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.

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.

Pictures from London Business School - Pictures of Diversity

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!

The class of 2008 is complete - almost!

Just want to say CONGRATULATIONS to all the R4 admits and all the waitlisted candidates who have moved off the waiting list right into the class of 2008 until now! I hope all of you end up coming to London Business School!

So it seems the class of 2008 is almost complete now! I guess some of the admits will still end up going to other schools - which will be good for some of the waitlisted candidates who can still move up over the next weeks.

And then surely we'll see each other in August! There's not much time left now. Monday will be the last day (in my life?) that I'm flying away at 6am in the morning, the last week of sleeping alone in a hotel, and most importantly, the last week of WORK! So it's time to enjoy the weekend now and gain some strength for that last week :-). Hope all the recent admits will party too over the weekend!

Admits in the Biergarten

This Monday we finally managed to set up a get together of admits in Munich. Unfortunately we met just the day Jorge & Dani had left, but I heard they had met another admit the previous week so I hope they enjoyed their time in Germany. We were five people, two girls three guys, three Germans, one French and one Spanish, so not as diverse as Patxi's Bay Area meeting, but given the fact that we're in Munich that's a very good record.

We had a nice time chatting about moving to London and flathunting. At the same time, we were watching in the Spain - Tunisia match shown on a big screen in the Biergarten. Luckily Spain won so that our Spanish and hispanophile admits were happy. As it turned out, at some point one of the admits mentioned a friend of his would join us, and suddenly a colleague of mine is standing in front of me, and not any colleague but a "peer", a guy who started the same month as me and whom I hadn't seen in two years. So I spent lots of the remaining time talking to him, and then it turned out we were staying in the same hotel so we went back together, just in time before the rain started.

Only about 7 working days left here and things are pretty relaxing now. We have a new team mate (an INSEAD MBA) who will replace me, so I'm just doing the handover right now. It's very different from a few months ago, I get out around 8 or 9pm these days, we go for dinner or drinks once in a while and things are good. Still, I'm very happy it 's over soon.

These days several people have contacted me who couldn't decide between INSEAD and LBS. One guy I met at the admits weekend called me to ask my opinion, and to be honest I think there are people for who INSEAD makes more sense, or might be a financially more viable option. Then one day after that another admit emailed me and asked the exact same question. And an Arab colleague of mine wanted to go to LBS but his parents are strongly "suggesting" him to go to INSEAD instead. So somehow I got the impression there is good hope for R4 admits and waiting list candidates, there are still lots of admits pondering other choices.

Another 2008 blogger!

It is quite incredible how many of the class of 2008 are already blogging, the MBA hasn't even started yet! I want to welcome a new classmate of ours, Karlitos from Barcelona, to the group of 2008 bloggers! The picture does not show him obviously ;-), just a random person on the Ramblas who I managed to take a photograph of during my Christmas vacation in Spain :-).


I am also trying to set up a get together of admits in Munich for mid June, let me know if any of you are around at the time of the football world cup!

Apart from that, I want to congratulate all the London Business School students who won the trophy at the MBA Olympics "MBAT" at HEC in Paris this weekend, I'm proud of you! Even the FT was proud enough to mention our sporting heroes!

Other than that, time is passing fast, little over four more weeks to go at work and there are lots of public holidays upcoming, my mood is slowly becoming enthusiastic (it seems like my mood is eerily synchronized with Al's)!
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Update from June 5th: in recent days, two more 2008 blogs have sprung up (at this rate half of the class will be blogging by September!). I want to welcome VJ from Amsterdam and Jorge & Dani from Sao Paolo to the LBS blogging community! Thanks to Patxi for the very appropriate logo on the left!

Admits weekend in London!

So, admits weekend is almost over! I'm sitting in the Lufthansa lounge and have an hour till my flight boards. Taking advantage of the fact that they have t-mobile hotspots at Heathrow airport, I'll give a short account to all those who couldn't make it, since I won't have time to write anything in the coming week (on a side note, a little trick for those of you who own a Blackberry with a flatrate: you can use t-mobile Hotspots for free anywhere if you choose "pay via mobile phone bill" rather than "pay by credit card" and then insert the number of your Blackberry instead of your actual mobile phone number :-) ).

First, the dinner on Friday night. We were greeted with a glass of champagne and slowly got talking to each other. About 100 people turned up, so in the end we were split up into two rooms. I got there quite early so I made sure to sit at a huge table with lots of people. I had a really good time, was seated between a guy from Amsterdam and one from Madrid, with a girl from India, a girl from the Philippines and a guy from Australia opposite me. We had a delicious 3 course meal, had great conversations and then slowly got up and mingled a little bit. I had the pleasure to meet Carlo who has been commenting on this blog and suspected that we work for the same company, and it turned out we do :-). I also met the people I had met at my first encounter with 2008 classmates. I also found out lots of people read my blog, which was very surprising! I have to be more careful about what I write from now on! :-). What amazed me the most was how excited people were about coming to London Business School, people had flown in from places as far as Tokyo and Toronto! There were even quite a few waitlisted candidates who showed up which was great, I do hope they get rewarded in the end, though unfortunately it has been communicated that attendance to the admits weekend wouldn't influence the LBS decision.

Saturday was a long, intense and great day! It started of with a long breakfast and we were greeted by the dean, the associate dean and the student ambassadors. Then we had a long list of lectures and sessions. Surprisingly, I especially enjoyed the Careers Services presentation. I was quite impressed by the quality of the Careers Services team. They told us that the woman in charge of investment banking careers had been the first woman to ever work on Wall Street and had 30 years of investment banking experience. So I guess she knows what she's talking about. "A day in the life of a student" was also quite a good insight into student activites and do's and don'ts. I was glad to be warned not to blurt out what I really thought about my job when I left because we would need to ask former bosses for 360° feedback for the orientation. So, all in all, lots of useful advice and plenty of time in between to chat with people.

At 5pm, lectures and sessions were luckily over, because I did get tired in the end. I woke up though when we all headed to the nearest pub, the Windsor Castle to enjoy a few drinks and talk to even more people! Afterwards, we had a short dinner and then got to the highlight of the evening: a gig in the cellar of the student bar by the student band (do they have a name?)!! They were really good and people were having lots of fun, people started stage diving already 3 minutes into the concert :-). I did wonder if they were from a different generation though with all those Guns n Roses and Jon Bon Jovi songs :-)! I must admit the current students were somewhat more active, while the admits were observing the scene wondering if we too would look like that next year :-). It struck me that soon I will enjoy student life again and became very happy. Bring it on!!! During the concert, I also had the great pleasure to talk a while to KV and the Divine Miss N, as well as Moe (I had met Wheels the evening before but somehow didn't bump into him again on Saturday, there were a lot of people there, I would say about 150 admits, 50 partners and around 30-40 current students from the class of 2007). What impressed me was how close the current students seemed to be, they seemed to be having a lot of fun. I don't know if I should really believe all this talk about how hard they work ;-)! They certainly looked like they were having a good time!

I probably don't need to repeat all those things that have been mentioned as advantages of London Business School. The diversity is impressive, there didn't seem to be any nationality over 10% of the class, I met people from Russia, Taiwan, Spain, Egypt, India, Malaysia, Italy, Canada, US, Pakistan and so on and so on, pretty cool! Also, talking to current students I enjoyed learning so much about potential careers, there were people from the UN, derivatives traders, lawyers, marketing executives, entrepreneurs and so on (though there is admittedly a large chunk of consultants and auditors!). But at least there seem to be plenty of people with unusual backgrounds. This was the reason I chose London Business School and it seems like it was definitely the right choice!

This morning, I attended the women's brunch at the Landmark Hotel, organized by the Women in Business Club. We were a rather small circle of about 30 women from the class of 2008 and 10 from the class of 2007, but this was also nice since the day before was a bit overwhelming and this was the chance to talk to less people in a more relaxed and quiet atmosphere for a longer time.

I didn't go to the afternoon's events. Instead, I went to my favourite restaurant in Chinatown, the Golden Dragon, to eat aromatic crispy duck with egg fried rice and drink jasmine tea. Afterwards, I took the chance to meet up with two of my sisters who happened to be in London this weekend in a pub near Green Park (how many "King's Arms" are there in London??), and then headed to the airport. And now it's back to work for another 5 weeks! This weekend was really helpful for me; on the one hand I'm even more excited about moving to London now, on the other hand I felt so inspired by all the people I met that I think I have the strength to work hard for another 5 weeks now, from now on time is going to pass like crazy!

Admits Weekend here I come!

----------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Ms angel angie,

Thank you for your booking online. Below please find the detailed information regarding your online award booking. Please have this confirmation with you when checking-in for your flights.

Flight: LH4758
Date: May 19, 2006
Routing: Munich, Franz Josef Strauss
- London, Heathrow

Departure: 15:05
Arrival: 16:10
Cabin: Economy

We wish you a pleasant flight.
Your Miles & More Service Team.
------------------------------------------------

I just booked my flight to London for May 19th and I can't wait!!

LBS admissions statistics

R2 admits had to pay their commitment fee last week so now I can share the new yield and class of 2008 statistics.

I had mentioned in a previous post that yield in R1 was around 75%. In R2, yield was only 59%. I guess those who apply in R1 are the very very eager and loyal ones (like me :-) ), I really wanted to go only to LBS). So now overall 360 offers have been extended and 234 have paid the commitment fee (overall yield 65%).

There are now at least 70 spots left, and I'm sure some people won't pay their reservation fee in June so there might be 80-90 spots still left for R3 and R4 applicants. This is pretty encouraging, isn't it?

Female share is down to 26%, which is better than in recent years but less than it was among the total group of admits, so yield was lower for female students for some reason.

R3 offers will be extended soon and then more people will join the portal and also attend admits weekend. I can't wait to meet everyone!

Congrats to R2 admits!

By now all the R2 admits have received their offers, congratulations!! It's great to see the number of admits jump up! The first thing I did was to check what countries people come from. The class is getting more and more diverse!

Some other interesting statistics
- the current female share among admits is 29%, a great improvement compared to recent years (and decades, obviously)! LBS seems to be approaching US levels. I believe it's thanks to the generous women scholarships offered by LBS and several investment banks!

- Surprisingly enough, the number of admits has only jumped by +88, while there were 140 admits initially in R1. I always thought R2 was the biggest round? What happened? Update: Apparently it took a while to include all admits into the directory. In fact, the number of admits in R2 was around 220 vs. 140 in R1.

- It seems though that about 40 admits from R1 never paid the commitment fee so the number of R1 admits as shown on the portal is down to 100. On the one hand, the yield of 71% in R1 doesn't sound good for LBS. Or is this good? I don't really have a comparison.

Work is crazy at the moment so I don't have much to write much on here, but I look forward to meeting everyone at the admits weekend in May and I'm counting down the days till August 28th!

First encounter with 2008 classmates!

This weekend I have had my first encounter with some of my future classmates!

Friday night I went out in Kensington and Notting Hill, and even though I enjoyed myself very much, I started to doubt heavily if I should move to London. Everything is so expensive, rents are crazy and it really depresses me to think how poor I will be! From a short-term financial perspective, it is really crazy to go to London Business School, while INSEAD would be a financially healthy option (low living expenses in Singapore, a one-year program, probably same starting salary and bonus afterwards...) but somehow in life I have not often made those "rational" choices. In the end I want to be happy, and I think I will enjoy life more at London Business School, should I blame myself for that?

Luckily, lots of my doubts were removed on Saturday afternoon when I met some of my future classmates! What a nice bunch of people! Unfortunately we were only 5 people of the class of 2008 who got together in "The Volunteer" near the school, luckily we were also joined by Rusgirl who happened to be in London that weekend like me. Apart from seeing how nice people were and how much I would enjoy spending more time with them and meeting the other 300 classmates, I got valuable advice on how to live, where to live etc., apparently it is possible to pay less than 200 pounds per week rent! I think the rent is still the aspect that most scares me. Hard to believe that only two years ago I was agonizing over the 50 pounds I paid per week for student housing in St Andrews (true, I don't intend to live in a freezing ground floor room that is dark and 10sq meters in size anymore-20sq m and heating would be nice!)!

I am excited about the admits weekend in May, hopefully I will be able to find flatmates and meet a lot more people from my program. My first impression of my future classmates is excellent and I am very excited about meeting more people in the coming months!

The saddest news from my job are that I have hit the record this week with 8 flights within one week, though I have to admit 2 of them were private (to London and back :-) ). I guess choosing a private equity project was not the smartest decision after all ;-). The project is over now though and the next project will be more relaxed, I will only have the regular two flights per week for the next 4 months (except for a team event that seems to be planned in Milan), so I won't complain too much.

New year, new blog...

Happy new year everyone! I'm on holiday at the moment so I disappeared for a while, not a good move right after starting the blog, but I definitely plan to write more frequently from mid-January.

In the time I've been gone, I was very happy to discover that I'm not the only MBA2008 blogger of London Business School anymore :-). Moe has joined me with his blog . With two blogs like this, I hope current applicants will get ample advice and the admits can start networking :-).

I'm starting a new project in the new year, specifically I have to fly to Las Vegas on Sunday for a week. Not a bad way to start a new project. I wonder if the technology fair will still be on and I bump into Bill Gates :-). I know Lufthansa offers wireless internet access on its transatlantic flights by now but I don't know if US Airways does. If it does, I'll definitely have lots of time to write blogs over the weekend, otherwise I'll just pick up the weekend after.

Happy new year to everyone again!

It's a long way to London Business School...

The year 2005 has ended with exciting news: I have been admitted to the MBA class of 2008 at London Business School and will move to London next summer! I am so happy. I seem to be in an unusual MBA blogger situation though: I can't talk about my anxious fight for admission but I can't talk about the MBA programme yet either ;-).

So what do I intend to talk about till I start the course?

• I will definitely give advice to current applicants since I've finished the application process myself only recently and can tell retrospective stories about choosing the right school, the GMAT, essay-writing, and the interview
  
• I want to tell stories about moving to London with my (non-EU)- partner, a problem that I'm sure many of us will be facing in terms of job search by the partner (though obviously we are extremely excited and happy about moving to London)
  
• Till I start the MBA I have 7 months of very hard work ahead of me and I would like to share my struggles to remain the person my friends and family love while working 70h weeks away from home for the management consultancy I've been working for over the last 1 1/2 years (I can't really name names because it is one famous for its dedication to confidentiality ;-) ). With these stories, maybe I can even give insights to current MBA students planning to work in a global management consultancy

I've been reading lots of blogs from other LBS students and applicants over the last weeks and it has been extremely helpful for me. So I am excited to start the first MBA2008 blog and I hope many join me along the way! Till then happy new year to everyone!