quite a few of my classmates are working at some hedge funds here in London, and none of them were on campus. So check out alumni and other contacts, go to all the speaker events and conferences, and you will have a much broader view of what you can do.

So much for my advice, I hope it helps! Enjoy the first weeks of your programme!!

Finally a sunny weekend in London

2007-08-05T19:36:00.000+02:00

Hi strangers! Not much time to write recently. I am too busy enjoying myself to switch on the computer these days. I had another great weekend in London, such weekends that I don't think you can get in Fountainebleu or wherever others choose to go :-).

On Friday, all the Summer Associates from my bank spent the day volunteering at a primary school in South London, and it was a great way to spend the day outside in the sun catching up with my new friends. The other Summer Associates are a very sweet bunch and I have found some very special friends this summer. At night, I went to a Thai restaurant with Genie and two other Indian friends and we talked so much in the end it was 10pm when we finished (we got there at 7) - so I went straight home and off to bed (with a bit Harry Potter reading squeezed in between), since I had spent most of the day shovelling sand.

On Saturday, I went to the gym and then a bit shopping. Then I chilled for most of the day. But the evening was the best, I went with a Basque and a Mexican, two Brazilian friends and another German/Spanish couple to the Japanese restaurant called Abeno near Tottenham Court Road, it was delicious. I had never had Japanese food before (beside sushi). The I went with my Basque and Mexican friend to a salsa club in SOHO called Floridita, it is pretty cool. The music is nice to dance but not too loud, so one could actually talk to people. I met some very nice new people - mostly bankers of course since this is London, but very friendly. We stayed there till 3:30am, which I haven't done in a while, but time really passed very quickly.

This morning I still got up at 10 because the weather was so beautiful, and I went roller blading in Hyde Park. Blading is such a great way to appreciate the beauty of London. Just racing by the lakes and the trees and the meadows is amazing. Afterwards I cooked myself a nice vegetable thai curry and read some more Harry Potter, but again fell asleep and had a well-deserved siesta. Now I'm off to Notting Hill to have dinner with my sister and some of her friends in a very nice pub called THE COW, they have very good fish there and the atmosphere is great.

The week ahead is quite important in the summer programme, our final evaluations will be submitted tomorrow and on Thursday I have to hold a presentation to three Managing Directors, based on which I will get an offer the following week or not. I don't mind holding presentations in front of anyone though, that's where my McKinsey experience comes in handy, I don't really get nervous and enjoy talking :-). Hopefully good news will come out of this week, though I won't know till afterwards.

2nd part of the summer: commodities

2007-07-24T22:47:00.000+02:00

Time is flying by like crazy. less than 4 weeks to go till the end of the summer internship! I have just started with the commodities group, who create investment and hedging products around all kinds of commodities. The people are great and the work is very interesting. I am trying to learn the pricing tools as fast as possible so I can understand more of what they do, but the products are very complex so progress is slow. Also, I have been given a project understanding the fundamentals of lots of regional crude oil grades, for which I am interviewing crude oil traders in Singapore and New York, I am learning a lot!! Never knew that WTI and Brent production are a joke compared to crude grades like Nigerian Bonny Light or Light Louisiana Sweet :-). I love it. The hours are even better than on my last desk, something like 8am to 7pm. Unfortunately that doesn't mean I get much sleep, because we have events every day. Trainings, dinners, lunches, speeches... I don't get to write on my blog much or keep in touch with anyone.

Then on the weekends I try to catch up with everyone and again I don't sleep :-).

back to reality

2007-07-19T22:22:00.000+02:00

5 weeks of my summer internship are over, 4 weeks to go! I have learned a lot and met a lot of nice people. In terms of work, the first weeks have been quite interesting. This last week was a bit boring on the desk though because we had so many events outside of the desk that I couldn't really get into any task recently. This week we had a dinner with all the female MDs, which was quite impressive, and tomorrow we're going sailing all day. Not too bad, not too bad. On Saturday our school is hosting a barbecue for all finance Summer Associates in London from all business schools, that should be a lot of fun!

I can't wait for my next rotation in commodities, I have been fascinated by the oil markets since I did a master's in International Security Studies covering Central Asian, Western African and Middle Eastern security politics and economic development, and although I know the reality of investment banking is somehow on a different level than the high level of politics - actually, it is easy to get lost in the details of taxes, accounting, regulations and excel - at least I will have some connection to things I am interested in :-).

I also can't wait for my well-deserved holiday though, it has not been easy going from exams straight to work, and I really need a complete change, to get out of London and the MBA and finance world. This will definitely happen, because I am going to Uzbekistan the day after my internship ends. Believe me, the world of finance, private equity and money is very far away there, it's a great place to switch off and remember what life is all about. Family, dancing, food, children, history, nature, weddings.

Life on the buy-side

2007-07-11T20:26:00.000+02:00

These days have been great for appreciating the beauty of working on the buy-side. Believe it or not, only a few days into my internship I got to write a due diligence plan for McKinsey, as they are doing the commercial due diligence on one of the deals we're working on, and I was happy I was the one specifying what they have to do, not the one who has to deliver all that in 4 weeks! Believe it or not, as it turned out I knew the McKinsey partner and Associate Principal of the project, and it is quite ironic they are working for my desk now! They'll be pretty well paid as well though :-).

Other than that, I've also been on a trip to Germany where we met with the management of one potential target one day, and today I came along to another meeting with tax advisors who were pitching a deal to us. The beauty is you don't need to be as well prepared or well-dressed, and they treat you very nicely. As a consultant, you have to be perfect and alert, and they can still be nasty to you if they want to. Today I wasn't even wearing a suit (I decided to go for smart casual today since many people on the trading floor, especially women, seem to do that), and the director asked me to come along to that meeting with PwC, and I said "is it ok? i'm not even wearing a suit today" and he said it wouldn't matter, it would be interesting for me, and I just came along, knew nothing, wasn't dressed to the occasion, but everything went perfectly well. It's much more relaxed.

Right now, I'm helping out on one ongoing deal and also on 3 or 4 opportunities, doing valuations, background checks etc., I'm learning a lot. The legal, fiscal and financial details are very hard to understand though. I'm struggling to understand 100 page documents flodded with words like Opco, Bidco, Rosco, bridge financing, withholding tax, quantum, SPV, ringfencing... you name it. At least I have won a LOT of respect for accountants and lawyers over the last weeks, I always thought those things were pretty straightforward, but it turns out they are not at all.

So much from me, now I will continue working. I just thought I'd take a break to post, because recently I have posted only pictures rather than stories.

Pictures from a Saturday morning in Borough Market, London

2007-07-08T11:33:00.001+02:00

Enjoying Tate Modern and Natural History Museum in London

2007-07-01T16:42:00.000+02:00

Though the sun has finally appeared this afternoon, the weather this weekend has been dreadful, raining heavily non-stop. I seized the opportunity to visit some of London's great and free museums and could not have had a better weekend. Today I went to the exhibition Global Cities in the Tate Modern Gallery. The cities featured were the biggest of them all, Tokyo, and furthermore London, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Mexico City, Mumbai, Sao Paolo (see photo by Andreas Gursky on the left), Istanbul, Cairo, and Johannesburg. The exhibition mixed pictures, videos, maps, satellite images, interviews and architectural models to illustrate themes, such as density, diversity, or speed. I'm a big fan of photography, but also enjoyed some of the videos a lot. If you go to the website of the exhibition, all the videos and photos of the exhibition are actually up there to be accessed by anyone, it is definitely worth it.

This is another collection of photos I liked. It shows the gates of gated communities and rich people's homes in Johannesburg who live behind fences hiding from the poor. These gated communities are only at their infant stage in London, and I don't think they exist anywhere in such a form in Western Europe, but given the crumbling of the social security systems in Continental Europe, I would not be surprised if we have gates like these in Berlin or Hamburg in 20 years time.

Yesterday, I went to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, another free museum. It is amazing that all these world class museums in London are for free, but I'm sure they make a lot of money from their museum shops and cafes and restaurants (certainly from me anyway - I couldn't resist buying this Ally Capellino bag designed for the Tate Modern shop!). I loved the section on Primates, which contains many pictures and videos of monkeys around the world. Some of them are so cute. I hope I can go to East Africa one day to see them live.

The rest of the weekend I either slept, went for dinner with friends at Busaba Eathai in Mayfair, which is delicious, cheap and has a nice atmosphere. Now I just need to meet a friend in the pub and then I can call the weekend history :-).

The internship is still fine, I'm learning how to buy infrastructure assets and companies with 80% leverage and how to find potential deals, which is quite useful. Next week I even have to travel to Germany for two days to meet with the management of a potential target. Lifestyle continues to be very good, and I don't expect it to change over the next weeks. Overall, a very nice summer so far, I just hope the weather gets better so I can go to the coast next weekend.

MBA in London and career change to investment: best decision ever

2007-06-23T12:56:00.000+02:00

As you can see from the title of this post, my first week of the summer programme in Global Markets has been fantastic. I cannot believe how lucky I am. It is such a nice feeling to do a job that you enjoy with people you like. Where should I start?

Preparing for the trading floor
The first three days, we had training in markets, mainly about trading, trading strategies, derivatives, equities and so on. Our instructor was a futures and FX trader for 11 years in the old days, so he had a lot of anecdotes to tell and emphasized the practical side of finance, which was quite helpful after one year of theory. I only got to know a few other Summer Associates because the US school Associates started a week earlier, but I will meet everyone next Monday when we have another training.

Finance meets reality
On Thursday, I started my first rotation on the principal investment desk. They take the bank's money and do leveraged buyouts of "illiquid assets", such as ports, pipelines, airports and so on, though now they are diversifying into the private equity space and starting to buy up running businesses as well. I'm helping out on three different deals to differing degrees, partly to learn, partly employing my language skills (some of the deals are in Germany), partly just doing excel modelling and things like that. It is very diverse in terms of the things they do. So in terms of the content, I couldn't be happier. I also enjoyed seeing the practical side of valuation, it is very different from what we learn at school! We learn that you project the cash flows to value a business. Here, what they seem to do is to use a simple EBITDA multiple based on comparable deals to determine the bid price, and then they go into complicated cash flow modelling and revenue forecasting to see how much debt they can use for the buyout. So rather than the output, the value - i.e. the bid price - is the key input, and all else follows. Of course, coming straight from school I did not approve of such short cuts, and I took one of the LBO models and decided to do a nice DCF model with it to get the value. And funnily enough, the value I got with my discounted cash flows was exactly the same they had gotten from the multiple, to the first digit behind the comma (at least if you call the five in 2.5 billion the first digit behind the comma ;-) ).

Lifestyle: pub at 6pm anyone?
But what I like just as much is the people on my team and the atmosphere of the trading floor, not to mention the lifestyle. The people on my team are extremely friendly and forthcoming and treat me very well, they joke a lot and are having a good time. The directors are also very approachable and friendly and sit with us and invite us for lunch and stuff like that. One day people were busy and only got sandwiches, but we have a really cool shop in the middle of the trading floor which sells fresh fruits, organic smoothies, sushi, fresh loose leaf peppermint tea and things like that. So that day I bought a sandwich of brown bread with ruccola, tomato, horseradish and roast beef, a lentil salad and a coconut banana smoothie. I think the old days when traders ordered pizza or burgers are over, luckily :-). The first day on the desk, I was enjoying it a lot and wanted to learn more, so I stayed quite long, I was there till 9:30 with two other associates but we were literally the last people left on the trading floor.

Yesterday, I was going to work till around 7 because my husband works till that time as well and we wanted to go for dinner, but then at 6 all the senior people and all the traders had already left, and one guy from my team just came around asking everyone "pub? pub?", so we went for a drink nearby at 6, wished each other a good weekend and each went our ways. We start at 9am and work till maximum 9 or 10 and often even shorter. This certainly beats working till midnight and sleeping in a hotel!

And the best is having the weekends completely off, without worrying about anything or doing assignments. I went shopping this morning, tonight I'll go to the cinema and dinner with friends, tomorrow probably hang out with my sister whom I haven't seen in a long time or go rollerblading in Hyde Park, and on Monday I have a training from 10-5 pm and will finally meet the rest of the other interns. I could not be happier. I wonder how my friends interning in M&A and consulting are doing?

The first year ends as it should - with the Italian Festa d'Estate

2007-06-17T15:49:00.000+02:00

If there is one common theme that makes London and London Business School special, it is the diversity and the opportunity to explore new things every weekend. One particularly popular activity for LBS students is to organize all kinds of national parties - readers of this blog will have heard about Diwali, Mexican Independence Day, the Salsa Party, Tatoo... Lots of great parties that have made this year a very special one.

Yesterday, we had our final exams - Cost Accounting and Finance 2 - and after that, it was time for a final party of the first year. And since it was the final one, it had to be a particularly festive one. What better way than to celebrate an Italian Festa d'Estate in Soho, in a club called Cafe de Paris.

I was happy to bump into some friends that I hadn't seen for a while and probably won't see for an even longer while - this is me with a Russian friend whose Italian husband just finished the Executive MBA - they are moving to Abu Dhabi next month. And me? I'm just a German girl who has been dreaming of living in London since she was 13, and now I'm here and am about to start my first job tomorrow morning.

Electives for next year - Finance, Finance and more Finance

2007-06-12T18:28:00.000+02:00

It's time to choose electives for next year, there are many great ones so the choice is not easy. In the end, it turns out my elective portfolio will be very finance focused, which I didn't necessarily plan, but most of the top teachers here happen to be the finance or economics guys, and I cannot risk taking a class in which I don't learn anything. Based on my background in psychology, there is not much I can learn from Organisational Behaviour or Marketing classes, or even Decision Sciences, so I feel like Finance & Economics is the way to go. These are my preferences as I have submitted them:

Autumn 2007:
- Global Capital Markets and Currencies (Economics)
- Options & Futures (Finance)
- Mergers, LBOs and other Corporate Reorganisations (Finance)
- Managing Corporate Turnarounds (Strategy)

Spring 2008 - University of Chicago GSB
- Entrepreneurial Finance and Private Equity (Entrepreneurship)
- Cases in Financial Management (Finance)
- Cases in Financial Risk Management (Finance)
- Time Series Analysis for Forecasting and Modelling (Statistics)

Summer 2008:
- Credit Risk (Finance)
- Financial Engineering & Risk Management*
- Equity Investment*

I will probably replace the latter two with the Creativity and Personal Mastery (CPM) course, but I'm unsure about it. I'm not sure if I should work on my personality or on my technical skills. If I look at the times I am unhappy (which are the times one might choose to take philosophical courses), it is usually because sometimes I feel like I haven't lived up to my aspirations or worse, that I will not live up to my aspirations. But somehow I feel that if I spend my time working on achieving my aspirations, rather than questioning them or agonizing about them, I will be happier in the end. It is a very weird decision to make, and I wish I could postpone it till next year, which I can't. I should probably go for CPM, because the other two courses won't add that much to what I will learn in other electives, particularly after doing some hardcore finance at Chicago GSB. Let's see.

Yesterday I handed back my laptop and blackberry to McKinsey so I am officially part of the alumni now. It is weird not to have a blackberry after 3 years!!! I did not write a good bye email in the end. I guess I would have done it if I had resigned in a normal fashion, but because I mainly resigned because they wouldn't let me do anything else but work for them over the summer of the MBA, and because that they said if I want to come back after the summer to just call them, I would have found it weird to send an official "I'm leaving"-Email. So I left in silence, though I called some people who were closest. Luckily, the person I got on best and worked with the most during my time with McKinsey was elected partner last week, so I still heard about it before leaving. I really wanted him to become partner of the Firm, so I was happy it happened before I left.

Funnily enough, whenever I thought of writing a good bye email, or whenever I thought of how I feel while working there, all I could think of was this Charles Dickens quote from "A Tale of Two Cities". It would have been wholly inappropriate to write such negative thoughts in my farewell, but in actual fact it sums up quite well the contradictory feelings I had. So if I had written an honest goodbye, it would have been this:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times;
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness;
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity;
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness;
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair;
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us;
we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way."

admits weekend, assignments, battle of the quants...

2007-06-04T23:40:00.000+02:00

Well, these days I can't complain that I don't know what to do with my time! 2 weeks to go till the summer internship and there is a LOT left to do: an economics group paper, two individual economics assignments, three final exams, one finance assignment due tomorrow morning, also another accounting assignment due next Monday, and in between I'm going to Germany for 5 days, and my bank for the summer has sent me some online trainings on FX, derivatives etc. to do over the next days.

There is a lot more going on. Tomorrow, the investment management club has invited the CEO of Frontier Capital to speak on Asset Allocation, and this is followed by a end of year party of the Women's Football Club. On Wednesday, my study group is going out for dinner with partners to celebrate the end of the year and also because we still need to drink that Veuve Cliquot we won in the economics debate a few weeks back! On Thursday morning, I might go into the City to meet my former EM (project manager) who has also since left McKinsey but is coming to London for a business meeting. Then I need to head to the airport. I got a very cheap flight to my home town, 50 GBP return!! The bad thing about such a price is that it influences my decision-making in other areas. We have a London Business Summer Ball in July, and one ticket costs 80 GBP!!!! I simply refuse to buy a ticket for one evening with a bit of food and drink that costs more than a return ticket to Berlin or Rome! In the end, we are all students, unfortunately some people forget that not all of their classmates are swimming in dollars (and much less in pounds ;-) ).

But of course, you all want to know about admits weekend. Well, probably the admits should be a better source of information, too bad Rusgirl wasn't there to tell the story! The only picture I have from the weekend is from the Women in Business brunch, and there is not a single admit on the picture :-). It's me with two of the more active Women in Business club leaders :-). Maybe the picture sums up my mood: I had a bit of a deja vu, it was very similar to last year's admits weekend, but I was in a different role this time, and that was very weird for me. I somehow thought "what are you guys doing here? My first year isn't over yet! It's too early! I'm not a 2nd year student yet!". I wouldn't say I was envious though, because though it's very exciting, I also like to have close friends already, rather than hectically roaming around looking for like-minded people.

From what I heard from talking to admits, they really liked it and I think all of them were sure they were going to come to London. There were lots of waitlisted people as well and I wish them luck! I guess it helps to come to admits weekend, but then not many waitlisted people make it into the class, so it's not an easy situation. But there were also many happy people who are just about to leave their jobs and move to London, and that is indeed an exciting situation to be in!

Another great event I attended today was the briefing for the Creativity and Personal Mastery Class with Srikumar Rao, it was great, and I'm now more sure than ever that I want to take this class. He talked about the course, then some of his current students talked, and afterwards we went to the Windsor pub (which the admits will know very well by now!) and talked some more, it was fantastic. I hope to take it next term. I'm not too worried about the pre-reading one has to do, because I was so enthusiastic when I heard about the course last year that I already read the course outline, Rao's book "Are you Ready to Succeed?" and another brilliant book on the syllabus, "FLOW", which is by the way one of the best and most helpful non-fiction books I have ever read, so at least I don't start from zero :-).

And it doesn't stop there, another great thing happened today! The investment management club was approached by the Battle of the Quants Conference, asking for 5 students to help them out with registration and in return they could stay the whole day at this conference which usually costs over $1,000 to attend. The email came early this morning and luckily I checked my email shortly before class, so I was one of the first to reply and will get to attend the conference next week! The keynote speaker is Nassim Taleb, who I hear is very entertaining and knowledgeable. The main topic is the whole "human vs. machine" debate in trading - can quant models replace or outperform people? Looking at Renaissance Capital's and DE Shaw's returns, it definitely looks like it, though obviously you will always need people to program the systems. Next week I will write about all my impressions from the conference for sure. I just need to find the time!

Oh come all ye admits...

2007-06-01T15:30:00.000+02:00

Welcome to London, class of 2009! This is the admits weekend, and I know my friends the student ambassadors are working hard to make this a memorable weekend for you, making sure you choose the right school for your MBA!

I will be there for the networking session at the pub, as well as the barbecue and the party on Saturday night, and I will also be present at the Women in Business brunch on Sunday morning! So it should not be too hard to find me!

Enjoy the weekend!
angie.

Bringing home the trophy: pictures and stories from MBAT

2007-05-21T22:53:00.000+02:00

As I predicted, this year we really blasted the other schools away. This is the list of competitions that we won this year:
- Men's Rugby
- Women's Rugby
- Swimming
- Cricket
- Salsa
- Basketball
- Volleyball
- Climbing
- 7k Cross Country
- Tug of War

We also won 2nd places in Women's Football, Tennis, Mountain biking and Taek Won Do, as far as I can remember.

Not bad, eh? Following are some pictures and some stories from MBAT:
On the train from London to Paris on Thursday, we still looked fresh. As you see, we were in good spirits and ready to get the trophy!

Our school's security guard, Youssef, came along as a mascot and also as a kick-ass rugby player of the glorious men's rugby team. You might think other train passengers were scared by the horde of 200 cheerful and noisy London Business School passengers, but we treated everyone according to the Geneva Convention. Whenever a regular passenger wanted to trespass our coach, we would shout "civilians! civilians!" and everybody would go quiet, and someone from the rugby team would give the civilians an escort through our coach. It was hilarious.

Our key competitive advantage was the red London bus, which had been driven all the way from London to Paris to supply us with fruits and drinks throughout the weekend. It was parked on the side of the sports field, and gave students of other schools cause for envy, since they had no supplies throughout the games. We were compassionate, however, and offered everyone as much beer and fruits as they wanted. All they needed to agree to in return was to get a London Business School tatoo on their body and pledge to the superiority of London Business School :-). Call it winning the hearts and minds, and yes it worked!

Thanks to our great team and the best and loudest fans ever, we won the second place (out of 12 teams) in Women's Football. The final against IESE was tough, because we had to play back to back straight after an exhausting and fierce semifinal against HEC, with only 5min of rest in between, whereas the IESE team had had several hours of rest. We lost 0:2 in the pouring rain against a very strong and fit IESE team, but luckily thanks the great crowd of about 80 London Business School supporters on the pitch, we had a lot of fun and celebrated our 2nd place.

These were some of the fans celebrating next to the football pitch during the final. With fans like these, how can you let your head down during defeat? They really made sure we kept our spirits up. When rain started pouring down, the crowd shouted "London weather! London weather for you!", so we had to laugh on the pitch while getting soaked and beaten. Thanks to everyone who cheered for us, it helped a lot!

Another highlight was the tug of war competition. We put the strongest and biggest rugby players on the team, and they won with great ease. They brought each opposing team onto the ground within seconds.

Well, basically that was MBAT 2007. I will add more pics as I get them, since I didn't actually take many pics myself and need to wait for others to share them. We had a lot of fun. Now I'm absolutely exhausted. My big toe was injured in the second football match and I played three more matches ignoring the pain, until by Sunday I could hardly stand. I also cheered lots of teams on Sunday in the cold rain and have fever and a cold now. But it was worth it! I didn't go to class today and stayed in bed all day, already feeling better.

We'll bring the MBAT trophy home to London again

2007-05-19T22:24:00.000+02:00

Last year, KV was the first to post that London Business School had won the MBAT trophy. This year, I will be even faster and I'm posting this before the tournament is even over.

I'm confident we're bringing home the trophy because this is what we have won so far:
1. 7k cross country run
2. Cricket
3. Salsa
4. Swimming
5. Women's Rugby
6. Tug of War :-)
7. Squash

We're also in the finals for tennis, basket ball and volleyball, and men's rugby tomorrow. Then we won several glorious 2nd places which are tough psychologically but still bring in points, such as in Chess, table tennis, women's football (my team -we gave our best but were beaten in the end by the IESE), mountain biking ...

So I will confirm tomorrow, but believe me, London Business School students fought hard and absolutely ROCKED this weekend!! Our favourite word these days was "amazing". All the teams are amazing and giving their best. Another word was "civilians", but I will explain this later. We had fun!

Admits of 2009, start training hard, because we want to win again next year!

Just another weekend in London

2007-05-14T00:09:00.000+02:00

Recently, I have often posted on specific topics (career, applications etc.), that I feel admits or applicants may not actually get a good feel for what life is like here. I do not intend to use this blog as a diary, as this would become quite repetitive, but it might be helpful to give an update on what life is like here in London once in a while. What have I been up to this weekend?

SATURDAY
Saturday started off with our Cost Accounting midterm exam. They like to schedule our exams for Saturdays, apparently because there are not enough lecture theatres available during the week to accommodate all of us at once. The exam was hard and there was a lot of time pressure. I was happy though, because I find when exams are easy the results are much more unfair, because then professors subtract points for every little deviation from the ideal solution. On the other hand, in hard exams the normal distribution kicks in automatically and the professors do not need to force it onto the results. So I think it went well. Usually, I would head over to the Windsor, our closest pub, straight after the exam, but this time I had different plans.

MBAT is next week, and I realized that I need to buy new sports shoes! Some time last week, I started thinking about how old my Adidas running shoes actually were, and it hit me that I had bought them some time in 2001! It was shocking. Then I took a closer look at the shoes and was embarrassed I have been wearing them all the time, they were dirty and falling apart. Anyway, so I went with two classmates to a huge sports department store in the South of London, and bought new running shoes as well as football shoes, since I'm playing women's football at MBAT. I also helped my friend pick roller blades so we can go roller blading in Hyde Park together as soon as the weather gets better again. Then the other two checked out climbing equipment, since they are planning to climb Mont Blanc in June. We spent 2 or 3 hours there and only came back around 4pm.

Then, I went for a birthday party of a Croatian classmate. He lives with another Indian and one Turkish classmates of mine, and I hadn't spoken to them properly in months, since times have been hectic and we are in different streams, so I decided to go there and make sure I get to talk to catch up with some people, finally! They had nice Sangria and very good music - I even heard Rachid Taha at some point :-).

In the evening, most people headed over to school for the "SANZA (South Africa New Zealand Australia) - Party" hosted in the school, but I decided not to go. Instead, some of us went out for pizza close to Baker Street. After that , my day was still not over, instead I watched "the Goodfellas" on DVD with my husband. The film is okay, but I don't know why people (or should I say guys? ;-) ) rave about it. The guy seemed utterly stupid to me from the start and I was not surprised by how he ended. I think it would help some people to ask "why?" once in a while instead of being at awe about people who seem to have money that came from nowhere. Anyway, then I fell asleep :-).

SUNDAY
I had to get up early today because my parents paid me a short visit. They came back from holiday in the US via London Heathrow and had about 6 hours between their flights, so they came into Paddington with the Heathrow Express and we met up. We walked towards Westbourne Grove in Notting Hill/Bayswater in the cold rain - welcome to London! We went to a nice Lebanese cafe - I think it is called Al fresco - and had hot tea to warm up and lovely hot mashed aubergine with chick peas and pita bread. Then we went for coffee and I brought them back to Paddington station. It was cold and rainy the whole time, but that was okay because I knew I had a lot of work to do for school. I'll be away for MBAT next week so I need to get everything done before we go to Paris.

First I had to do the Cost Accounting assignment on customer profitability due tomorrow morning. Despite the exam, we still have an assigment due Monday morning 9am. Luckily it was one of the easier ones, so it didn't take me too long. The previous ones have been a nightmare requiring a couple of hours of effort on a Sunday night, but this time luckily it was short. But that was offset by the nightmare that is our current Macroeconomics assignment. Because I missed one class and didn't do my reading at the beginning of the term, I missed all of the theory and formulas on capital accumulation, growth accounting, labour productivity and so on. Of course, the assignment covers exactly the topics I missed and consists of 8 questions requiring calculations, theory, application, everything. So I had to read a few chapters in our Macroeconomics book and did all the calculations, since this was the most straightforward part. I haven't answered the qualitative questions yet though, these will require some more thinking on my part.

Then I was hungry and went to Brick Lane in the East End with my husband. There was some Bangladeshi celebration going on and the streets were full of people and food stalls. We still decided to eat at our favourite place though - the Sweet and Spicy. We always order the same - Pilaw Rice, Karahi Gosht, Tarka Dal, Peshawari Nan (try this coconut bread if you haven't!!). Then we were stuffed and decided to walk to Moorgate instead of taking the tube at Aldgate East, thereby enjoying the stroll through the City.

Once home, I decided to do some more work, this time preparation for my internship though. I started reading "Options, Futures and other Derivatives" by John Hull. It is very well written and detailed, and I have high expectations to finally understand more than I currently understand in our Finance 2 class. I really need to prepare a little, because I believe I am one of the few people going into trading/structuring without any finance background and without any kind of quantitative background, so I have realized in recent weeks that it would help to get up to speed before I start.
(btw I have updated the post on impressions from the ibanking/finance job market, since the finance club has sent out and overview of who's going where. Not everyone filled it in, so again these are minimum estimates, but we have a great group of people going to the top ibanks and even quite a few people who landed jobs on the buy side, so things look great).

As you see now, after a few pages of the book I decided to call it a day though and thought I should write something here, because I probably won't till after the MBAT. I must say, living in London is very nice, and despite having to do some work for school on the weekends, it turns out there is still a lot of opportunity to explore London and socialize in between.

I resigned from my job today

2007-05-11T15:58:00.000+02:00

Obviously, you and I knew what was coming, but now it is official and my company knows, too. I sent in my letter of resignation today. It's about time, because I'm starting my summer job with another company in London in 5 weeks already. Now I'm getting lots of administrative emails (I have to hand back my Blackberry, Laptop, mobile...) and also requests for meetings from some partners. I will go to Germany for a a few days at the beginning of June to sort everything out.

I am relieved now, because I can speak openly to everyone and start saying goodbye to people. Now that I'm thinking about whom I need to call, I realize just how many friends I made over the two years of the analyst program. I think I will dedicate a whole day just calling everyone, catching up and saying good bye. I have also received the invitation to join the alumni network already. The alumni network is big and powerful, the best ever, but it is weird to be "on the other side" now.

Just thought I'd share this with you.

The fatal combination of happiness and heavy workload

2007-05-08T22:35:00.000+02:00

Patxi and the Divine Miss have complained about it - and now it has hit me, too. I have lost my inspiration. I don't feel like writing much anymore. Yes, the sun is shining for most parts, and MBAT is coming up - I need to practice tennis and football, plus I recently joined the Softball team as well. Also, workload right now is a bit crazy. This has been the busiest term so far, against all expectations.

But I think there is more to it. Lucy Kellaway pointed to it in a recent FT column. The name of the column was "Worry, don't be Happy". Her point was that unhappy workers are more productive. I think she is wrong for most professions, but concerning journalists and writers I think it is very true that the happier you are, the less time you want to spend writing.

The peak of my creative powers was probably the first 6 months of this blog, when I was working 16h days and feeling exploited. Then, I started an exciting new life in London while still agonizing about my future path. Right now, it is probably one of the first times in my adult life that everything seems to be going great. I am living where I've always wanted to live with the person I've wanted to live with, doing what I want, looking forward to a summer job that was my first choice, followed by an exchange term at the school I wanted to go to. Things are going great and life is beautiful.

The only topic I am pondering a lot these days, and which kind of keeps me inspired, but about which I haven't reached a conclusion yet, is how this all happened. Why is it that I was in the wrong place doing a job I didn't like before, and now everything is great? Is it just luck? My interpretation is a mixture of becoming "older and wiser" :-), and what Patxi has described in his beautiful post about persistence. I think lots of people when they are young and insecure, they give up very easily and are discouraged very fast. Any adult tells you scary stories, any peer tries to put you down, and you take their word at face value and lower your expectations. After some year, you realize you just have to try harder and harder and things work out.

It may be my lack of inspiration that I need to shamelessly copy paste Patxi's quote here :-), but I just loved this sentence:

And here comes the moral of the story: even though the final score will forever read:
Denials: 7
Acceptances: 1
I still win!
To all of you who keep trying, congratulations!

A lot of unhappiness in life comes from low aspirations and not trying to aim for something better. A lot of my previous unhappiness at university and my first job came from aiming low. I was too afraid of rejection to apply to top universities abroad, and then I was constantly unhappy about being at mediocre universities, and afterwards I really didn't try hard to get a job in something I liked and just took the first offer I had, which I knew from a previous internship I wouldn't like. And then I spent two years feeling sorry for myself. Not exactly a recipe for success! This really the first time in my adult life that I am doing what I wanted to do. On the one hand it is a bit sad that it took me so long to figure it out, but then lots of people never do, so I am grateful to be where I am now. Let's hope and pray that things stay this way, even if it means less inspiration for my blog :-).

Thank you for the ipod!

2007-04-24T23:17:00.000+02:00

Thank you so much to clearadmit, all my readers and fellow nominees and winners for contributing to my blog and keeping me going! To be honest, blogging would have been no fun with few readers and what I enjoy most about my blog is the comments and e-mails I receive from fellow students and applicants. It has been a pleasure for me to write this blog and I am happy that this pleasant hobby of mine has also helped fellow students and applicants in the process.

I am thrilled to receive a 30GB video ipod as a reward! My strategy of being a late adopter has paid off! I never actually bought an ipod since I was still waiting for prices to come down, and I had decided to purchase one next year during my exchange in Chicago. Now that won't be necessary anymore and I look forward to loading my hundreds and hundreds of CDs that I own onto my new ipod. Can't wait for it to arrive :-).

Congratulations also to winning applicant bloggers Rungee, Iday, Forrest Gump, and Rusgirl! Also, congratulations to the London Business School student bloggers The Divine Miss and Karlitos, as well as Benny from Tuck!! There is something to this room, I haven't told you guys but I'm actually living now in the same room that The Divine Miss lived in last year, so it seems to be the room, the view over London roofs must be inspiring. Let's see if Rusgirl can take over this room next year and uphold the tradition :-).

Thanks again and keep commenting and contributing :-).

Summer term courses

2007-04-23T00:05:00.000+02:00

Summer term is busier than expected but I love all the courses so far, which is great. Going surfing over spring break might have energized me, but I also think the content and professors this term are better than last term, so I'm thrilled. Courses so far:

Marketing Strategy: this is a simulation game, Markstrat, that we are playing over several weeks. My study group is Firm E and we need to make decisions on product launches, R&D, advertising campaigns etc. over 5 periods or so. I like dynamic simulation games and am putting in more time than I should.

Management Accounting: this is a subject I thought would be quite boring, but it turns out it may be one of the more useful subjects they teach at business school. It goes under the header of cost accounting, which doesn't sounds fascinating at first, but it turns out it is essential if you ever have your own business - how do you allocate costs to your products? I do not only think that it will be useful to me at some point in the future when I have my own business - I also wish I had learnt about this before working as a consultant, I remember several instances where this could have been useful.

Managing Organisational Behaviour Company Audit: I had written earlier I didn't enjoy the class itself last term, though for the final exam I finally did the reading and loved the book, Reframing Organizations. So I did get a lot out of the course via the book in the end (perhaps I should have done the readings right away!). Over the last 4 days I went to Spain with my study group to do an "organizational audit" of a medium sized family business. We interviewed the president and all of the senior management on their motivation, relationships among the management, frictions etc., it was very exciting, time passed very quickly and we learnt a lot.

Macroeconomics: I only attended the introductory class and it appears to be quite something. Our professor is a hardcore liberal economist French guy, which is a spectacular and unusual combination. The readings seem to be interesting (so far I enjoyed Paul Krugman's The Myth of the Asian Miracle), and now I just need to get over our Operations field trip next weekend till I can actually sit down and focus a bit more on Economics, since this was my goal at the beginning of the term.

Operations: so far nothing spectacular, we have started a factory simulation game outside of the classroom but I haven't been much involved yet since I was in Spain over the last week - luckily I have a good team that is running the game at the moment. Other than that, I look forward to our visit to the Porsche and BMW factories next week. To be honest, I have never liked Operations too much and simply will never like technical engineery stuff, I am trying to find it interesting but it seems to be against my nature. I promise to try hard to learn something useful though!

Finance 2: this will be tough. Our professor is a Russian mathematician specializing in interest rate derivatives, which tells you all you need to know. Right now we are reviewing capital structure though, which isn't one of my favourites - even though I know I have to learn it - but I can't wait till we move on to derivatives. Not that it will be easy, but I definitely need it for my internships, so I will work hard for this course.

So you may see, things are busy and there is more than enough to do. Especially since I enjoy the classes I do more than last term. I was going to study Russian on the side and also work on my financial modelling skills, but so far it doesn't look like this is going to happen any time soon! But the important thing is that I'm enjoying the academics again, which was important to me.

Impressions from the ground: the current job market in investment banking

2007-04-12T21:54:00.000+02:00

Following Citigroup's announced layoffs - 1,000 of which are supposed to be in London - I think it is time to comment on the current job market for MBAs interested in joining global investment banks. I do not have any overall numbers and can only comment on what I can conclude based on what is happening with the class of 2008.

First of all, I think the headline of "1,000 bankers in London to lose their jobs", as proclaimed in yesterday's Evening Standard, sounds more threatening to future bankers than it is. Most cuts are made in back office and administrative jobs, obviously. Furthermore, if you talk about the few M&A or Sales & Trading jobs that will be shed, I would assume only those who are losing money would be shed - if you want to cut costs to improve profitability, you will not fire anyone who brings in profitable deals, as your profitability goes down if you fire profitable employees. So I believe, even those MBAs interning at Citigroup this summer should not be worried, though obviously I understand that some who may have rejected Deutsche or Lehman offers to join Citigroup over the summer might wonder if they made the right decision.

But moving on from Citigroup, our summer job recruiting season has given us some good insight into the job market in the finance industry. I remember when we started the year, I was impressed by how well the 2nd years had done last summer, but also concerned - if there were so many summer interns last year and they almost all received offers at the end of the summer or joined other investment banks full time, how many spaces would be left for us? I can now safely say that I believe hiring this year has been even better than last year, so my impression is that we are lucky enough to have entered the MBA and the summer recruiting season at a time when investment banks are competing hard to hire MBAs.

Why do I get this impression?
- First, what usually seems to interest most on the business week forum, what I would call the "Goldman Sachs Index" :-). Basically, their core school is Harvard and I believe if they could they would like to hire as many people as possible from Harvard and fill up the rest with Wharton students. When hiring is down, they will focus on their absolute core schools. But when they want to hire more, they will obviously expand their search and look at "lesser schools" such as Columbia, Chicago, London Business School etc. as well. This year, it seems they have made a record number of offers to our class. I don't actually know the number because I only know of those I know personally, so I only know they minimum number, but I know of at least 9 offers (across M&A, Trading and Private Wealth Management). Taking into account our class size, this would be similar to ~25 offers at INSEAD or Harvard. So it's not a bad start

- Secondly, you may have guessed, I could mention the Morgan Stanley index ;-). Morgan Stanley has always been happy to hire from London Business School, but they are also very prestigious if not to say elitist, so I think they have always been quite picky and only taken a handful of people whom they could not say no to. Well this year it has been quite different, I think they extended at least 10 offers in M&A as well as Sales & Trading that I know of, so again taking into account our class size, this is a considerable number. You can see that around 8-10% of our class will spend the summer at either Goldman or Morgan Stanley, which is not bad considering that only 40% aspire to work in finance

- Regarding the other investment banks, some of them have actually made a record number of offers this year. Deutsche has extended more than 15 offers and Lehman I believe almost 20 offers. Barclays must have extended at least 20 offers, because I know 5 in my stream alone who are joining Barclays Capital, then I know two others with offers from Barclays Global Investors, so my estimate of 20 offers is likely to be conservative. Then you have many other banks, such as Merrill, HSBC, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, UBS etc. which have probably all extended around 5 offers each if not more

- Low yield: this is another indicator of how well it is going. I know some banks extended a lot of offers but won't actually get that many summer interns from our school because these people had too many other attractive offers. I know of one very good ibank that gave 7 offers for M&A jobs and only one guy took it

- The buy side: this is an area where our school can definitely improve compared to Harvard or Wharton. But I think we did quite well this year, and hopefully we can strengthen this area little by little. The Investment Management Club has definitely done a great job in marketing our class to investment management firms and hedge funds and it seems to have paid off. Fidelity, PIMCO and Capital Group have made several offers, as well as UBS Asset Management, T Rowe Price, and several smaller hedge funds and other buy side firms. There even seem to be quite a decent group of people going to private equity. I know there is someone going to Bridgepoint Capital, and someone else going to Actis Capital, which is big in PE investment in Africa and India. I can't say exactly, but I would think that about 20 of us are going to work in investment on the buy side

So where does this leave us? My impression is that of the 40% of us who came here with the aspiration of going into finance, about 15% are going into actual investment banking, about 10-15% into Sales & Trading/Markets, about 5-10% into Investment Management and about 5% into Private Wealth Management. So my impression is that those who came here with a clear idea of what they wanted to do, we have been lucky to enter an friendly environment, even though as I mentioned earlier the whole recruiting process did turn out to be more competitive than I had expected. At least, things look bright in the world economy, and I think the class of 2009 will encounter equally benign conditions next year.

Busy summer term ahead

2007-04-09T16:59:00.000+02:00

Well, holidays are up and I better start blogging again, right? As Patxi pointed out, 1/3 of the MBA is already over, this is shocking! What has happened so far?

Autumn term:

immediately adjusted to living in London, where I have been dreaming of living since I was 13 (funnily enough, when I was back home over the holidays I found a very old diary of mine where I talk of how I want to spend the summer in London and would love to live there when I'm "old" :-) )
Made a lot of friends from all over the world
Enjoyed learning about Finance and Economics, as well as learning better how to analyze industries
Spent days and days agonizing over career choices

Spring term:

Decided I will definitely make a career change
Met many investment banks on campus and survived lots of interviews
Signed my contract for the summer with an ibank in London
Enjoyed Finance Class with Joao Cocco and pretty much suffered through all the rest
Celebrated the end of term at the Salsa & Sangria party when the exams were over

And the summer term ahead will be very busy...

Luckily, this is the last term of core courses. We have Macroeconomics, Operations, Marketing Strategy, and Management Accounting (whatever that is supposed to be)
I'll also take my first elective, Finance 2, which is focus on derivatives as far as I know
My study group is going on a trip to Barcelona to do research for our Organizational Behaviour project
We will visit Eastern German Porsche & BMW factories for our operations class
MBAT is coming up in May

So this should be enough to keep me busy over the next weeks. I also look forward to meeting the class of 2009 at admits weekend in a few weeks. I have been to some MBA info sessions here on campus so I have met a few applicants already, but in terms of admits so far I only know Rusgirl so far.

Looking back on 2 years with McKinsey

2007-03-17T21:20:00.001+01:00

I've added tags to almost all of my posts now to make it easier for readers to browse my posts by subject. Just now, I browsed through all my posts about my time at McKinsey before coming to London Business School. It was beautiful to look back and think about what a crazy and enriching experience it has been, and also to think about all the friends I made there. I also think most of the things I am enjoying and looking forward to now are thanks to my time there - the benefits I earned through hard work, the brand name, the trainings, the coaching by Managers and Partners - in a way I can engage on a new path now and the path is much more rosy thanks to the effort I put in there. I was remembering what our global head Ian Davis said at one training:

"Being successful at McKinsey doesn't mean making partner. Being successful means that whenever you look back on your time with McKinsey later in life, you think it was the right thing to do at that moment of my life and I'm glad I did it"

But reading through these posts, you will also understand how different my life is now. I play tennis in the sun almost every day, I play football with the women's team, I go to Richmond Park, Hyde Park, Regent's Park a lot, I am planning lots and lots of holidays around the world, I enjoy trying out new restaurants, I sleep a lot, I have new friends from all over the world ... this definitely beats working 17h days!

Going to... Chicago GSB!

2007-03-17T09:48:00.000+01:00

The exchange results are out. I have a place at the University of Chicago! Though it will be sad to leave London for 3 months, I still think I will go for it! My main reasons to go for Chicago GSB were:

- the academic quality, particularly in Finance and Economics
- the opportunity to take electives at other departments - particularly, I hope to be able to take a course in International Relations with John Mearsheimer - I highly recommend his book "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics".
- it's a really beautiful city with great shopping and outdoor opportunities
- my sister lives there

... what more reasons do you need? If there are any readers here from Chicago GSB class of 2008, please get in touch! I have a lot of questions :-).

Is spring term really almost over already?

2007-03-10T19:39:00.000+01:00

I have no idea how or why, but spring term is already drawing to a close. It hasn't really started yet and I feel we haven't done much, but it's over, and so is another chunk of my MBA. Time is racing ahead. How could spring term pass by so fast?

- Well, the first weeks were blurred due to the marathon of job interviews. We managed to squeeze in classes between one interview and the next, and half the classroom would be empty. Nobody really paid attention to classes. The only class we cared about was Finance, since we discussed Mergers & Acquisitions, Options and Foreign Exchange just in time for the interviews
- Then, the weather has also become quite mild and sunny in recent weeks. I went out a lot, running in Regent's Park, strolling around Hyde Park and walking around the East End
- Since we don't have classes on Fridays and had few assignments, many people went away over the weekends, so it has been quieter at school than in the first term

Wrapping up this term, I want to pick up on my first impression of spring term courses.

In classroom learning
Finance: as I said before, it was a great class and I look forward to Finance 2 next term, which will be more focused on options & futures, so it's a bit more abstract and I like that. Sometimes I wonder if I had been better of doing a PhD rather than an MBA since I realize I like the abstract stuff more than the applied practical stuff, but then I enjoy learning about a broad range of subjects, which you can't if you do a PhD

Discovering Entrepreneurial Opportunities: the cases of start-up companies are great, since they give you a great feel of the insecurity surrounding entrepreneurship. I especially enjoyed the Spreadshirt Case, it seems to be a very cool company and I am happy they are succeeding. I am somewhat drawn to entrepreneurship, though I prefer to do it in 5 years rather than now

Marketing: I'm not sure how much I would learn in Marketing with an experienced professor due to the subject matter, but unfortunately I haven't gotten anything out of this class. My curiosity about Marketing may be of a more critical or sociological nature - I find it quite interesting to observe how advertisements reflect gender stereotypes, success stereotypes, how they promote "stupid consumerism" and so on. But this critical angle seems to be out of place in the classroom.

Managing Organisational Behaviour: again a course that could be extremely valuable but has disappointed so far. The cases are actually quite interesting, but the learning is a bit limited so far.

Decision & Risk Analysis: the teacher is quite good, but in the end the class is little more than applied logic and statistics, so if you know your probabilities and have worked with Excel before, you are unlikely to get much out of this course. One important learning I have gotten out of this course is the value of modeling in general though. Previously, I think I always considered modeling as a sort of lesser activity and avoided it whenever I could while I was working at McKinsey. In fact, I managed to spend two years there as an analyst without ever building a complex financial model. Whenever a new project was announced as "advanced excel modeling skills required", I would avoid it. Now, I really see the value in models, and believe they can actually be very useful for investment decisions. It may be obvious to most of you, but coming from a social science background I was quite skeptical about the usefulness of modeling before, and this has changed completely.

Out of classroom learning
I have enjoyed for the amount of spare time I have this term to pursue other interests and read myself. I am especially grateful to Patxi for recommending me the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad (Rich Dad). I wish I had read it 10 years ago, but it is never too late, and it is helping me tremendously seeing personal finances from a different angle. Since I know I will need to improve my financial modeling skills for the summer, I was happy to encounter the bookFinancial Modeling Using Excel and VBA (Wiley Finance) by Chandan Sengupta. It is one of the few books I have found that are actually useful for self-study, and I feel I can really use it to teach myself all I need. Another book that I would count among one of the best non-fiction books out there is Flow: The Classic Work on How to Achieve Happiness by Csikszentmihalyi.

Other than that, I enjoy lunching and dining with my friends from school. Now is a time that you know who your friends are and you have had enough time to get to know each other closely. I have a lot of friends from other streams unfortunately, which makes hanging out a bit more difficult. Additionally, we know that time is passing too fast and that we will soon be working in different places over the summer and then many of us will go on exchange, so we don't actually have that much more time to spend together anymore, surprisingly. Luckily, some of the nicest people from my course are going to spend their summer in the same bank as me, and many more classmates will be somewhere in the City, so it will be easy to catch up over lunch and dinner :-).

What is left of spring term? Not much. We'll have three exams or so, but they are in the softer subjects, so there isn't really anything to do. My main aim for the next weeks is to get ready for MBAT in Paris in May, so I want to play a lot of Tennis in Regent's Park. I also need to get fit very fast because I will go surfing in Canary Islands over the Spring Break, and last time I did surfing I was horribly unprepared physically, as I underestimated how fit you need to be to surf a couple of hours per day. Now I have no excuse and really need to get ready.

Happy New Year of the Pig

2007-02-19T11:16:00.000+01:00

One of the things I love about London is how international it is. I don't know how it feels for the indigenous minority here, but I love walking around the City or Trafalgar Square and hearing dozens of different languages. This weekend was Chinese New Year of the Pig and the Chinese Association of London hosted celebrations and fireworks in the centre. It was VERY crowded but a nice experience.

Other than that, tomorrow London Business School holds a new session of the Breakfast Series. These are free breakfasts hosted by the school where they invite interesting senior speakers (sometimes alumni, sometimes others) to share their personal experience. Tomorrow the CEO of a Nigerian investment holding company and alumni of our school is coming for breakfast and as you might have guessed I am going there to find out more about investment in Africa.

After a class in Decision & Risk Analysis, I will head to the City with some classmates to a lunch hosted by our summer employer, or specifically an Argentinian director of the bank who is also an alumnus of our school. After that I will meet one of my first round interviewers for coffee as it seems I have now found a team to work with over the summer. They do very interesting projects in infrastructure investment and all the people I've met from the team are extremely friendly and sociable, which I like a lot.

I have also just booked a flight to Barcelona where I will carry out an "organizational audit" of a company. We have to do this for our Managing Organizational Behaviour class, and since one of my study group mate's family has a large chemicals business in Barcelona, we decided to carry out our project with his company and enjoy some shopping, good food and the sun "on the side" (of course, the project will come first ;-) ).

So things are good except for most of the classes this term. I'm not getting much out of them. The only great class we had this term was Finance but this is over now and there are only some fluffy classes left - and though I have nothing against fluffy classes in general, specifically now I'm not getting anything out of Marketing or Organisational Behaviour. This term is great for lots of other extracurricular reasons, but in terms of academics it is quite disappointing. The good part is that there is hardly any serious work and I can enjoy my spare time for now. So taking everything that is happening into account, it seems to be true what the Chinese are saying - the Year of the Pig seems to be a lucky year.

The future of business schools in Africa

2007-02-12T22:53:00.000+01:00

Shortly after writing my last blog entry on investing in Africa, I received an e-mail from the Africa Club of London Business School to attend the event "Building Business Leadership in Africa" that was hosted in our school today. I went there without really knowing who would be there and was impressed by the high profile of the speakers and audience.

The panel was made up by many Deans of the top African Business Schools (including "The LBS of Nigeria", the Lagos Business School (finally I know why my school has the domain london.edu and not lbs.edu!)) and also representatives from the Association of African Business Schools. In the audience, there were many African students or alumni from London Business School, as well as Africans working in London investment banks and consultancies, and locals from London interested in investing in Africa, including some fund managers. The panel discussion highlighted some of the issues facing African business schools that I want to mention here.

Whom do we serve?
Most African business schools are closely connected to state universities and were originally set up to serve the public sector. Over the last ten years, they have had to change to cater to the needs of multinationals for the training and development of their local staff. Additionally, the skills taught at business schools should be useful for local entrepreneurs. Depending on who your target group is, course content and style need to be very different, and it turned out most schools tried to do everything (as in the West) without a clear strategy.

Who is our competition?
There was an additional discussion of the level of aspiration African Business Schools should have. Should they try and emulate Harvard or London Business School? Is the the right model for them? Many in the audience as well as the panel agreed that doing business in Africa is not the same as doing business in the US (I especially liked the LBS Dean's joke that "just in time in Nigeria often means just in case"), and therefore the business schools should focus on providing content that is relevant for people who will do business in Africa. One useful suggestion from the audience was that instead of trying to learn from Harvard or Columbia, African Business Schools should cooperate closely with business schools in India or China, similarly countries in terms of growth (BTW did you know 7 out of the 10 fastest growing countries in the world are in Africa?) and other problems they face (corruption, bad infrastructure...).

What is our role in society?
This wasn't actually discussed directly but you could read between the lines that this wasn't very clear, and it might be tied to the lack of clarity on who the target group is. In the West, business schools are just there for people who want to go into business and make money to get their degree, learn something, expand their networks and move on. In the developing world, the same schools might be faced with much higher expectations. When people discuss business or entrepreneurship in Africa, it is always about increasing prosperity, making the countries better, improving efficiency, combating corruption etc.. That is the official story, but the question is if you serve mainly public sector workers and employees of multinationals, are you really working on the right side? Or should you build up entrepreneurial skills of the poor so that they can increase productivity and independence of the country? As I said it wasn't discussed, but I would like to know more about how these Deans actually see themselves and their roles in their country.

How do we improve teaching quality?
A large part of the discussion was centered on how to improve the quality of teaching, especially in terms of relevance for the private sector. It appeared that the links between business schools and the private sector were still quite weak (obviously there are huge differences between the schools). One idea implemented already by the Institut Superieur de Management Senegal is to exchange teachers between the African Business schools. They talked of their intents to get Western teachers to teach some courses but had not yet worked out the funding. It seems that there is no "finance professors without frontiers" organization yet. I can't believe there are no good finance professors out there who wouldn't volunteer to teach a great course in Tanzania on Kenya for a few weeks for free. Actually, the Dean of LBS mentioned that it is easer for Tanzanian or Kenyan business schools to attract volunteer professors when compared to Nigerian schools. But there was also consensus that depending on donations and aid from outside wouldn't help. So the main conclusion was that the only way improve quality was to strengthen the ties with local entrepreneurs and tailor the program and the case studies to the realities of business in Africa.

Weirdest questions from hedge fund and ibanking interviews

2007-02-11T12:27:00.001+01:00

I have one final round interview to go tomorrow morning in the City, but am pretty relaxed since I already have two offers :-), so I feel like the recruiting is over and can safely share some of the funniest interview questions I got.

HEDGE FUND
I already shared my favourite brainteaser from a hedge fund interview. Overall I found the hedge funds much more innovative in asking questions, while the banks ask the typical brainteasers that everybody who has prepared a little bit already knows (can you believe I was asked "why are manhole covers round?"!!!). My next favourite question, also at a hedge fund was:

- "I have to ask you... do you like money?"
I looked the guy straight in the eye and said
- "yes, of course I like money".

He sighed in relief "that's good, because in the end this is all about making money, and if you care more about the details of the company than about the money, this is not the place. You look at a company, you buy, two weeks later you sell, you move on."
The question was tricky because every vault guide says in ibanking interviews you should never admit to being interested in money - you are supposed to care more about client service, industry trends etc.. Luckily I went with my intuition and turned out to be right.

The other interesting question from the hedge fund interviews were
- "okay, I have seen your CV, tell me about yourself but without mentioning anything on your CV, tell me who you are beyond your CV"

BANKING
The banking questions were more mainstream in a way but nevertheless there were quite challenging or at least interesting ones

- "Imagine you have a client who tells you he always only decides based on price. If you quote him the lowest price, he will do business with you, if not, he will take his business somewhere else. What would you do?"

- "We have invited 15 of your classmates for the final round. Why should we take you and not your classmates?"

- "Tell me about a time in your work when you really felt the power of a team and what a team can achieve" (I thought this was a much nicer question than "tell me about a time when you worked in a team...")

- "What do you think is the next big investment opportunity in the markets that can offer spectacular returns?"

All the other questions were pretty standard I believe -
- why do you want to do this?
- why do you want to leave consulting?
- draw me the US yield curve.
- How do you calculate forward rates?
- where do you think interest rates are going?
- where's gold?
- what do you think determines the oil price
- what's happening in Venezuela?
and so on, just checking awareness of the markets

Overall, I enjoyed most of the interviews since they were challenging, but I am very happy it is over we don't need to answer such questions any more :-).

By the way, for those preparing for sales & trading, global markets or hedge fund interviews, I found the following books helpful to get an overview of the industry and also to learn about derivatives - even for the summer positions they do ask a lot about options and it really helps to understand their background:
Inventing Money: Long-term Capital Management and the Search for Risk-free Profits
This is a great book to learn about derivatives and the story of the brains behind the derivatives industry, as well as the pitfalls of relying on formulas to invest billions.

Hedgehogging (Penton Audio)
This is more of a fun read from the founder of hedge fund Traxis Partners, Barton Biggs. It gives a great insight into the more long-term macro-level thinking that characterizes successful investors.

Practical Speculation
Another great book on investing by former George Soros partner, Victor Niederhoffer. He writes about interesting myths and tricks in investing and about market psychology. It's good to read some of these broader books in case you are asked what kind of things you have read on investing or how you would invest your money, as these books give you some creative ideas on how to think about investing money.

First job offer

2007-02-06T22:23:00.000+01:00

Yes, it seems like nothing can stand in the way of my transition to the finance world in London any more. After a long detour, it seems like my dream of working in Sales & Trading will come true. More details later. All I can say is that it has been much tougher than I thought. Along the way, I had some rejections based on the fact that the interviewers didn't believe I was really committed to a career change. But finally, somebody saw that I actually do want to work in investment banking rather than in consulting.

Now the challenge will be finding a great desk to work with, which will be exciting. In any case I am so happy this is over. These past weeks were really tough. They shortlist 40 people, and in the end they take 5 and reject some great candidates for reasons such as "you spoke a bit fast in the interview and some of your answers were too long" (true story!!!). Another great one I heard today was someone who was told after M&A interviews that his accounting knowledge was too weak, when the guy had worked as a tax accountant for 6 years prior to the MBA! You choose which explanation is more ridiculous, in any case they came from the same bank :-). It's very hard, and there are less people with offers than I expected, especially in markets. In IBD there are some offers but also less than expected. Probably, I can give a better picture next week when most things are decided, right now is really the first days of offers.

I wish everyone out there good luck! Hang in there and don't be discouraged by weird rejections, in the end it will work out.

One thing I have been impressed by throughout the whole process is how great the second years at London Business School are! They have been incredibly helpful sharing advice about interviewing, conducting mock interviews, calming us down, hosting workshops on brainteasers and excel valuations. I don't know how it is at other schools but I have great gratitude to the 2nd years and I hope I can be of equal help to the class of 2009 next year! Special thanks to fellow blogger King Myles from the Finance Club!

Did a woman write Shakespeare?

2007-02-06T00:43:00.000+01:00

Provocative question, I know. But after reading the book Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a woman write Shakespeare? I am absolutely convinced. The evidence is overwhelming. The book is great, very entertaining and thought provoking. According to the book, the most likely author of the sonnets and plays attributed to William Shakespeare is Mary Sydney, the Countess of Pembroke.

Fascinating stuff to kill time with while you wait for calls from recruiters - and while we wait for the next Harry Potter book to be released - July 21st is the official date, why so late?

Summer job interviewing craze

2007-02-01T22:19:00.000+01:00

The summer job interviewing craze has started! It is a very exciting time, but many people are tired by the end of the week. Juggling 5 interviews, classes, phone calls, preparing, researching the markets, waiting for calls for final rounds, constant questions of "have you heard from Goldman yet?" is not easy!

Today I decided to just sleep till 11am just to get back into form. Then I had 3 interviews. The good part is that at least the investment banks seem crazy about hiring. Some people got offers right on Monday already! They basically walked into their 1st round interviews, and suddenly received offers at the end of the day. I interviewed with one bank on Tuesday which called us for the final round already tomorrow (Friday). It seems each bank wants to be first in extending offers.

In addition, it seems that some companies who are nor corporate partners (i.e. who do not get the privilege of being the first to interview on campus) suddenly realize lots of candidates will sign offers within the next week and start scheduling off-campus interviews. For months I did not get any calls and this week and last week 4 different companies called me to come in for interviews this or next week. You just can't do it, at least if you also want to attend classes like me! Right now I'm focusing on Fixed Income Sales & Trading though and hope that works out for the summer! Things are moving very fast here so next week I'll know more!

In any case it is a very exciting but also very intense time, and you have some exhausted people, some disappointed people and some happy people. I was going to post about interview questions, but the truth is the interviews are 80% fit I would say, all they really want to know is if you've thought about what you want to do.

Investing in Africa

2007-01-27T16:07:00.000+01:00

Is it just me, or are newspapers full of hints that many countries in Africa are booming right now, unnoticed by the general public still in awe about growth in China and India? I think to spot beginning trends, one cannot wait till stories make the front pages. I usually watch out for recurring themes that are mentioned here and there as if they had no significance. Africa is such a case right now. You might here of a big IPO in Nigeria, increasing tourism in Mozambique, and a real estate boom in South Africa - but most journalists don't seem to put 2 + 2 together.

For the last two years, I have noticed more and more positive news coming out of West Africa and also Southeast Africa. And in recent months, the momentum is astonishing. Once you start watching out for news on successful businesses and investment in Africa you will notice it is in the news every day - but never as a top story.

Did you know, for example, how African stock markets performed last year? Botswana up 47%, Kenya up 47%, Malawi up 127%!!!, Mauritius up 46%, Nigeria up 40%, Uganda up 72%. If you read the companies & markets part of the FT closely, you will also notice that more and more investment and private equity funds are set up for the sole purpose of investment and Africa - for example Actis Capital , Aureos Capital, or African Capital Alliance, all members of the Emerging Markets Private Equity Alliance.

I'm posting this to encourage you to watch out for positive news and articles on Africa. Also, if you see anything interesting, feel free to post links and info in the comments!

First week of classes

2007-01-20T16:16:00.000+01:00

Yes, the sun is shining again in London. The storm is over and it is not raining anymore. What a change. Other than the weather, which is a very important topic in Britain, the main topics at London Business School are the summer recruitment and the start of classes. I am very positive about classes so far, at least more so than in the first term. What did we have?

- Finance: as I already said, and Martha and Patxi wrote the same, Joao Cocco is a great teacher. He manages to teach at a very high level and fast pace and at the same time entertain and engage everyone. Finance continues to be my favourite class. This week we did mergers and acquisitions and analysed many newspaper articles on deals and discussed why share prices of acquirers, targets and competitors in the same industry moved the way they moved. Especially helpful for the hundreds of classmates applying for Investment Banking jobs!

- Decision and Risk analysis: so far we have not done much new but refreshed the statistics pre-course (which I waived), but it seems it will be mainly about using excel and building models, which I find very useful. The teacher is energetic and cheerful, so the class is entertaining.

- Discovering Entrepreneurial Opportunities: We do what the name suggests, try to find opportunities for new product development. In our first class we had a visit from an entrepreneur whose business failed and we discussed the case of his start-up and he shared his experience of the liquidation of his business. The teacher is also very good and senior.

- Managing Organisational Behaviour: I cannot comment much on the class or faculty as of yet because we spent most of the class watching a video. It was about Nick Leeson, the guy who traded Barings Bank into bankruptcy. I found the documentary fascinating. The link to MOB was to discuss what was wrong in the organisation to enable such a massive fraud to happen.

- Marketing: this maybe one of the more disappointing classes. Unfortunately in some core courses (same last term) the programme office has assigned us very junior teachers, and unfortunately sometimes people with PhDs from Harvard or MIT aren't necessarily great teachers. Especially with fluffy topics I find experience is key. Chicago GSB has an advertisement saying "Our full-time MBA faculty is the same as for the Executive MBA" and I wish it was the same for London Business School. But it's not.

In addition to those classes, summer jobs are on everyone's mind! On Thursday, Morgan Stanley hosted a lovely and delicious dinner for 20 female MBAs and they came with ~ 10 female Managing Directors from all divisions. They were great, charismatic women, we had lovely dinner and lots of wine and were laughing a lot, I don't think we ever talked about finance or investment banking, it was more about getting to know each other and also seeing how they managed to have kids and be MDs (all of them had children). It was a great evening and very inspiring. I also met a woman who is head of equity derivatives and has a degree in international politics like me. So we had a nice chat about how to leverage political insights for a career in trading.

Yesterday, I had my first interview with a hedge fund and got an interesting brainteaser: company A and company T both have oil fields, company T has one in Texas and company A has one under the arctic ocean. Both have a market capitalization of $1bn. Who has more barrels of oil in the field? Then: okay, where is the price of oil? Let's assume tomorrow the price of oil jumps from 50 to 100, whose market cap will rise more? It was quite fun and I solved them quickly, so it was no problem.

Then they asked if I could do DCF and LBO modelling, and they also gave me some questions like "ok, assume I have a company with an EBITDA of 10 and sales of 100 and CAPEX of 5, make some assumptions and tell me how you would value the company in your head? I tried the lazy way of saying I would just assume an EBITDA multiple and multiply it by the EBITDA :-), but then they still pressed for the DCF valuation, as expected.

I liked the experience and it was very good practice for the upcoming sales & trading interviews (only 1 week to go!). The question that always knocks me out is when they ask if I have ever invested money. The truth is that I never had a any money left, or when I was younger I did but I didn't really know about investments. As soon as I had $1,000 saved I would just go on a long holiday, spend it all and come back home and start saving again. But I don't think it makes sense to hastily start trading FX or whatever just so I can claim in interviews that I have done that. I hope it is okay. Not everybody has experience investing in their twenties, right?

First week of summer recruiting almost over

2007-01-11T22:51:00.000+01:00

What a week. It isn't easy to get up so early anymore. The female MBAs were particularly hard hit since the Women in Business Club organised daily breakfasts with investment banks for us starting at 8:30, while the guys only had to come in by 10. But I'm not complaining, it was very nice to meet the representatives in a relaxed and personal setting, since the mixed recruiting presentations are crazy. There can be up to 200 people trying to speak to 5-10 representatives, and often they don't have any representatives of the departments some are interested in.

Overall I met some very nice people though and think I have formed a very good view of where to apply and where not to apply. I was very positively surprised by Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, they were extremely approachable, down to earth and friendly. Apart from that, the investment bank that made a great impression was Morgan Stanley, they were very friendly and professional. Lehman is tomorrow and knowing them I'm sure they'll bring along many alumni.

But today was consulting day, I skipped all the presentations and enjoyed my time in the gym and in my bed :-), but of course I went to the McKinsey presentation in the evening. Though I may not be the most objective person in the world on this matter, I think they had the best presentation of all companies so far. They brought many consultants from the London Office, the BTO, the Corporate Finance Practice (all of them LBS alumni), and invited all of the students from the classes of 2007 and 2008 who worked or interned there before. Then they even had a director from the London office who heads the Private Equity practice as a speaker. I was watching the event to see how I would like it if I was an uninformed student and I think I would have liked it a lot and I would have thought it is the best company to work for :-). I hope many of my class get to intern there.

I'm also collecting a bit of information about Private Equity and Hedge Funds on the side. I'm not actively looking for anything there, but I thought it makes sense to have good information about it. The funny thing is that here everybody tells you "you can only get into PE through networking", and I have just been told by a Permira guy I know that this is complete bullshit (his words). Maybe it's true for the small funds in London, but he said hiring works almost exclusively through headhunters, but that if they're hiring, direct speculative applications can work as well. So I've made up my mind that it is better to listen to someone who has been working at Permira for 5 years than business school students. I'm not looking into PE though, because I don't think it solves the consulting problem of travel and I think it makes more sense to do it with a lot of business experience, otherwise you just end up being a normal hard working Associate doing the same job one would do in an ibank.

Next week a very high profile speaker is coming to campus - Ana Botin from Banesto/Grupo Santander! I think she was voted Europe's most powerful businesswoman by the FT and I have signed up to go to the event. Things are going to be crazy next week, classes will start again and everybody is busy writing cover letters, preparing interviews or networking. No idea how this will work! But it definitely is an exciting time.

One resource for those preparing for finance interviews that might be helpful:
McKinsey on Finance special M&A issue

Good luck everyone! I think I won't post as much these days as I don't want to talk about what is happening until I know for sure what is happening, but some exciting things are going on and I am slowly but surely seeing how great my decision to come to London Business School was :-).

1st anniversary of my blog

2006-12-28T22:48:00.000+01:00

One year ago to this day (if I'm not mistaken - in any case I believe it was a few days after Xmas), I started this blog, not knowing where this would go. So I just wanted to wish my blog a happy 1st birthday :-).

I was inspired to start this mainly by the blogs of The Divine Miss N and Rusgirl, as I found them to be very helpful (whenever I didn't know how to do things, I would just copy their source code, paste it into my template and modify it a little bit :-) ). I think I was the first blogger of the class of 2008, though Moe almost beat me to it (his blog has sadly closed down since then due to some hacker attack). Then there was Wheels, who never showed up in our class and stopped blogging in June (though he did show up at admits weekend). Where are you?

Then there were Ellen, Jorge and FM, enthusiastic in the beginning but somewhat less once classes started. But of course, we are still a large group of active bloggers in our class, namely Patxi, Karlitos, VJ, Linda, and our recent addition, Genie! So the new admits should have plenty of resources here to find out about life in London and ask questions - congrats again, guys & girls! And this is just the class of 2008. Obviously, the veterans of the class of 2007 - Suzy, KV, Al and Myles, are also part of this happy family ;-).

Let me end on this happy note, I have enjoyed having this blog and getting to know more of you and so... expect me to continue :-).

Happy holidays and a happy new year!

Good time to get into investment banking?

2006-12-21T18:52:00.001+01:00

I'm not sure how to interpret the record bonuses paid out to investment bankers these weeks. Most journalists, and also quite a few investment bankers I've talked to, take the way things are going well now as proof that things will go badly very soon. I don't know if this is a realistic assessment though. What I observe is that most financial journalists are embarassed they didn't see the tech bubble bust coming in 2000, and now they are predicting a crash just in case one happens - this time they will have predicted it! The only indication I have so far from the ground that things might not go so well is that Bear Stearns has decided not to recruit Summer Associates next summer and has canceled their career presentation at London Business School on short notice. I don't know what the reasons are. I know Goldman plans to hire ~40 summer associates for their London office (IBD and FICC) next summer, so those numbers look good.

So I actually think so many people predict a crash right now mainly to insure themselves against embarassment should a crash occur. In fact, I think we might have plateaued a bit but soon things are going to rise even faster. I think the record bonuses may be a symptom of something very different, not a bubble, but a symptom of how the spread between the stars and the "underperformers" is getting bigger. I'm not talking about investment bankers strictly, it is a common phenomenon that the highest earners in most countries see their income growing disproportionately, while the bottom earners are losing purchasing power as time goes by. Capital is getting more and more concentrated in fewer hands. So in essence, if this is true, it is a great time to become an investment banker. If the world is more and more split into the lucky and the unlucky ones, it matters more and more which side you join.

These are just some thoughts I'm going through, I'm still alert that many insiders are telling me this is not a good time to enter, but in the end I notice among all courses at the MBA and in general my strongest interest lies in finance and economics, so I want to go into that field. As I mentioned in my last post, I have to take some serious career decisions right now. Luckily since classes are over I had a lot of time to think and reflect. The funny thing is, after 4 months of going here and there mentally, I am back to where I started: I definitely want to leave consulting, and the only field that excites me is Global Markets/ Sales & Trading. It is funny how you can get confused and end up at square 1 again, but I guess at least now the decision is more thought through than in the beginning. So milkround is coming up and my plan is to focus only one 4 or 5 banks that have a great programme in markets. January will be busy!

You know the first term is over when...

2006-12-16T15:38:00.000+01:00

- people are throwing farewell parties and wish each other happy holidays
- you start looking for Christmas presents
- you sleep 9h every night plus take long naps in the afternoon
- you finally get to see the Velázquez exhibition in the National Gallery that opened in early November

- you get to check out some a cool vintage dresses on Portobello Market
- you finally write to your best friends back home
- instead of complaining about assignments, you are sad that time passed so quickly
- you scan the job postings on the Career Services website, realise you have signed up to dozens of company presentations and that you should start writing cover letters soon

- you go to Royal Albert Hall to sing Christmas Carols
- you know it will soon be time to take some serious career decisions
- you start thinking about what to pack and prepare for the flight back home

Weird happenings in the finance world

2006-12-05T18:36:00.000+01:00

Why is Morgan Stanley buying up hedge fund in the dozens recently, when Goldman Sachs has just created a hedge fund clone that will emulate hedge fund investments for only max. 1% of annual fees (versus 2%+20% performance in current hedge funds)? Hedge fund fees are bound to go DOWN.

In other interesting events of the finance world, I met with a managing director yesterday who heads some trading desks for a large investment bank in the City. I know him through a personal contact so he was very honest. He told me he would never go into investment banking if he was in my position, that it wasn't intellectually challenging and had no future. He said the future is in technology/automation and in Asia, in nothing else. If I can't stop it, he said trading is the way to go, all else would be useless, boring and terrible. Trading he said was still the least bad option, but a horrible environment for women. Very honest advice, but also a bit surprising to come out of someone who is in the job himself.

In any case, I'm continuing my exploration of finance jobs and am slowly but surely finding out what I would like or not. On Friday Goldman Sachs is hosting a full day event for female MBAs in their offices that I'm attending, even though we have the accounting exam in the afternoon. The good thing about the exam is, there is less and less to study the lower you set your aspirations :-).

Time to celebrate success

2006-11-28T14:03:00.000+01:00

London Business School teams are very successful at the moment, winning global competitions. My stream mate Cindy was part of a team that won the HSBC Global Deal Competition in New York, beating schools like Columbia, Chicago and Kellogg. But I was especially happy that my friend Amit won the Alpha Challenge, a global stock picking competition, beating teams from Stanford, Wharton, Columbia and others. Pretty impressive! I can't believe how these people did it, it's not like we had a lot of spare time recently to fly to other continents!

To be honest, I don't find this term very stressful, unlike some others (Karlitos made a related post). If you had a tough job before the MBA, the MBA is a vacation. In comparison to my job, it is very relaxing and there is zero serious pressure. The only pressure you could have is the pressure you put on yourself. But still, there are things to do, so even though I have lots of evenings off and enjoy my private life, you cannot really leave London a lot. Second year will be different obviously, as KV's example shows :-). I look forward to it.

Trip to Cambridge

2006-11-12T13:12:00.000+01:00

It is very good to take some time off once in a while and escape Marylebone, the area where London Business School is located. Yesterday, we took a trip to Cambridge to visit a friend and former colleague of mine who is doing her MBA at Judge Business School.

I had heard that Cambridge is nicer and sweeter than Oxford and I agree, it is a very small and beautiful, relaxed town. People seemed very cheerful and happy there, and people walk slowly and don't push you around as they do in London.

I think we got to see almost all the colleges. My favourites were Pembroke College and King's College, though from what I've heard the MBAs usually end up in smaller or lesser known colleges. We had lunch in St Catherine's College where they offer subsidised food, very cheap and quite okay.

In the midst of these old buildings, I had a fascinating talk with my friend's boyfriend who is doing a master's in polymere engineering. Crazy stuff! Did you know they have developed biodegradable mobile phones by now and even contact lenses that turn into water at request? Suddenly I remembered I had met a Colombian girl in Hamburg who works for a polymere company in Hamburg that develops biodegradable shoes and stuff like that, these products don't only dissolve, but if you throw them into your garden they suddenly turn into plants. This is great stuff and I definitely need to look into this field, though I doubt I will ever study it I think it is a fascinating investment opportunity.

We also went river punting which I highly recommend to anyone who visits Cambridge. You get to see all the colleges from the back and can also watch crazy Chinese tourists trying to punt themselves. Obviously, lots of students as well who struggle not to fall into the water.

Being an MBA student obviously I was also curious to visit Judge Business School. It looks like they have very generous sponsors, it is located in a very artsy building that used to be a hospital but has now been converted to a business school. The architecture is very nice and colourful.

What did I learn about Judge? It seems to be very collaborative and friendly with only 110 students per year. Also, the class seems very diverse in terms of backgrounds, they have an age range up to 50 years (vs. 36 at London Business School) and according to my friend many people from charities and public services. The conflict now is that they want to move up in the rankings, which would mean reducing diversity (chuck out those non profit guys for a GMAT800 IT consultant). Let's see in which direction they go, but I definitely liked the school.

They are also going to the MBAT tournament next year so we will meet some more of the class. So, this is what's happening in my life "outside of London Business School".

Finally: New Dean appointed

2006-11-07T18:30:00.000+01:00

Just a quick update for those wondering who will replace Laura Tyson as our next Dean:

It will be Robin Buchanan, senior partner at Bain & Company (he's been partner since 1990 so seems to be a very senior guy). He has an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Sounds like a great choice. Especially the people in our school interested in consulting are very happy, but I think overall you can definitely expect things to go forward.

Midterm reflections on classes so far

2006-11-05T02:06:00.000+01:00

6 weeks into the course, it is time for a reflection on the MBA core courses so far to follow up on my first impressions.

Microeconomics
The class I enjoyed the most. The only thing that upsets me is that I always think economics would have been the perfect undergrad for me. But at least now I get to study a little bit of it. The interesting thing is that I did not expect to like it, because I had a 5 day crash course in Microeconomics during my Mini-MBA taught by Besanko (back then I did not know he was a big guy in Microeconomics) and it was too much, it is not a subject you can absorb easily within a few days, especially because this professor liked maths and graphs even more than our current professor :-).

What I like about Microeconomics is that it is very challenging and also very relevant. In which other subject do you deal with very strategic topics such as pricing and market entry but actually discuss based on facts and formulas rather than exchanging random opinions (which can happen in strategy class - more about that later). We have only just covered the basics and are starting game theory now (our professor's favourite topic), but I have a feeling I will learn more about strategy in Microeconomics class than in strategy class

Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility
The cases chosen for this class were excellent. I think all of them touched on extremely relevant and contentious topics that we might be confronted with. We started out with minor ethical dilemmas (such as putting information in a favourable light to sell at a higher price (is this how business works or not?), but then moved on the more political topic of corruption: what should an individual manager do in a situation where he is urged to bribe and it may be the only way to get a contract? Should managers act differently when they are expats? And in the very end, we got to topics of Corporate Social Responsibility, discussing pharmaceutical firms' responsibility to give away cheap drugs to developing country's and also Walmart's responsibility to the environment, its employees and its suppliers' employees. All of the cases were quite controversial. My favourite phrase of a classmate was "but we are just assuming this is corruption. I would prefer to call it relationship building!".

What left me a bit frustrated was that in the end I haven't advanced at all in this class. Yes, I have heard other opinions. But I have in no way been able to make up my mind. I still don't have a strong stance on these topics and mostly I still don't know if it makes sense to do what seems on the surface to be the "moral" thing to do. But it is still fascinating to see the diverse opinions. When you work together with people you sometimes assume everybody has the same moral values, but it was quite clear there are very different views. So I think it is great that we have had this class, but I can't say I have a clearer view on what is the right thing to do in all situations, it's tricky.

Accounting
I was quite disappointed to find out we would be taught actual accounting (recording transactions) as opposed to financial statement analysis. I assume they assume you need to learn bottom up and put balance sheets together yourself in order to understand them better, but I think if we used all the time we spend on pretending we have an ice cream shop and record transactions actually learning the theory and conventions of financial statements and digged into financial ratios, risk analysis etc., it would be much more fruitful. At my company, I had the great privilege to be taught in Financial Analysis by Kellogg professor Art Raviv, and the one phrase I remember very clearly from him is "Accounting is a myth, accounting is fiction, accounting doesn't exist!" and then went on to teach us how to actually dissect financial statements and get to the truth behind them. That was much more fun. We are getting a new teacher next week though, let's see if his approach is different. I'm upset though because I think accounting is very important and not many people are good at it, so it is a useful thing to learn, the problem is so far I haven't been able to get enthusiastic about what we are doing and haven't learned anything in the class.

Strategy
I haven't made my mind up about this class yet. It is definitely a very hard subject to teach. The cases are good and we watch a lot of videos, which is fun. I think I have to do some outside reading (the professor posts many optional readings on portal but I've never managed to have a look at them so far). It may be a subject where you only get as much out of it as you put in, so I need to put more effort into it. Next week we have our strategy group assignment, let's see if I get into it then.

Finance I
Obviously, I came to London Business School because I wanted to learn Finance. Our teacher is great and the speed is extremely fast. Despite some initial knowledge and my interest in the subject, I find it quite challenging and I learn a lot in every class. The first group assignment was great, we did a valuation of the Airbus superjumbo, and it was exciting to do the valuation at a time that you read about the delays and their impact on the breakeven in the FT. I wish I had more time to study finance, we learn so much and I get by, but I fear I might forget lots of it next year, so I hope they repeat the content once in a while.

So overall, my impressions are mixed. I've learned a bit less that I hoped to and have caught myself reading FT or writing sms to friends on my Blackberry in class, and that is something I really did not want to do, but sometimes we don't learn anything interesting and I have to do that, I am impatient and need to do something, either leave the classroom or read or write, whatever keeps me busy. Next weeks will be busy so I might pay more attention in all classes from now on.

Lehman Brothers Investment Banking Workshop

2006-10-29T19:21:00.000+01:00

Better late than never, let's write about the ibanking workshop Lehman Brothers held in the Canary Wharf offices on Wednesday. Thanks, Women in Business Club for setting this up! The way to Canary Wharf was one of the most exciting parts actually. Some idiot must have left his bag on the train, and while we first waited in Canada Water to have the bag evacuated, they suddenly decided to evacuate all of us rather than the bag and we had to leave the train and the station immediately. Then we were wandering around Canada Water for half an hour trying to find a cab or a bus, but it was to no avail. In the end we went back to the station and at some point they opened it up again and we could finally reach Canary Wharf. You almost walk into Lehman Brothers offices as soon as you leave the station, which is very convenient.

They brought us up to the top floor (31st) which had an impressive and beautiful view over the night lights of London. 10 of us were half an hour late and the panel was ongoing. There were Managing Directors from each division - Investment Banking, Investment Management, Fixed Income, and Equities. After the panel, we moved on to a drinks reception, and many more Lehman employees joined. There were analysts, associates, several women from the recruiting team and more senior bankers, so it was very easy to talk. I especially enjoyed talking to an equities trader who is trying to get more women interested in trading. He was telling me that every woman who walks through the doors of Lehman comes with the wish of doing sales, no matter what their personalities are. He urged us to open our minds and examine our strengths, and he said it is more than okay not to decide upon the role we think fits us best. You have to know what the roles are and what your strengths are, but according to him you have to keep an open mind about where you would fit. I like this approach, because it can be hard to make such a decision from the outside, it is much easier from the inside.

Overall, the evening was very informative and friendly, and many of us on the way back were impressed by the effort they had put in providing us with honest information and informal contact (as well as delicious drinks and canapés!).

Why has my memory blurred a bit by now? Because, on Friday I had the luck to be shown the Deutsche Bank trading floors in the City! I loved it! To be honest, I would have loved to stay right there and go to work :-)). What did I love about it? Well, I had some preconceptions about trading floors, or let's say I had seen another trading floor once many years ago where I didn't feel comfortable, but this one is NICE!

First of all, hardly anyone was wearing a suit, most were smart casual. Then, there were lots of women, I'd say 30-40%. People were young and seemed very cheerful. Another stereotype is that people eat greasy fast food in front of their screens, but actually they have a pretty stylish café in the middle of the trading floor selling smoothies, juices and salads, nice! Then all the country teams had their flags either on the monitors or on the walls next to them, it revived my memories of the world cup in Germany :-). Also, instead of ten screens and twenty telephones the traders all just had two large and very new plasma screens and one phone (plus mobile I guess), so it all seemed quite relaxed and healthy. Add to that the fact that they had beautiful exhibits of modern art on the ground floor and I must say I was very impressed. I hope to go back soon.

The coming week there are luckily fewer events, one big one is the stock pitch of the Investment Management Club on Wednesday, but sadly I'll miss it because I have to recruit some undergrads for my company in the evening. It is funny switching back and forth between the roles of recruiter and candidate :-). On Thursday we have our Microeconomics midterm exam and then Sundowners, the timing of the exam is great, right before our happy hour in the MBar, so you can walk straight from the exam into the bar and celebrate, well done!

Pictures from Diwali party

2006-10-26T00:25:00.000+02:00

A few weeks ago, some classmates of mine complained that I never post pictures of the class on my blog. Then I posted some pictures from Tatoo on my blog, and others came to me and complained why I had posted pictures of others but not of them on my blog! :-). So it sounds like there is demand for more (maybe not from the viewers, but from the objects ;-) ). In any case, I think even for applicants it's nice to have an idea of the MBA students of a school. So here are some uncommented pictures from the Indian Diwali party a few days ago...

Next post (hopefully tomorrow) on the Lehman Brothers Women Workshop in their Canary Wharf offices. It was a great and very insightful event so it is definitely worth posting more about it.

Women in Business Conference 2006

2006-10-21T09:11:00.000+02:00

Yesterday we held the Women in Business Conference at the London Business School. What an experience! It was very high profile and I met and listened to some very impressive women:

1) Vivienne Cox, Executive Vice President and CEO, Gas, Power & Renewables and Integrated Supply & Trading, BP

Vivienne is one of the top people at BP and also an excellent speaker and a very nice person. She spent some time talking about renewable energy, but the most interesting parts were her advice to succeed (and I think that goes for men and women alike). Her advice was: "find something that only you can do and know what only you can do". This is useful for two things:
- If you ever want to work flexible hours, go home early or in any way appear to put in less time than others (e.g. when you have children), she said it is crucial that you are still the best person to do that job. So you have to know what you excel at and make sure you leverage this skill on your job. That way, you are in a much more favourable negotiating position than if you are easily replaceable
- If you're a boss, you may find yourself in the position of having 1,000 things on your to do list and you may get overwhelmed by all the work. So knowing what only you can do also means that you know which things others can also do by exclusion. So her advice was if you are overwhelmed, only do the things that only you can do and delegate the rest. Also sound advice

2) Dorothee Blessing, Managing Director, Goldman Sachs IBD
Many who saw her agreed that Dorothee was the jewel of this conference. Finally, an example of a very smart and ambitious women who loves her job, has a big family (three children) and is an extremely good and helpful person. Her answers to the questions from the audience were very insightful and she listened very closely and thought very hard to give just the right answer to that person.

She shared some wisdom of hers that I will never forget. Lots of us were wondering "how is it possible?" to work fulltime in investment banking, travel around the world and have three children? Her answer was that the main problem is not about being a women. She said the most important thing is to know what you want in your life. This gives you determination and also makes you do only the things you love. In her case, she said she always knew she wanted a big family, no matter what. She then joined Goldman Sachs in Frankfurt and simply loved the job, so she also wanted to continue in that job. She said if you know exactly what you want and love your job, you will find a way to make things work.

The conclusion to this is that maybe many women who say they can't handle job and family or they need to withdraw from work because it doesn't work never loved their job in the first place? Maybe we just use children as an excuse to leave a place we didn't want to be in anyway? I'm not claiming it is going to be easy and Dorothee wasn't. I just found it very insightful that instead of agonizing over how hard it is to be a woman, we would do well investing this time in figuring out what exactly we want and which job we would really love, and then I completely agree with her that you will find a way to make it work, because in that case it is worthwile.

I am very thankful this busy MD flew in from Frankfurt to share this with us. She has changed the way I think within an hour, and how often can you say that about people? This leaves me now with the task of figuring out my dream job again - ouch!

3) Networking
There was also plenty of time to network in between and after the session. Apart from having more time to talk to my lovely female classmates (they are all so nice, so this is always great, even if I do it every day :-) ), I met an Irish alumna who is now CEO of her software startup, and funnily enough also a MiF alumna from Hamburg who is now a freelance consultant in Hamburg. I also met again a Goldman Sachs recruiter I had met already at a dinner two weeks ago, and it was a pleasure to talk to her again, and then I got the chance to talk for the first time to our excellent Finance professor, Francesca Cornelli. She is one of these rare persons simply everybody has to like. She is also an excellent teacher, the pace is fast but I enjoy the class very much. I came with some previous finance knowledge but we go much further than the basics I had in every lecture. We are in the 3rd week now and already dealing with calculating forward rates, it's great

The weeks ahead are going to be BUSY. It's not so much the workload from school (though there are five assignment piled up), but more the fact that every evening there are events, so if you want to take advantage of them you only have the weekend to do any work. The events for the coming days:
- Indian Diwali party on campus, including dinner, fireworks and Bollywood dancing
- Lehman Brothers Women's Workshop in their Canary Wharf offices
- Scholarship drinks reception with the Dean and the corporate sponsors of the school
- Lunch with the MD of HR of Deutsche Bank in their offices in the City
- Undergraduate recruiting at London School of Economics, Oxford and Cambridge - since I have time I am helping out my company to recruit smart German undergrads for our German office. Some of them might be lured by opportunities in London so we have to work hard to lure them back to Germany. I think I am well suited for this because I studied in the UK and actually applied to the London office out of undergrad, but somehow the German office found out and convinced me to forget about London and come to Germany

Apart from that - still working on figuring out the right path in my life. Yesterday I decided to take a day off from this. If you look at it from an outsider's perspective, all this talk about "should I do Consulting or Investment Banking?" probably sounds completely stupid. There are so many people in London who are designers, art dealers, architects, journalists and so on, and to them I assume it all sounds the same. What I'm doing now is I'm talking a lot to other McKinsey people and then to lots of other people, often with finance background. Among the McKinsey people (we are 8 in our MBA class) I think as good as 100% want to go back and think this is the best thing to do. Of the other people I talk to, many also think it makes sense to stay a couple of years longer. It's funny how fast things can change. I'll keep my mind open for a few more months and go to all the networking and informational events, so far they have been very helpful in giving me an idea of where I would enjoy working and where I most likely wouldn't.

Pictures from London Business School - Pictures of Diversity

2006-10-15T10:21:00.000+02:00

Yesterday we celebrated the best event at London Business School so far - TATOO! Wonder why it's called TATOO? Well, this is why:

TATOO is a celebration of the diversity of the school, and each country or region prepares food, drinks, songs, dances or whatever they feel like to present to the school. The clear winners for me?

1. RUSSIA

The Russians served excellent food (something I had not expected!), the fact that they didn't serve vodka wasn't their fault (we could only get drinks from the MBar and the student associations, even the German stall couldn't serve beer!), but what I liked even more were their costumes, their dances and their music. Everybody enjoyed watching them very much.

2. INDIA

The Indians prepared a little dance/play about a flirting game, it was a lot of fun, they had beautiful costumes and the music was beautiful. I know they practiced many times of the last week so I was also impressed by their time commitment, since we are all quite busy right now, and I think it was very sweet of them to sacrifice all their spare time over the last week to show the school community their dances. Thank you, India!

3. FRANCE

What can I say? Excellent food! The cheese was great and the burning crèpes even better! The French sure showed everyone that they know what good food and hospitality are!

And... my classmates!

And how could I forget? THE BAND!

It is a bit ironic when future investment bankers and management consultants start singing Rage against the Machine songs ("F* you, I won't do what you tell me!"), but hey, a bit of nostalgia should be allowed, right?

Overall, a beautiful party! And now back to work - fast!

Career choices

2006-10-08T18:54:00.000+02:00

One of the very frequently asked questions on campus is "what do you want to do after your MBA" or in my case "are you going back to consulting?" Some have a very clear and consistent answer to this, others don't know and therefore don't like the question. In my case, the answer is usually quite clear but not very consistent. Ask me now and the answer might be very different from two months ago.

I came here with the aim of working in global currency and commodities markets. Though I'm still very interested in these markets, I have also become very interested in equities over the last weeks. Then I read an excellent account of the hedge fund industry – Hedgehogging (Penton Audio) by Barton Biggs, founder of the hedge fund Traxis Partners. It is very insightful and truly hilarious and generally made me very interested in fund management.

As if this wasn't enough to keep me distracted, I am unsure if leaving consulting at this moment is smart. Leaving now, I would enter the field of finance as an associate and I'm not sure how I could progress from there, especially in more specified fields such as investments. At the same time, I am constantly receiving good bye emails from colleagues who are about 2 years ahead of me and they seem to move over to very interesting jobs in private equity/venture capital and investment management. So now I'm exploring this option. I know some partners in the corporate finance and private equity practice so it would be quite easy for me to work on projects in this field to prepare for the move.

To make this decision, networking will help a lot. I am currently reaching out to colleagues, business school classmates with consulting background facing the same choices, alumni of my company who moved over to investment banking and hedge funds, as well as classmates with finance background. The common consensus among most I've talked to so far is that it makes more sense to stay in consulting for a while longer, at least in terms of career.

The problem with consulting is that, since it is a quite accelerated path, the longer you stay the less attractive outside options become. The good thing is I really like the people from my company. We are a group of 8 ex-analysts in our class and I like all of them very much. On Thursday we are invited for a dinner by the London office and in two weeks I'll help out recruiting undergrads from Oxford/Cambridge/LSE for the German office (this is a challenging task since competition from London-based consultancies and investment banks is fierce). So I'm reminded a bit of the book Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle. In it an ex-ibanking-analysts goes to business school convinced he will never go back to M&A. But then he is lured into a summer internship on Wall Street by a more prestigious bank thinking there it will be better. He hates the summer internship and returns to the 2^nd year convinced he will not return. But then school starts, he's invited for dinners and events, receives an offer with a nice bonus and suddenly finds himself back where he didn't want to be as a fulltime associate.

There is no conclusion to my post. I could write a conclusion now and next week the conclusion could be different. I think once I've talked to about twenty people hearing their thoughts, opinions and experience I will advance. There is still about half a year to make a decision.

First Impressions of professors and core courses

2006-10-03T21:32:00.000+02:00

The core courses have finally started. So far, I've had Microeconomics and Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility. Here are my thoughts so far. Both professors are of extremely high calibre. We also had a glimpse of an entrepreneurship professor at a careers service event last week and he was also extremely bright and entertaining. So my overall impression of the faculty is excellent. I would even say that I am positively surprised, despite my high expectations. Unfortunately, mbaprof is not telling the tale from the professors' perspective anymore. I assume he was found out and told to stop blogging? Now let's talk about the courses:

Microeconomics: I had been told by a 2nd year that this professor is controversial, so some people love him and others are very upset about him. I enjoyed the class immensely, it was very entertaining and the dry matter of supply and demand was discussed in an original way. I heard some people were confused or upset that he made everything sound very difficult, but I didn't notice that. Also, the professor is great at discouraging waffling, so if someone talks just to talk he makes a bit fun of them, which is mean but will be good for the quality of class participation.

We seem to get a lot of extra work and homework in this class, but I think that helps to learn. Also, I enjoy learning, this is better than working, right? I don't really understand when people moan about every class and every assignment. Why pay $80,000 tuition fees if you don't want to learn anything? I think it is just a social thing and everybody thinks they have to moan about studies to fit in, but I find it ridiculous, we're not in high school (or are we? There are some high school stories going on, but I don't feel like writing about them. Let's just say some people forget they are not 16 anymore).

Business Ethics: This is certainly a topic many moaned about before it started... "what's the point?" "you can't learn ethics", "it has nothing to do with business"... The class was great though. Obviously we started out talking about Enron, Arthur Andersen and the like. It turned out we had someone in the class who once interned at Enron and then worked on a Parmalat deal at an ibank. Then there were four or so with experience at Andersen, and also another one witnessing bribes and corruption at an aerospace company. So I think everyone saw that it will affect everyone directly or indirectly and we cannot afford to say we don't care about these matters in business. The case discussion was controversial, as expected. I look forward to the next case discussion, which will be about bribery.

Tomorrow we have our first Finance class, finally! Today was also the meeting of the Finance Club, which was impressive. They organise lots of events, such as modelling and excel training, interview training, sessions on "life as a trader" or "global currency markets" held by global investment banks. It will be very useful! Tomorrow is also the 1st meeting of the investment management club. So there are events every day and it is very exciting.

Steering towards desaster

2006-09-28T14:53:00.000+02:00

Business school life is very tempting. Every day, you get emails from people organising something. The mountaineering club organising trips to Wales, the surf club offering trips to Cornwall, the Latin Club announcing Salsa lessons, the Investment Management Club hosting a stock pitching contest, then every weekend there are house parties, house parties and more house parties. Right now I am very enthusiastic and am signing up for lots of interesting events

I signed up as a volunteer for the Women in Business conference hosted at the end of October. There will be panels about Microfinance, Success Factors and, above all, about my new favourite topic, Personal Wealth Management and Financial Planning (more on this topic to follow soon)
I formed a team of four to participate in the Venture Capital Investment Management competition, we are a great team and I hope we have time to do a good job, because I think we definitely have an edge
Yesterday we had great fun at the "girl's night out", about 70 female MBA2008s showed up and we had a great night, it was so nice to meet some more girls I hadn't met yet
Today is Sundowners - the first happy hour hosted by the school for staff and students including free drinks!
Today is also the club fair - where we can sign up to even more events
Tonight is also another house party in Swiss Cottage
Tomorrow we invited about 10 people for dinner - all the MBAs/MiF who live in our building
Saturday night is yet another house warming party
Sunday is the kickoff for the Women's Football club
...

You get the idea! So far it's a lot of fun, though I suspect at some point this will all end in desaster :-). I will actually be a bit less busy than expected because I just found out they have canceled the Russian language course due to lack of demand. I am extremely upset about this, because I was determined to speak Russian by next summer. My last trip to Uzbekistan was great - but it would have been much better if I had been able to talk to people! So I am determined to learn Russian but now the issue is complicated. I might use next spring break to do an intensive course in St Petersburg.

Anyway, I'll keep myself busy. In case my frequency goes down, I am especially happy to announce a new MBA2008 blogger, Genie! Thanks, Rusgirl, for pointing me to her. As it happened, we have two Russian girls in our class and I didn't know which one Genie was, but I did find out last night at the girl's night out, so there is no blogger left "in hiding" now.

10 questions (not!) to ask at recruiting events

2006-09-22T22:05:00.000+02:00

Knowing that I was off to business school, I volunteered to take part in a recruiting event of my consulting company in May. Actually, we call these events "sourcing events", where we "source" new candidates to apply for a job with us. This is distinct from actual recruiting events where you would conduct interviews. So there I was on a Saturday morning 9am after a very tough 80h working week, having come home from the airport the night before.

First, a principal from the Swiss office made a very interesting speech about the sports industry (basically, the big money behind FIFA, Olympics; Basketball etc.), and then there was a free brunch for all the candidates with about 5 consultants mingling with the candidates to answer their questions on consulting and our company. What struck me was that some candidates gave me very bad vibes and some gave me very good vibes. Some made me feel bad, angry or shocked at their naivity, others made me feel at ease. Obviously, based on these observations I would make recommendations for the candidates or not. After the event, I thought about why I got a negative impression of some and a very positive one of others. I think this is helpful for anyone attending recruiting or networking events.

What not to ask at a recruiting event...

Do I have to have studied business studies to apply?
Isn't it horrible to sleep in hotels 4 nights a week? I could never do that!
But do you really work so much? Isn't it tiring?
But do you recruit natural scientists? (upon my affirmation) But I studied advanced robotics, can I do advanced robotics work in consulting? or another girl but do you have molecular biologists? (upon my assertion that we have just about everyone you could imagine in my company) Well, I don't think so because my university was the first to launch a molecular biology degree 3 years ago
Do you like your job?

... and why not...
Regarding the last question, it is actually the most valid of the list and can give useful insight. However, since I didn't like my job very much at the time, it made me feel bad. It made me feel bad that I had a job I didn't like, and it made me feel bad because I was in a dilemma about what to say. Obviously I cannot say that I don't. So I can say yes, you learn a lot, but that it is definitely a tough job. So the problem I have with the last question (do you like your job?) is that it can put the other person in a defensive and uncomfortable situation, and you should always try to make the "recruiter" feel at ease.

The first four questions are terrible, because rather than show interest in the job or the company, the candidate is looking for reasons NOT to like the job. I found that many students who had no idea about my job only wanted to hear about the negative aspects of the job or threw around prejudices they had heard. Some questions also stem from insecurity. Instead of saying that they have a background in computer science but they would love to learn more about business, they ask "but do you hire scientists? But can I do robotics?". Some also showed a high degree of inflexibility. Some candidates had a background in biology or medicine and asked if they could apply their knowledge in consulting, and I started telling them about work for healthcare and pharmaceutical companies, but they would insist "but can I do molecular biology?". First, it shows a lack of interest in a wider range of topics, and it also shows a high degree of ignorance about the business world.

So keep your doubts about the job to yourself and ask more diplomatic and positive questions instead. These will usually give you the information you wanted, but leave a much better impression.

... and what to ask

What do you actually do in consulting on a daily basis?
What would a typical week look like?
What are the people like in your company?
I studied political science and would love to try out consulting - how would you advise me to approach consultancies?
I would love to have a better idea of the kind of work you do. What kind of projects have you worked on so far?
...

If you are looking for commonalities in these questions, you will quickly notice that these questions show genuine interest and an open-mindedness. These people respected that I probably can tell them more about the job than any little prejudices they might have heard second hand, and asked with an open mind. They also conveyed a much more positive attitude by asking how to make it happen, rather than listing all the problems there might be. The questions were also very open, engaging me in conversation, rather than abrupt, such as "isn't it horrible to sleep in hotels every week?".

I think it is not about lying or asking only flattering questions. It is about coming in with an open mind and asking the person who probably knows best what the job is like what their job is like. This is very different from coming in thinking that consulting or investment banking is a horrible job and looking for confirmation of this opinion. If you think the job is horrible and you know all about it, why attend the event in the first place?

Feeling inspired - and keeping myself busy

2006-09-20T12:04:00.000+02:00

Thanks to Patxi and anonymous guy for your comment on my "eulogy". In the end, I spent almost a whole day thinking about it, and it was time well spent. The good thing is, I don't have to overthrow all career plans I had in mind so far. I have realised that which job I choose does not matter very much at all. People always agonise about which is there dream job, and I think this can be a very difficult approach. There may not even be a dream job for you (this idea is very well presented in a new book called "Working Identity" by INSEAD professor Herminia Ibarra).

The traditional approach to find your dream job, as suggested in "Which color is your parachute?", is to think of people you admire and what jobs they have. I never could think of anyone when I thought of CEOs or entrepreneurs I had heard about. It only struck me yesterday who my two role models are - and they are very close. One is my 87 year old grandmother, who used to be an interpreter at German embassies and also a translator of children's books. Some of you may know the English classic "Black Beauty" - my grandmother translated the book into German. But I admire her not because of her job, but because even at 87 she is traveling, working, learning languages, she is a very cheerful person and she is still very curious about life. I admire her for her energy.

The other person I admire (or envy?) is my stepfather, who is a doctor. He loves his job so much that even though he could easily retire, he is now doing five jobs at a time - in two hospitals, in a private practice, giving advice to courts of justice, lecturing at universities and conferences. I admire him because he has found a job that he loves and he can spend 60h working at his age and be a very happy man. At the same time, he travels around the world, plays golf, goes to jazz clubs and generally enjoys life.

What I learned from thinking about why I admire them was that it doesn't mean at all I want to become an interpreter or a doctor. Also, that maybe it doesn't matter if my next step after business school is entrepreneur, investment banker or journalist. I can switch around as much as I want to. I can do new things every 3 years if I want to. Realising this has taken considerable pressure of me. I know feel very free to enjoy life and not worry so much about career choice. Well, I still haven't found the purpose of life and I still haven't found my "dream job". But I know now what kind of life I want to live to be happy when I'm 60 or 80, and that makes me happy.

Talking of enjoying life, these are my plans for the next days:

tonight: dinner with our Brazilian housemates (we have 4 London Business School flats in our building and are having dinner together for the first time)
Thursday night: traditional English dinner with my study group near St James Park
Friday: dancing in a Bollywood club in Soho organised by Indian classmates
Saturday: brunch in Notting Hill with friends I made while studying for a masters degree in St Andrews

Viva la independencia - but do you know where you are going?

2006-09-17T22:57:00.000+02:00

Yesterday about 100 London Business School students celebrated Mexican independence day at the Mestizo in North London. It's funny how history passes, and lots of Spanish people came along to celebrate as well, among others fellow bloggers Karlitos and Patxi (though one of the two left suspiciously early :-) ). It was quite crowded and hot in the bar itself so I spent most of the time outside with about 40 other students talking about this and that. Right now it is quite a nice phase, you already know a lot of people and get to know them better, but at the same time I still meet a lot of new people every time I go out, so it is a nice mixture of the known and the unknown.

Other than that, I am constantly postponing my assignment for Understanding General Management that is due on Tuesday. We have been asked to write our own obituary. I assume the idea behind is that we should think about what is important in life and what we want to have achieved when we look back. I feel very offended by this assignment. Yes, one should think about the purpose of life. But unfortunately, I came to the conclusion that there is no purpose to life when I was still in high school, and have been quite successful in forgetting about it over the last ten years. Now I have been reminded of this, thanks to the MBA. I think on a superficial level, it can be inspiring to think about a purpose in life - saving the world, helping the poor, leaving a trace in the world (via achievement or offspring). But to be honest, one does not need an MBA to strive for this. It might even be counterproductive.

Pondering on the purpose of life is quite a demanding task for an MBA student. Few of us are philosophers, and those who are are particularly unlikely to know the answer. In conclusion, what I don't like about this assignment is that the only way to answer it is in a very superficial, conventional way. As soon as you try to find a sincere and more thoughtful answer, you will fail.

Most likely, my obituary will sound like this:
"By the age of 15, she realised she would not find a purpose in life. For most of the time (interrupted only by a short period of time at London Business School), she successfully managed to suppress this truth and therefore lived a happy, long and successful life".

As you can see, it is not the most motivating of all assignments. Luckily I will forget about it very soon.

Sunny weekend in London

2006-09-10T23:30:00.000+02:00

Life is still very relaxed here. Unexpectedly, it turns out we don't have any "real classes" till October. We are spending our time during the week mainly on preparing our CVs for the CV book, getting introductions about leadership and management and other such issues. The only real course would have been Business Statistics, but I'm waiving that one, so I have 5 free days over the next two weeks. It's really not very busy yet in academic terms, so I get to go to the gym everyday, which is very nice.

Contrary to weekdays, weekends are very busy. On Friday we had our first off campus party. A classmate who owns a house in Clapham threw a big party in his house, which I think about 60 or 70 of our class attended. Moe was so kind as to share his vodka with me, so I had a splendid time :-), even though one of our classmates who apparently was a DJ in his pre-MBA life didn't show up.

On Saturday I went to Harrod's food section with my husband to get some good cheese, which is not so easy in your average British supermarket. I love Harrod's food section, if I could I would buy all my food there. Last night three Indian classmates had a little dinner party. We were in a group of about 10 or 15 people, enjoyed Indian food and lots of wine and had a very good time.

Today was the warmest day in London so far, and I went to Hyde Park Speakers' Corner. If you want to see freedom of speech in action, this is the place to go. It is all quite useless though, as the speakers seem to be mainly fanatics who are not interested in listening, and the same goes for most of the listeners. The highlights were an American Muslim preacher claiming that men and women weren't equal ("because my wife doesn't pay any bills, but I pay bills") and an English guy claiming that Christianity was the religion of peace, and Islam was the religion of war and violence, unsurprisingly he ended up surrounded by a group of 5 Arabs shouting at him.

Then there was a Jamaican who claimed he was an angel (little did he know that he had another angel listening to him :-) ), and an English woman who simply insulted her audience. Overall, an interesting experience, I am constantly astonished how much energy people spend on trying to convince others of their religious or political opinions, since in my experience it is a completely useless effort and a big waste of time.

Then I had the great pleasure to meet a Maroccan friend who is just starting her MBA at HEC. She wrote me once because of this blog and since then we had been emailing once in a while. So this was the first time we met in person and I enjoyed it very much, even though there was not enough time. When I started this blog, I was mainly focused on helping other applicants, I hadn't considered the fact that I would actually make friends this way, but now this "side effect" is highly welcome :-).

Overall, the weekend was excellent, it is simply impossible to be bored in London. The great part is that the weekend continues on Monday, since I am waiving statistics :-). But I have two cases to read, so tomorrow I actually intend to do a little bit of work as well.

Escaping the comfort zone during Away Day

2006-09-05T16:03:00.000+02:00

Yesterday we finally had our "Away Day". We were not told what we would be doing, only that we had to be at the school at 7am sharp and take off to the countryside!

The whole day was all about challenging ourselves and about team work. We did some very challenging stuff, like rock climbing and also climbing a high pole and jumping down. We were secured by ropes obviously, but for someone like me who has never even been on a rollercoaster, this was definitely a high adrenaline activity!

What I enjoyed most, apart from the high adrenaline, was working in our team. They put two study groups together, so we got know our own study group closer but also had the chance to meet more people. Again, the diversity of our team was impressive. Put together an Israeli engineer, an Egyptian investment banker, a British ex-soldier, a Russian automotive manager and many more, and you know what a high performing and diverse team is! We speak 9 languages within our study group alone! Not a bad record for a team of seven MBA students!

Tonight it's my turn to prepare dinner for my flatmates, after enjoying a delicious Chicken Khorma prepared by our Pakistani flatmate on Sunday. I'll make stuffed bell peppers in beef and tomato sauce. It's my favourite dish, and I hope it turns out well. Sharing a flat with two classmates has turned out really well, it gave me the possibility of living very close to school for an affordable rent, and it's fun to enjoy dinner together and remind each other of all the things one can forget, such as reading cases, showing up to careers service presentations, picking up documents from the school, waking up at 6am etc..

London orientation

2006-08-31T21:48:00.000+02:00

So, finally the MBA has started. Technically, I don't think it starts till October, these first 4 weeks will contain mainly introductions, preparations, skill development, leadership training and team building, which is good, because it gives us time to get to know each other and learn how to work together before we get busy.

Stephen, Patxi and Karlitos have already described the orientation so I just want to mention the parts that most impressed me:

- the lecture by strategy professor Costas Markides on "Ten things I wish I knew when I did my MBA" (he holds an MBA from Harvard Business School). There was lots of useful advice and many many occasions for laughter. I can't wait to attend his classes

- the international citizens game. As Patxi mentioned, the "German engineer" (who is actually a philosopher) was hilarious and I think I owe the bottle of champagne I won to him (all of us Germans won a bottle of champagne each, a very generous gift, given that we are for the first time 10 Germans in the class). There were lots of memorable and funny presentations from the regional groups, there was Spanish flamenco, Canadian singing, British umbrella handling advice and an introduction into Japanese greeting and drinking habits (see picture).

- numerous drink receptions. I enjoyed meeting lots of classmates. As Patxi mentioned, the class is very diverse and some have very interesting and unusual backgrounds, so that is definitely a plus.

- We were told however, that diversity is also a major predictor in the study group so I am also a little bit relieved that our study group is not that diverse. The countries covered in my study group are India, US, Egypt, UK, Germany, Spain and Russia. Probably, for a US school that would count as very diverse, but if you look at it at a map all countries except India/US are within a small circle of the globe and could all be considered relatively Westernized.

- The streams: yes, I'm in Stream A, which I'm very happy about, because somehow I always ended up in stream or class a, in primary school, in grammar school, and any other places I've been after that, so I had a feeling I would end up in Stream A and that's what I did. In terms of fellow bloggers I have Moe and VJ in my stream, and lots of people I had met at the pub crawl, so I am very happy with my stream.

Today there was no highlight, the day was dedicated to career services information, and to be honest I can see how it is helpful for some, but if you are a sponsored candidate or know exactly what you're looking for, the general information sessions ("what color is your parachute?") are not very useful. So I tried to sit through the day patiently.

Tomorrow will be more fun as I signed up for the Volunteering Day. I will have to get up at 7am where I could actually have had the day off instead, but I'm happy to volunteer and spend a day out in the fresh air.

I have the impression I won't be blogging as much as I used to over the next weeks, even though every day gives enough material to write five posts. But there's not much time now. Holiday is over.

Relaxing before the storm

2006-08-24T01:24:00.000+02:00

Things have been easy and relaxed here. Contrary to other people's experience, they set up my bank account in a day and I had no major problems (apart from all my cards and cheque books being designed for Mr angel angie rather than Miss!). I'm very happy with the pay as you go mobile deal I got from O2 and we have just signed our contract for the new flat!

We'll be living 5min or less walking distance from school right in the heart of Marylebone. I think it took some (Miss) divine intervention to get this flat, but it's great to find a place without having to deal with agencies. We'll be sharing the flat with one microchip designer and one marketing manager from the Silicon Valley. I can't wait to move in and finally unpack my bags!

Apart from that, the pub crawl is keeping us all busy. There are probably around 30 to 50 admits who turn up each day. Where are the other 260 people? It's a mystery. On Monday the orientation starts and we'll be divided into four streams and get assigned to our study group. I'm very curious to find out where and with whom I'll end up!

So next week will be very busy, with orientation, introductions, our first classes and a volunteering day on Friday that I signed up for. Luckily I get to waive one of the core courses, Business Statistics, giving me some spare time in September (5 full days to be exact!) to relax and go to the gym, so I'm looking forward to that.

School is getting quite busy now, last week when I got my student ID it was absolutely deserted but now you have more and more people walking around there. Apparently Joe Stiglitz was there there other day giving an executive course on globalisation. I was quite surprised by this since I wasn't too impressed by his book Globalization and its Discontents . And I have to add I read it many years ago, at a time that I thought No Logo was a great book (I haven't looked at it since 6 years so I can't comment what I would think about it now - but at least it's quite interesting and has some interesting analysis of changes in Western labour markets). I found Ken Rogoff's rebuttal of Stiglitz's book more convincing and I hadn't expected Stiglitz to be considered an authority on the subject of globalisation (though he obviously is an authority in other fields of economics). Anyway, I'm sure it doesn't hurt to confront future businessmen and women with some critical ideas :-). They'll hear those very seldom once they're back in the workforce.

So this is a little London update before the MBA finally starts! While I'm writing this, there's a fox in front of our house "barking" (or should I say screeching? It's a weird sound!). I have never seen a fox in my life so it's funny to have one in front of your house in London! And this is only zone 2! If the fox lets me sleep, then I'll catch some sleep now.

Price discrimination - the "stupid premium"

2006-08-18T11:57:00.000+02:00

I think you can have different opinions about price discrimination. You could say it's unfair to charge some consumers more for the same thing just because their willingness to pay is higher. The common trick in price discrimination is to alter the product in a little way to make it seem different (cooler designed chocolate boxes etc.) and you can identify those people ready to put money on the table.

On my recent holiday in Switzerland, I came across the most beautiful example of price discrimination. And in this case, I find it completely fair to overcharge those ready to buy this product. If you believe in such marketing tricks, you surely deserve to pay a premium for your stupidity.

In this case, the product was as simple as could be. I know there are people who argue that Evian tastes better than Vittel and so on, and that the Norwegian tap water sold in New York for $10 a bottle really is especially healthy, but this was even better. It seems that water is sold under the brand of Carpe Diem with three beautiful side effects. If you feel tired, you can choose "revitalising water". Or, if you're a bit upset, you can pick "calming water". But, my favourite, if you feel confused or missed your last yoga class, you can drink "harmonising water" instead. Isn't the modern world of marketing great? And now you can pay $5 for a bottle of water with a supposedly calming or harmonising effect. I don't know how successful this product has been in Switzerland so far, but given that they are ready to pay $7 for a little plate of tortilla chips ("because they are straight from family Gonzalez in Mexico"!), I'm sure harmonising water will be a huge success.

Yes, sometimes price discrimination is fair. Some people deserve to pay more. I'm enjoying my London tap water instead.

Getting settled in London

2006-08-10T18:25:00.000+02:00

Things are going very well here, I arrived safely despite the London terror threat (there had to be a benefit to getting up at 4am and flying a no-frills airline into Gatwick!) and managed to survive 2 hours of tube to finally reach Fulham.

Then I went to the HSBC branch to open up a student account. To my surprise, it was opened on the spot and I can now transfer funds to the UK. This will be very helpful for the flat search. Before that, I also went into the Royal Bank of Scotland branch to see what my dormant account from my student days was doing (I never got around to closing it when I left the UK in 2004). I thought I only had 3 pounds left but it turned out I had 7 pounds left so I treated myself to a Cafe Latte and a Smoothie in Costa Coffee :-).

I also have a UK mobile already. Before flying in, I ordered a SIM card from O2, so there it was waiting for me this morning. For pay as you go contract they definitely offer the best deals, great bolt-ons (something similar to package contracts but much more flexible) and also, if you top up at least GBP10 per month (which is easy) you get 50min calling time for free. So it means for just 10 pounds per month you can have 50min and 100 sms, without having to sign a contract. This is the deal I used when I studied in the UK.

I also picked up my student ID this afternoon. The LBS building was deserted. Thanks, Hobbes, for the advice about the photo for the ID. Something is wrong with the camera these days though, the photo is really dark, but it seems to be the case with everyone, so I think they have to retake them for those of us who came in early.

So with all these things done, I'm almost hoping I don't find a flat too soon. What am I going to do here for three weeks???? ;-))). Just joking, luckily London is not a boring place at all and there will be plenty to do. But seriously, all I have scheduled for the next 3 weeks is viewing flats, meeting friends and going to the pub every evening, pretty easy going schedule.

Now I'm off to a pub in Notting Hill and then will head to view my first flat. I have another appointment to view a flat on Saturday morning in Bayswater. Things are going well, lots of offers coming out on accomodation and there's plenty of time, so I'm not worried at all. After almost a year of counting down, London life has started very well :-).

Off to London - on my own

2006-08-09T16:37:00.000+02:00

I'm finally back from Switzerland and off to London tomorrow. My partner suddenly fell ill and we had to rebook his flight to Saturday. We have an increasingly weird history of never flying together. It is becoming eerie. In January, I was off on a business trip to Paris and we decided he'd join me privately to have a look at Paris, so we could at least spend the night together (at that time I had to fly to the US quite frequently). When we came to the airport, they had canceled the flight and somehow rebooked me but not him, so we couldn't go together, I had to go to Paris to my appointment and he stayed. When we went to Switzerland, we arrived at the airport 30min before take-off and it turned out he had left his passport at home. He joined me the same evening, taking advantage of the fast rail connection with Zurich. And now here we are, scheduled to take a one-way flight to London and, again, I'll go on my own.

No need to feel sorry though (at least not for me) because these coming days will be busy!
Thursday: collect student ID from LBS, visit estate agents to set up flat viewings, open up bank account with HSBC, view my first flat at 8pm, afterwards drinks at my sister's house in Fulham
Friday: wait for my UPS shipping to arrive, browse findaproperty.com and call estate agents, go to pub in Maryleborne to meet with French undergrad friend
Saturday: follow Patxi's advice and walk around preferred areas for flathunting: Maryleborne, Maidavale, Bayswater (my friend's idea, according to him the greatest place to live in London, let's see!), pick up my partner from the airport, join my sister at a party of some German friends of hers

In addition to that, we have the flathunter's pub crawl coming up next week, we meet in a local pub EVERY WEEK DAY at 7 pm, so that will keep us busy, too. So, busy London life is approaching fast. I hope next time I post I have some good news from my flatsearch.