First Battle Shots

I got the feeling I'm part of this army today. The INSEAD students vs. employers. We're all marching into battle, and the employers unleashed their first set of arrows - in the form of first round interview rejections. There's people being felled all over the place. And the war drum beats faster and faster. Next week could get messy!

Adaptibility & Comparitus

One of the curses of being fairly adaptable is over sensitivity to your surroundings. I'm a firm believer that only through understanding one's surroundings can one really adapt to them. Great as that is in theory, I'm starting to realise some shortcomings to this approach. I guess this is one of the 'left field' advantages of taking a year out and not working - you get time for all sorts of curious thoughts to pop into your head.

But I hear you ask impatiently - shortcomings? Well yeah. I've coined the term 'comparitus' - OK, so it's not brilliant. It's the process of constantly comparing. And believe me, when you do an MBA, there's so many things to compare. What classes are you taking? What grade did you get in X? How long did your group take to do Y? How many interviews have you got? Are you busy with dinner tonight?

The things is, I'm coming to the conclusion that this is a pretty efficient way to get oneself depressed. You can never know everything about the 400 other people doing an MBA. And so you sample. And then extrapolate. And guess what - when you sample, there's selective sampling bias built in. So when you ask someone and they tell you that they have 3 interviews already, you feel like everyone else must have at least 5 and you having none is a sign from a higher power that you're really not that good. Or at least that's how it is if you're going through an insecure patch like myself.

Which brings me back to the whole adaptability thing. I had to write an essay on "Adapting to a truly foreign culture" for my favourite class of the year so far - "Psychological Issues in Management". My main point there was that there's a conflict between self and the interface between your surroundings. If you spend all your time adapting, your self kind of disappears under a layer of glue moulded to your surroundings. So I guess what I'm expressing in a fairly voluminous manner is that I've decided to try and adapt a bit less and be myself a bit more. I think that's quite a challenge - Psychology professor is adamant people never change, and he's someone I'm inclined to take seriously. But I like projects. At least interesting ones.

CQW: Did you get BCG interview?

Arcade Fire

Frequent readers may have noticed the shameful bid for publicity this blog has experienced in the past week. In a bid to play around with Google search rankings (at the moment a search on "career casino insead" goes nowhere near this blog) I have linked to some other student's blogs.

The next stage in the tarting this blog for the masses is a move into the audio/visual dimension. What better way to do this than to stick some piccies up of the Arcade Fire gig I went to in Paris.



You'll be spared my attempts at music reviewing cause I need to go to bed. The gig was good. Not amazing (they insisted on playing lots of songs from the new "Neon Bible" album, which is not that good). But when they played songs from the first album it was amazing.

It was so refreshing to be out there in the real world with real people enjoying some music and completely forgetting about the whole MBA/job thing.

The real surprise for me though was the support band. They were ace. You too could have a listen to their music here. Maybe you like it too.

Good night!

Marketing brochure

Nobody marketed P4. If they did, they would have had a hard time. It involves the largest congregation of stressed people I have ever seen. I have yet to have a conversation this week that hasn't involved job search, career, cover letters or CVs to some extent. OK. I lie. I had one. It was about Iranian New Year and why it is that it's at 1:07AM.

On campus stress levels are currently running off the scale. In general, there's three types of stress:

Deer in headlights stress - clearly I start with my category first. This is goes something like "oh my god. I finish in 3 months and I have no clue what I want to do".

I will be rejected by consulting stress - this goes along the lines of "Consulting is my dream job. Everyone that's done it is really talented. I'm not sure I'm that talented"

Quietly Confident Stress - these are the people who have already got jobs. Most of them are consultants who have been sponsored and are now rapidly reaching payback time for their companies. The realisation that there's a world outside of consulting has slowly dawned on them over the past year and they are now having second thoughts as to whether they really want to go back. You can normally find them sitting sheepishly in the back row of recruitment presentations hoping their colleagues won't notice.

Much like the best and the worst things in life, stress involves a positive feedback loop. And you really feel it. Yesterday I woke up and finally started trying to shake myself out of my stress. While important, this whole job malarkey needs to be kept in perspective. If nothing good appears, then nothing good appears. Unemployment is not good, but also not the end of the world. And I do really have some idea of what it is that I want to do. I just need to focus on that and make the most of it. As one of my friends says - "baby steps, baby steps". So I've started e-mailing contacts trying to secure some opportunities outside of the what has so far been a fairly appalling set of choices provided by on-campus companies. Wish me luck!

CQW: What sector are you interested in?

Roger That

One of the classes I'm taking this period is Psychological Issues in Management. Why did I take it? Well, it seemed to be so far out of left field that I thought it couldn't possibly make for a boring experience. And for once I seem to be about right.

It's taught by a Spanish professor who seems to know exactly how to rub pushy MBAs the wrong way. It's a pretty simple recipe actually. It involves:
1 part expletives
1 part tough questions
1 part picking on people (god forbid!)

Ironically, the people who struggle most with this cocktail are those who you'd think would be the best placed for it - the really hard, driven, ambitious types. You have no idea how much this course features on the campus conversation radar - by now every body's heard of it.m And people get really wound up by this.

So far what we've been covering something fascinating. How to listen to people. Specifically, the Rogerian method of client-centred therapy. This is a specific approach for listening to people where you try and reflect back their feelings to them, while being empathic, congruent (i.e. your outward appearance must match how you feel internally) and accepting of them. It's interesting to note just how unnatural such an approach is for most people is - one class exercise involves the professor reading client responses from a Rogerian interview and then prompting the class for a suitable interviewer response. It's almost impossible to get this right.

Interestingly though, I seem to be in the minority of the class which is more probably to be successful at listening to people - we did a questionnaire to try and assess whether one has Rogeeian attitudes. I seem to be quite a good match for it, though the proviso is that as with any self-administered questionnaire you may be getting who I want to be rather than who I am answering the questions.

CQW: Did you go to the McKinsey dinner?

Google is go

The heart and the mind often do battle. The older I get, the more I realise the heart really does know what it's talking about and although one spends all their time pouring knowledge in their head, the result is quite often a reduction in wisdom.

Take for example the whole consulting business. I thought I wanted to do it. I worked like hell to get into it. I then worked in it and hated the living daylights of it. Two years later I bumble along into INSEAD. Along comes P4 and all of a sudden everybody you talk to wants a job in consulting. Why? Most of them don't really know. Because the consulting companies are on campus this week. Because the consultants look good. Because the consultants pay well. Because you can get an interesting job afterwards. But most importantly, because nothing else appears as good.

And like anyone else, I get swept along this consulting rush. It's like a river. You grab and snatch at passing grass as the weeks sweep by, but consulting inevitability seems like a waterfall you rapidly approach. My flatmate and I even developed the "Consulting Inevitability" framework to better leverage understanding of this process.

And then on Sunday something inside me snapped. Not a loud scary snap. Just a gentle prod from the heart to the head. Saying "Oi!". And then the head started to think about itself a little bit more and about what other people think a little bit less (that's always the good stuff). And it remembered. It remembered waking up at 5AM every Monday morning to fly to somewhere in Europe. It remembered clinical Hilton rooms with faceless receptionists. It remembered spending hours trying to decide whether a hamburger or a steak (the only 2 room service choices) is less fattening because that's the only nourishment available after 11PM, and your belt is out of spare holes. It remembered the woman at Heathrow passport control who recognises you by face after 2 months of building up your BA silver status. But most importantly, it remembered enough to ask the question "What the hell are you doing?"

So consulting is off the menu. I don't know what's on it, but consulting is definitely not it. The only thing that's definitely on it is Google. Hence the addition of the advertising links on this blog. I'm going through a rapid period of sampling the myriad of products they make. Please click on them. They make me money. Not bags of money, but some. Maybe enough to buy a beer after I end up unemployed in July.

CQW: Are you applying to BCG?

Deer in headlights

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines. It's time for P4. The period where all your job hunting dreams come true. Or not. As the case may be. But to be able to determine this, you must first start by getting some dreams.

Right now, there is a certain deer in headlights feeling to the whole period. As of next Monday, there will be about 3 company presentations on campus for the next month. They're all for milk round jobs. Which means that most of them are management consultancies, some are for banks, and there's one or two companies that actually produce real things thrown in for good measure.

Following my not very happy end to the last period (where I basically got totally stressed out I still had no clue as to what I wanted to do), I did some reflection over the holiday. I even went so far as to map my stress out. Anyways. One of the main things which hit me is that I'd fallen for the "the MBA provides you with a blank sheet of paper" story which is pushed by business schools prior to joining. Yes it's true - career changes are possible. But you better be damn sure what you want to do anew, because anything you apply for will have 20 people who have done it for the rest of their lives applying for it, and convincing people they should hire you rather than them is a tricky proposition.

So the "white sheet of paper" theory is out. What's in is make some of the remotely interesting options real (there's really not that many you can get to this stage) and then decide amongst them. So that's what I'm doing. I'll start with Google on Monday. Wish me luck.

Campus Question of the week (from how on CQW): How was Singapore?