The Internship Search Has Begun

It seems amazing to me that we've just been in school for about 3 months now and it feels that we're already into the full-fledged internship search. We've started trying to fit company visits, job fairs, and on campus presentations into our already busy schedules.

My first visit was at Symantec a couple of weeks ago. Despite having worked at Symantec for a brief month during my previous life in management consulting, it was really great to get back on their campus and learn more about how their product management organization works. We also got a quick tour of their engineering labs which was very interesting for someone who's worked in tech for 4 years and never set foot in a data center.

The following week, I headed into the downtown SF office of Adobe to learn about their product management team. The office is gorgeous and I could totally see myself fitting into the culture there. The company is great about fostering creativity but also making products that really satisfy the user's needs. This is something that I am passionate about as well. I wished that we had more time to talk to each of the alumni presenters to learn more about their experiences with Adobe, but it was a great afternoon learning more about Adobe.

I'm sure in the next couple of weeks, I'll be at a bunch more presentations and trying to figure out what I really might like to do with my summer. At the moment, I'm thinking a product management internship with a tech company but we'll shall see where this crazy business school experience takes me.

Grades

So I know that everyone tells you grad school isn't about grades. I mean just look at the grading distribution. At Haas, the lowest grade a professor ever has to give is a B-, with the majority of students getting B+s. While I intellectually knew that this was true, I can honestly say that after spending my entire prior educational career trying to get straight As, I have to say that it was difficult to let go of grades. I tested the waters by not doing assigned readings and waiting until the absolute last minute to complete assignments which are all things that I would have previously considered to be slacking.

Our last quarter ended almost a month ago and we have yet to hear how we did, so I have pretty much forgotten about grades as I've become heads down trying to make sure that this semester is successful. We started hearing about our grades from first quarter today and I have to say that seeing that my grades start to come in and not have my more laid back strategy blow up in my face. I will definitely have to remember this in the future as all of the end of first semester, thanksgiving, and holiday parties start! Relax and worry less about grades!

Oh No! Not My Computer

On Friday, my worst fear was realized. I hopped on the bus and was surfing my phone when I felt a tap on my shoulder. A woman across the aisle was getting my attention to let me know that water was pouring out of my laptop bag. Oh no! I reached in to see what had happened. The lid to my waterbottle had opened and 12 oz of water was now floating around my bag with my laptop, notes, and portfolio for my company trek in a few hours.

Let's just say that Friday was not one of my best days. I got off the bus as quickly as possible and stopped at a local cafe to get paper towels and dry off my laptop. Luckily after much anguish and stressing, two days later when I took my beloved Mac to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store, it just decided to magically work. I'm not sure why, but at this point, I'm very excited to have my laptop back and in working order given that we have more midterms next week and a whole host of papers to write.

Please heed my advice and back up your laptop at least once a day!!! No one needs to deal with data loss!!! Let's just say from here on out, I'll be backing up my laptop every night as I fall asleep.

Career Management Conference

One of the reasons I was drawn to Haas is the fact that they provide incredible support for those of us who aren't sure what we want to do when we get out of b-school. Of course, we had to come up with some sort of a plausible plan in our application, but that doesn't mean that we will be sticking to that plan at all. Haas Career Services really encourages us to explore and learn about other possible opportunities that we may not know about yet. All of this culminates in the 2 day Career Management Conference between our Fall A and Fall B quarters.

Despite the fact that it was really difficult to wake up early to get to school on what is supposed to be our break, I've learned a ton of great things that will be very helpful in my summer internship search which kicksoff in full swing on Wednesday night with Multi-Firm Night. The first day of the conference was filled with a lot of great tips for getting your resume and Linked In profile up to snuff. We also talked a lot about how to go about informational interviewing and make the most of career fairs and conferences that we will attend. The best thing of the entire day was a small group interview where you and two other people interview for a pretend job with a second year Career Coach and then all give each other feedback. It was really great to learn what other people thought that I needed to work on and get to see my peers interview.

The second day of the conference was much more tactical than the first with more alumni panels and industry recruiting discussions. The best session of the day was the tech industry interview discussion. An alum from HP discussed precisely what he looks for when he goes through resumes and gave us valuable insight into the perspective of a recruiter. While it was frightening to learn that if your last name is after N that you get significantly less time than those earlier in the alphabet. We were all shocked at how little time we have to make a lasting impression on a recruiter, but better to know it now than figure it out when you don't get an interview invite.

All in all, it was a very worthwhile conference and it has reminded me exactly how much work I need to put in on my resume and cover letters in the next few weeks before recruiting open season starts full force.

Surviving Finals and >Play Conference

I literally just hit submit on my last final paper of Fall A!!! I'm so excited to be done with 1/8 of my entire b-school experience! Just insane. It has been a great quarter. I think I've done a good job of settling into school again and getting to know all of the great people in my class and cohort. Go Axe!

Unfortunately, we didn't get too much of a break between finals and classes starting again, especially because the Digital Media and Entertainment Club's student-led conference >Play was this past Saturday. I was very impressed with our abilities to get some really great speakers. We opened the morning with a quick intro from Dean Rich Lyons and then heard from John Lilly, the CEO of Mozilla. He had some really great insights into how he sees the web-browser evolving and how that will transition into the mobile space. Then I headed off to a panel on creativity, which wasn't as captivating as I thought it was going to be. Next, I enjoyed a really interesting panel on the future of the mobile ecosystem. The panelists were a great mix of people who focused on applications and browsers. After a great lunch, I saw the founder of Guitar Hero and the President of EA Sports to discuss the future of video game distribution. They believe that distribution for video games will eventually become digital, but believe that this will take a while for people to become open to the lack of a physical game DVD. Finally, we closed out the day with playing in the expo and a talk from the VP of Product Management at Google. I have to say that I was kind of disappointed by his talk because he just reviewed Google's current products instead of discussing where he saw the future of Google's products. All in all, it was a great day!

>play Conference

I'm so excited for the >play conference at Haas next weekend! It's going to be an exciting day of digital media and entertainment. We're having speakers from Mozilla and Google. Also, there will be great workshops on the latest trends in digital media and internet technology like cloud computing, brands that matter, games on the move, and mobile ecosystems in motion.

If you're in the Bay Area next weekend, I highly recommend attending! Check out the agenda for the conference here!!!!

Finals Time!

It's less hard to believe that it's finals time already than it was when we hit midterms. I guess that means I'm settling into the crazy quarters schedule. I'm starting to realize more and more that it's really more important to hang out with classmates and be social than it is to really spend that extra couple of hours studying. Unfortunately, that plan kind of backfired on me last week when I ended up with a nasty cold. Oh well. It comes with the territory.

It has definitely taken the first couple of months for me to realize that I really am at school as my career. I guess I thought that I was just at a conference and would be back to the real world soon. Nope! Lucky for me, but I'm a student so I should truly take advantage of the lifestyle.

We definitely have a great 7/8ths of our B-school experience left, so I'll remember that and not spend too much time studying for finals next week, but be sure to socialize with classmates!