Arboles

I can’t remember the last time I sat on a couch, let alone the last time I sat on a couch and watched The Daily Show. This is probably because I don’t follow the program, but that’s neither here nor there. Yet here I am, laptop on lap, and eyes flitting between retired Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, former supreme commander of coalition forces in Iraq admitting that the US is in a “never ending nightmare” due to the “strategic failure of senior leadership” and a spankin’ new, crisp, white MS Word sheet. Though I’ve lost my drive to post everyday, I don’t seem to have lost my love for serial commas.

What makes sitting on the couch so special, you ask? Well, the imminent arrival of exams on Monday has something to do with it, as does the fact that I really can’t remember when I last took a minute to unwind. The schedule here is hectic, as I’m sure you’ve gathered from the post (or lack thereof) of other J08 bloggers. If you’re fond of never having a free minute and always having to choose between multiple things you really want to be doing every hour of the day, then you’ve made the right choice coming to INSEAD.

For example, after the last class of P1 concluded today, I had to choose between having a beer or three at the campus bar, and heading to a secluded corner to immerse myself in the joys free cash flow valuation. I really wanted to do both; the former because Beer Is Good and the latter because if I didn’t, I’d be so far on the left side of the z-distribution that I’d end up in China, but since the activities were mutually exclusive, I had to pick the latter.

That’s one choice I won’t dwell too heavily on, but let me give you one that you may face as an INSEAD student. What if you were presented with a situation where two firms you were interested in working for, in two divergent sectors, say, oh, finance and industry, were both hosting a presentation, at the same time, on the same night. What’s that you say? That the choice is a personal call, and that I should create a decision tree with the weighted probability that I would actually get a job with the firms involved, discounted by (1 + H), where H = How Much I Really Want That Job?

Hmm. Got it all plotted out, now? Good. Now tell me what you would do if both firms were only on campus one time out of the year, and this was your only chance to glad-hand with the honchos who’d be interviewing you. Unfortunately, this scenario is not the product of my sleep-deprived, stress-addled mind, but rather, was something I experienced on the third day of class.

Life can be broken down to a series of little choices, right? So when do I find out whether or not I made the right ones?

Cubierta

This post has been languishing in the “Drafts” section for a while, so I figured it was time to dust it off and give it a go. Oh, how very British of me. “Give it a go, ol’ chap. You must be thirsty after that furious go you just had. Fancy a pint?”

A few months back, INSEAD released it’s 2006 Career Report which potential students and new admits eagerly peruse like crones over tea leaves, for indications of how much gold, frankincense, myrrh they can expect to have tithed to them upon graduation.

My issue isn’t with the content (though I have some issue with the potentially misleading numbers, but that’s fodder for another post) but rather with the cover, which I’ve attached below.

Analysis of 2006 Career Report cover

Cover: It’s sunny! There are pretty green trees! Hey, look at all the glass and steel around. This must be a modern building, full of high-tech wizardry and gadgetry, just like our school! It’s shiny, and we know how you all love shiny things. That’s why you’re getting an MBA after all, so you can score that €144K EUR salary and buy all the pretty, shiny things your black, black capitalist heart desires.

Reality: Though I have not seen the Fonty campus, current and past students say that it is constantly under (re)construction, and that any dose of modernity lost its relevance in the ’60s. INSEAD literature explicitly states that Macs are not supported, and that there is no WiFi in the amphitheaters. As Hallonman, NYFrog and other recent student bloggers can attest to, it’s not always sunny in France. Even in late May. Or June, for that matter.

Cover: Look at our crazily diverse student body!  Look at how representative of the world we are!  There are about 19.5 billion Asians on the earth, and growing, and the balance is made up of whites!  Let me present you with our Benetton Ad, Lite:

1) Shorter Asian woman, young-ish, in sandals and casual clothes smiling up at big white man.

2) Big, animated white man in shirt, slacks, dress shoes, explaining something to the younger, diminutive, (dare I say subservient?) Asian woman.

Reality: OK, what the hell. Why not just put her in a cheong sam, throw a pair of chopsticks in her hair and post a thought bubble with something to the effect of “Five dowah, ruv you rong time” and complete the picture?

If INSEAD is going to play the diversity angle to sell the school, at least put a few non-Caucasians on the cover. Would it be so hard to portray up an Indian female or for that matter, a mid-30s Indian male IT professional with 12+ years of post-IIT graduate experience who wants to change careers and be an I-banker or management consultant?  Te he.  INDIANSEAD jokes will never get old.

Maybe a black male? Oh, wait, J08 has all of n blacks, where n is less than or equal to .00314159

To add insult to injury, the big white man is probably a frog too, since the French still make up a disproportionate 10% of the class.

So much for diversity.

Epic Pile

Caveat emptor: All gloves are off for this post, and probably for all posts from here on out. Lock up your kids and keep the squeamish away. If you’re riding a moral high-horse, get the hell off now, or be prepared for some real anti-Mongol Tae Kwon Do flying dragon kick dismount action from this blog. D-Day approaches and the rain of sub-par bullshit not to be expected from a “T1″ b-school has begun. And I’m here to write about it.

I had to ditch the Spanish title for this post, since I lack the creativity to express myself how I’d like to in a foreign language.

Search term of the day that drove more than 1 set of eyeballs to my site: “INSEAD unemployed.”

I just threw away an hour-and-a-half of my life and took the “Career Leader” assessment that was posted on NetVestibule. If the results are are accurate at a .0000001% confidence interval, then I’m totally fucked and headed for some INSEAD unemployment myself.

The last skills/aptitude/career test I took was back in the early ’90s, and from what I remember of the content, it was probably written in the ’60s. It did spit out quite a few gems though, amongst which were my ideal career paths: secretary or clerical worker.

The INSEAD test is on par with the Jetson’s era crap, if not even more idiotic.

You have a notable interest in three core elements of business work:

• Creative Production
• Influence Through Language and Ideas
• Quantitative Analysis

In the workplace, you will probably enjoy activities such as:

• designing new products
• developing marketing concepts
• creating visual and verbal advertising ideas
• planning events
• managing public relations

Awesome analysis. Batting .333 in baseball isn’t bad. On a career test, not so much. This test and its results, Harvard author be damned, are an epic, steaming, pile of shit.

I am not the creative type. I don’t do arts and crafts. I have never worked in any creative industry, nor do I have even a vague interest in doing so. I do not plan well. Impulse and whim rule my existence. I feel that public relations is a bunch of bullshit akin to politics. Innovative? Newfangled? I’ve been driving the same jalopy for the last 12 years. I don’t watch television, and tune out all advertisement I run across, in whatever medium. Shall I go out and buy some festive hats and streamers for our cute little office party?

Give me a fucking break.

I am absofuckinglutely horrid at math. I took the minimum amount required in college to graduate. Yeah, yeah, I’m going to b-school, where quant is king. Actually, no. Refer to the sea of literature about how INSEAD is a consultant mill. If I wanted to be a fucking quant jock, I would’ve applied to fucking Chicago.

Organizational Culture
You would fit best in an organizational culture that is a bit reserved and on the polite side. In such companies, departments, and teams, a lot of the work is done independently, behind closed doors — or at least with some privacy and allowance for focus and concentration. Boisterousness and aggressive behavior definitely run counter to the norm in this kind of culture. People who thrive in such organizations generally view social and business “networking” as a chore to be avoided or minimized, rather than as a fundamental — and fun — part of work. Your tendency in this direction is very strong, so you’ll want to pay close attention to this aspect of any organization you consider working for.

OK, I’m not a big networker. Yay, it got something right. I’ve also never worked for a company that even comes close to the above description. Ever. It would be hard to describe my past gigs as “PC” in the slightest. I’ve sat in on more conference calls that involved pounding on tables, genuinely pissed off people, and winning lines like “Where the fuck is my order, I don’t fucking care what your fucking excuse is; get that goddamn container on the boat tomorrow tomorrow or we’re canceling all of our POs” than the typical, button-downed, Steelcase cubicle BS of, “Let’s touch base on the feasibility threshold tomorrow.”

Sure, tests aren’t perfect. And hell, test results can even be misleading. Having taken the GMAT, scored what I scored, and got in to b-school, I know that for a fact. I can forgive the lapses quoted above. I can even chuckle at them and spew paragraphs of invective in response. But when I read the following, the whole thing lost any credibility it had with me.

You can express this interest through virtually any business career path. But clearly sales is a natural fit.

Wow. Just wow. Let me just say that I hate salesmen. Cold-callers are the scum of the earth. I understand that cold-callers are not representative of sales in general. So let me take this to a blanket level and say that I despise sales as a function and as an industry.

Every negative stereotype of salesmen has been proven and reinforced a thousandfold by my experiences. I see ignorant people get taken by annuity and financial products salesmen all the time. I’ve seen sheisters sell sub-par cars to people who obviously know nothing about automobiles and feign ignorance when the piece of shit breaks down 2 weeks after being driven off of the lot. I watched my parents get suckered in to buying a time-share when I was too young to understand. Now that I’m a little bit older, and a little bit wiser, I’ve got a deceptively simple product I want to sell to these salesmen: a swift kick to the crotch.

Therefore, telling me that “sales is a natural fit” is akin to saying, “Hey, DTLF, you’re the fucking Antichrist.”

INSEAD Career Services is 0 for 2. It’s a tough climb from here.

Noche

I had a chat late last night with a man in an interesting line of work that I once thought I wanted to get in to, but is, according to him, over-glamorized and misperceived by the public.

I hadn’t really thought about that field in a while, except during those occasional bouts of “Is there a purpose to all of this?” but after our talk, the wheels are turning again. Apparently, a MBA may actually help me get in to this field, albeit tangentially.

Amongst the (printable) things that stood out from our conversation is the following edited tidbit.

“There is a price for everything… No one will ever marry an <insert profession here>. You’ll be the three year fling they have before they go and find someone stable to settle down with.”

Would that be so bad?

EDIT:  A reader asked if I could be more cryptic with this post.  Yes, yes I could.  “The Blue Wolf howls towards the chartreuse moon at midnight.”

Nervio

It looks like I touched a nerve with the Trabajos post. It has blown away all previous posts and received over 200 views since I put it up. It appears that TIS <3 $. They <3 it a lot. More than cute little puppies. More than Manchester United. More than their “partners.” More than their mothers. Yeah; I went there.

For all 1.14159 of you who care about my identity, here’s the the scoop. My picture can easily be found in your local English dictionary under “Negative Nelly.” How does the adage go, again? There’s a black lining to every cloud. And I’m the one holding the Magic Marker.

Upon attending my first INSEAD information session and reading the 2005 Career Report, I had high hopes that Career Services would be this omniscient, benevolent entity that loved me unconditionally and would do everything within its power to “hand me jobs.” From the response I’ve been getting to the previous post, it seems that a fair amount of readers feel that a more apt description of CS would require me to remove the reflexive pronoun and and plurality from under the quotes.

We’re all big boys and girls. We know what we’re getting in to. At this point, we’re all committed. Pot odds are good, else we wouldn’t be doing this (well, unless of course you’re me, and are running away to INSEAD to avoid that whole life bit).

I leave you with some sappy sentimentality, which I hope we’ll be belting out around this time, a year from now.

Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road
Time grabs you by the wrist, directs you where to go
So make the best of this test, and don’t ask why
It’s not a question, but a lesson learned in time

It’s something unpredictable, but in the end it’s right

I hope you had the time of your life.

No, I didn’t write this. I “borrowed” it from Green Day.

Trabajos

I just finished gouging out my eyeballs after reading the transcripts for both online “chats” with Career Services. For those of you who value your ocular ability and would like to retain your retinas, let me save you the time and bloodshed. A summary of both fusterclucks can be found below.

P.S. – The opionions expressed herein are just that: onions. Yes, onions. If you don’t like onions, morderme.

P.P.S. – I love you all, especially the INSEAD Career Counselors, and will see you soon. Besitos. En ambas mejillas. Como hacen en Francia.
—

INSEAD Career Services Chat

Setting: Archaic NetVestibule Chatroom hosted on a IBM 286, through a Prodigy ISP, up a 2400 baud modem

Cast: Wannabe Banker (WB), Wannabe Consultant (WC), Wannabe Googleian (WG), Wannabe The Hell Out Of Current Job (Typical INSEAD Student {TIS}), Career Counselor Dronebots (CCD)

WB: I used to be an underwater basket-weaver in a small, impoverished sub-Antarctic whaling village. What are my chances of getting hired by Goldman Sachs?

CCD: Well, WB, banks do not necessarily require finance backgrounds and some unstated minuscule number of former students have successfully transitioned from other fields, and an even more microscopic number have done so without an internship, which is unavailable to you anyway since you picked the wrong intake. Banks love to see leadership, potential, ambition and other such non-quantifiable, nebulous catchphrases that we throw out there to make you feel like you actually have a shot at that single outlier salary of €144,000.

WC: How much money am I going to make with an INSEAD degree?

CCD: WC, the range of salaries depends on your sector and region. For example, in Chongqing, the salaries for street sweepers goes from ¥8 to ¥198,753.

WG: I heard from the janitor at the school of the daughter of my mother’s second cousin twice removed that Google hired .0977 people from the 2007 class. WHYYYYYY? Oh for the love of the God of Groundhogs, WHYYYYYY is that number so small?

CCD: In 1991, 88laksjsdfd00987 were hired for Consulting in W. Europe.

TIS: What on earth does laksjsdfd00987 mean, and how is old data pertinent to my situation?

CCD: Oh, since this chat is running on legacy architecture that makes a Commodore 64 look like Big Blue, that’s just the way the “percent” sign shows up.

WC: We’re all dying to know why the percentage of students employed after 3 months is so low. What explains the portion that are still unemployed?

CCD: Do do do, la di da, ignoring your question. Did someone say something? What statistic? We cannot address that at this time. Please talk to Alumni Services.

WG: When will we have access to Alumni Services?

CCD: Upon graduation. We’re out of time! Thanks for coming!