back at London Business School tonight!

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!

MBA finances

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

Happy ending of my summer internship

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

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!!

Electives for next year - Finance, Finance and more Finance

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."

Just another weekend in London

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.

Summer term courses

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

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

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.

Going to... Chicago GSB!

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?

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.

The future of business schools in Africa

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.

First week of classes

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?

You know the first term is over when...

- 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

Finally: New Dean appointed

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

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.

Pictures from Diwali party

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.

First Impressions of professors and core courses

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

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.

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

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.