The MBA Student Voice

Odyssey Ropes Course at UCLA Anderson!

As Charlotte mentioned in the previous post, orientation has officially kicked off a couple weeks ago and then the bloggers disappeared off the face of the earth.  To be more specific, we clearly are enjoying our time too much socializing and studying (cough) to update our readers.  It sounds a bit blunt, but it's the honest truth.  On top of taking on a 2-unit course on the foundations of leadership--complete with a final exam--our schedules pretty much run from Monday through Friday, 8 AM to 5 PM.  And sometimes, we have to stay on campus until 7 PM (the horror!).  The Anderson admin really has tried to break up the week as much as possible, so we'll have one day of being absorbed in academia and another immersed in various physical activities.  One such physical activity that we were subject to is the Odyssey ropes course.  

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Parker Career Management Center at UCLA

Orientation officially kicks off in about two weeks, but the communication from faculty and staff keeps rolling out at full speed.  In a series of 12 total logistical emails to be sent out before orientation, we are now finally at number 12.  The clock's ticking fast and the anticipation is thick in the air.  So what better way to calm our nerves than to have us get a head start by visiting the Parker Career Management Center (Parker CMC)?  

From now up through the end of orientation, the Parker CMC career advisors will strive to meet with each of us on an one-on-one basis to better gauge where we are with our career selection process.  This is strictly a preliminary meet-and-greet, but it's heartening to know that Anderson is taking its new career-focused curriculum very seriously.

Inside one of Anderson's buildings.  

With the advent of the new curriculum, we will be meeting much more frequently with our advisors and with our ACT groups.  We will actually choose from several career-based "tracks" and this will give recruiters a clearer understanding of what our academic skillsets will be.  We will also be allowed to get specific "certifications" in many pertinent areas, such as consulting, banking, marketing, entrepreneurship, real estate, and media.  

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Exploring Ackerman Student Union and LuValle Commons

One thing I've thoroughly missed over the last six years was the UCLA campus. I can wax poetic about the merits of UCLA and its surrounding neighborhood, but it's something that one needs to experience first-hand to fully appreciate. I miss just about every nook & cranny of the campus, from the beautiful Royce Hall and Powell Library to dorms Dykstra and De Neve.  Heck, I think I even miss the slightly-spooky YRL Library (complete with the trademark "library smell" and scurrying spiders, though to be fair, it's being renovated) and the unforgiving climb back to the dorms on Bruin Walk and the treacherous, never-ending flight of Janss Steps. 

As it were, I found myself back on campus last week to pick up my Anderson Bruin Card (see end of post here).  It being summer, the campus was fairly devoid of optimistic (read: rowdy & naive) undergrads so I decided to kill some time.  First stop was Ackerman Student Union, the mecca of all undergrad student activity.  

Yes, there's a Panda Express there, and the line is usually much, much longer.

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International students

 Last friday was my last day with Goldman Sachs. I would like to think of it as declaring my innings after completing half a century of months, I use a cricketing analogy in spite of India's poor showing in the ongoing Test series against England. 

I started preparing a list of things to do in my last two weeks in India and it is kind of intimidating. I would like to discuss a few things here in the hope that the other International students can take a few hints (or maybe add to my list).

1. I am assuming that most people are done with their visa, definitely a major part of the preparation. Nevertheless I have to prepare a file with certain documents which should literally be at your fingertips at the port of entry. My I-20 and passport/visa. Few more might be a stretch but here goes - financial docs establishing liquid funds for a year of school, mark sheets/transcripts.

2. Loan processing with Eli Lilly. Finish your application and set up an appointment with Andy Promisiri at the financial aid office. You need to finish certain formalities like becoming a member of the Eli Lilly credit union before the loan is sanctioned and disbursed. My understanding is that full time students will get their first quarter bill on Sep 1 and have to pay by Sep 20. 

3. The accounting tutorial, http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/x32956.xml . From work environment to having holiday homework, its a transition I am finding difficult to make! From what I have seen the tutorial is prepared in an interesting style, I think we are first batch to be exposed this 'Pre-Skilling'. 

4. In this market situation, there is one department at Anderson which we will rely a lot on. Parker CMC has already got us thinking on our resumes and career paths - http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/x23554.xml. I think some of the self assessments take over two hours. 

5. House search. I know that unless we walk around in the neighbourhood ourselves we will not make a right choice but always good to be prepared with a list of places. Looking for a 2br/2ba to be shared by four of us. Variables like distance from school, bus stop, grocery stores, furnished, un-furnished, pets, rents, etc could easily make this exercise a complicated math problem. 

6. Insurance for travel and for a few days before orientation. I think this may be a wise choice given that we will be carrying many important and costly items to our new abode. I have signed up for pre-orientation trips as well so some kind of insurance makes sense :). 

 7. International driving license. This should be handy though I am not completely aware of the CA rules.I have an Indian license and should get an International permit valid for at least a year after which I would have take the test (heard its difficult to pass in one go!).

8. Find out hassle free and cheap options to transfer money to the US. From India I am getting a picture of a few common methods to do this. Most banks do this directly or through their commercial branches. Get Forex, loaded cards (can be used like a debit card in US), Demand Drafts (in your own name or college's if you want to pay the fees using that) and direct money transfer to accounts in US. 

9. Smooth culmination of services in your home countries like phone, internet, redundant bank accounts cause the last thing we want to be doing is calling back home and enquiring why money is still being debited for the calls we never made / services we did not use. 

10. I have heard that most universities in US need a MMR (measles, mumps & rubella) vaccination certificate. In absence of documents in the required format we might need to do some running around there as well but I am not very clear on this requirement. 

I think ten's a good number to start with. I welcome any suggestions and corrections on the points above.I may write another list of things to do as soon as you land in US (My google calender shows I am attending overlapping events already!) but as they say one thing at a time.

Of course Anderson's consistent mails and reminders are great, their interest in helping the students have a smooth transition is very apparent. Its up to us now to face up to the challenge.

Cheers,

Rahul Bala,  MBA '13

Pre-Pre MBA Musings: GMAT Study Guides

This burgandy book was the bane of my existence for longer than I care to admit.  In fact, purchasing its predecessor, the one with the orange cover, was the start of my on-again, off-again love affair with the monstrosity known as the GMAT.  To be perfectly honest, I bought the 11th Edition Official Guide on a whim, to just "try it out" and see what score I get on the diagnostic test.  That score shall forever remain a dark secret, but I can tell you that I was devestated--after being in denial--and didn't open the OG for another year.  

Finally, I decided to slap myself back to reality and I knew that I needed to tackle this beast, or at least court it properly.  As many know, it's a necessary evil and usually the first step that many of us take to fulfill our MBA dreams.  Of course, we all go in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, thinking that the quant section is a piece of cake with high school-equivalent math (and no calculus or trigonometry!).  And the verbal section?  Come on, sentence correction and reading comprehension?  We were doing this kind of stuff for the SATs!  

I soon found out that while the questions themselves aren't rocket science, the hard part is to do the problems correctly, FAST.  And this is what kills most of us on the GMAT.  I lacked the discipline the first time around to properly drill with a stop watch and casually tossed the OG to the side once I found out that my practice test scores weren't improving much.  And so I moved onto my next abusive muse:

Yes, I bought the entire set of the Manhattan GMAT guides.  Yes, it was painful to cough up the money.  I thought, "This time it's going to be different.  I'll start fresh and get all the essential concepts down pat and then I'll conquer the GMAT...Top tier business schools, I'm coming for you!"  

Oh, how naive I was.  I admit, though, that some of the books in this set are absolutely brilliant, such as the Sentence Correction guide, the Number Properties guide, the Word Translations guide, and the Critical Reasoning guide.  If you need to brush up on the fundamentals of quant & verbal, I highly recommend these guides.  Once I honed my skills in these topics, I found myself back to the drawing board...All because I haven't been doing timed practice runs with the questions.  So in the end, I found out what was most important once the basics were down: to drill, drill drill! 

I ended up revisiting (more like crawling back to) the long-forgotten and long-neglected official guides and started from the very beginning with a stop watch in tow.  I would do chunks of 20 questions at a time and then check my progress, take a break, and get right back to it for another set of 20.  Lather, rinse, and repeat. 

Once I started the timed drills with the official guides, my practice scores improved dramatically.  So there you have it--there really are no shortcuts and practice does indeed make perfect...It just took me a while for my pride to accept this fact, but alas, it was all worth it in the end.

UCLA Anderson at Forte MBA Women's Conference

In 2012 the Forte MBA Women's Conference is set to be held in the Los Angeles area, but this June the Forte Foundation held its Annual MBA Women’s Conference in New York. Nine UCLA women from both the FEMBA and full-time program represented the school. Most of us flew in on Thursday evening and met that night for dinner in a cute Mexican restaurant in Soho. We had diverse backgrounds – marketing, media, PR, aerospace engineering, education, economic and pharmaceutical consulting, automotive, HR and software – yet we all shared a bond through Anderson.

Over the next two days, while surrounded by other students from top business schools, we represented Anderson and interacted with key executives, asking questions and networking with 400+ women who attended the event.

On Friday, we were coached by Jodi Glickman on perfecting our 30 second pitch, sat in on industry panels and attended a Company Expo. We listened to Uta Werner (CSO at Xerox) and Kristin Peck (Executive VP, Worldwide Business Dev. & Innovation at Pfizer) share their professional and personal stories in a panel moderated by Pattie Sellers, Fortune magazine’s Editor-at-Large. On Saturday, we followed our interests attending discussions on topics ranging from Career Acceleration to Entrepreneurship.

Many of us stayed a few extra days to enjoy the East Coast vibe of New York. 

 

The Most Bittersweet of Endings

On the morning of April 14, I wrote a blog post about the numerous conferences going on on and off campus, and inviting the broader community to join in on those conferences.

Until now, this was my last blog post, because something that afternoon occurred that has changed my life.  Forever. 

In one of my previous posts, I talked about Sari Closet, an online nationwide rental service for saris (formal South Asian women's apparel).  To recap: Sari Closet started as a class project in our Business Plan Development class.  At the end of the class, our "final" was to present our business to the class and to a group of guest venture capitalists, whose commentary / Q&A compromised the bulk of your grade for the quarter. 

The feedback we received was tremendous, to the point where one of the guests contacted us to help us get started.  We launched the business in January and went live in May. 

So on that fateful afternoon of April 14, I was in a pod at Rosenfeld Library with my classmates-turned-business partners, preparing for the Knapp Venture Plan competition that evening.  This is a business plan competition across Anderson, with the winner getting $30,000 in prize money, presumably to launch the business (although that's not a requirement). 

Nisha and I were going to present, so we dressed as best we could like fashion executives.  Patrick was dressed like an MBA student in his last quarter: a t-shirt from a band nobody has ever heard of, old jeans, and at least one tennis shoe. 

(Digression: we made it to the next round of the Knapp competition, the semi-finals.  But in this round, all of the businesses were put into different rooms based on industry, and the judges chose the best business of the ones that they saw, and that team moves on to the finals.

I didn't realize that you had to "win your room" until 20 minutes before we were supposed to present, I thought the judges all listened to the pitches, then got togeher and chose their favorites based on all of the rooms. 

But I was wrong, and naturally, we ended up in Food and Beverage.  Any muppet can figure out that a sari is neither a food nor a beverage.  But our objections were shot down (apparently, our industry room was "Retail".)  So there we were, presenting Sari Closet after two food trucks, a beer business, and a pastry shop.  Of course, we didn't win.)

So we are meant to present at 6pm, and I get the call at 4:45pm that changed everything.  It was from Mrs. V.  I left right away, and 4.5 hours later, Mrs. V and I introduced our daughter to this world.

Like I said, something happened that changed me forever.

So I never had the chance to post again to this blog, and then I graduated.

Tearfully, it is time for me to say goodbye. To the blog, and to UCLA Anderson, at least as a full-time student. I'm officially an MBA graduate, and a father. 

I'm not going too far.  I'm still dedicated to Sari Closet, and will stilll be following the sports industry closely - the sports entertainment business remains my professional passion. 

Those of you who have enjoyed my writing (all three of you) can follow me over at Perfecting the Upset, a new sports blog started by Rahat Ahmed, a friend from college, and focusing on the sociology of sports: why are we fans, what makes us tick.  There will be a heavy dose of nostalgia, plus coverage in a way that isn't blinded by commercial interests. 

I'll be focused on my beloved Washington Capitals and Manchester United, and possibly UCLA football / basketball and the Steelers, if my daughter lets me.  I'll join there later this month. 

I'll always love my two years at UCLA Anderson, and writing this blog.  It's a bittersweet good-bye for me, a time that I will always cherish and remember fondly.

Go Bruins.

 

 

Just Admitted: Pre-MBA Experience at UCLA Anderson

I'm a recent admit of the full-time MBA program here at Anderson. Originally from the Ukraine and later San Francisco Bay Area, I cannot wait to make the transition down to LA and keep you guys posted on what it’s like to be a b.student at UCLA Anderson. Housing is in-the-works (driving to LA this 4th of July weekend to look at neighborhoods), first homework assignment is in hand (accounting), recruiting for 2012 summer internships is already underway and all of this is weeks before classes begin. Exciting!

 

Conference Season at UCLA Anderson

Today is the Conference edition of the blog - because there's lots of news on all of them! Contact me if you want details any of the events happening on campus!

* The International Food Festival is on Thursday, April 7, starting at 17:00 (that's 5pm) at Alumni Plaza here on campus.  This is where the International Business Association turns Alumni Plaza into a street market atmosphere with food stalls representing 15 different nationalities, music and dance performances from around the world, and a global selection of beverages -- all run by UCLA Anderson students!  Last year, over 500 people were in attendance.

Entry is just $20 which includes five free food tickets (additional food tickets can be purchased for $1 each).  All UCLA graduate students are welcome - from any school, not just Anderson - as are all UCLA faculty and staff.  And yes, you can bring your family!  Children's entry is just $10.

* UCLA Anderson is putting on the PULSE Conference on Friday, April 8. This is UCLA Anderson's first-ever Sports and Entertainment Conference!  The conference is a collaborative effort between the Sports Business Association, Entertainment Management Association, and UCLA Anderson's Center for Managing Enterprises in Media, Entertainment, and Sports (MEMES).

Ann Sweeney, President of Disney / ABC Television Group is the keynote speaker.  Other speakers include AEG CMO Sean Dee, WME's Head of Digital Media Chris Jacquemin, and Yahoo! Sports's Director of Product Strategy Dana McGraw, plus many more!  Check out the PULSE Conference website for more details!

* The International Business Association is working with the African-American Students Association to put on UCLA Anderson's first-ever conference about Africa!  The day will highlight opportunities to invest and grow on the continent, with a fantastic array of speakers including MobileXL CEO Guy Kamgaing-Kouam, Sterling Energy Partners CEO Clyde Sotomey, and the Consul-General of South Africa's Los Angeles consulate, Cyril Sibusiso Ndaba. The conference will be on Thursday, April 21 here on campus, starting at 14:00. 

So to recap, you could expand your business mindset around the world, learn about different cultures, and become a more global citizen, all from within the confines of our beloved university in two weeks.  Not a bad deal!

-- Sreesha

Spring Quarter Resolutions

Today's the first day of our Spring quarter, and after a week of recruiting trips, vacations, and general relaxation, it feels good to be back at school. For a couple reasons, I'm more excited about this quarter than I've been about previous quarters. First off, for us 1st years 3rd quarter means having real freedom and choice in our class schedule. With only two core courses this quarter, there's plenty of room for electives, and it's empowering to start tailoring our educational paths to fit our interests and career choices. (I'm especially thrilled about Law & Management of Nonprofit Organizations with Professor Guerin- this sort of course is exactly why I wanted to come to business school.)

Fewer core courses also means my workload will be more interesting, and therefore more manageable, this quarter. For a humanities major like me, it was a huge transition to be back in school learning 4 different kinds of math all at once (accounting, finance, statistics & economics.) Fall quarter was hard. But now, with a foundation in these subjects and a better grasp on how to balance the conflicting priorities of academics, recruiting, clubs, and socializing, I feel ready to take advantage of all the opportunities here going forward.

To make sure I stay on track, I'm making some resolutions for the spring quarter. Most of them are boring and all about scheduling.  But one of them is to be a much better and more consistent blogger.  It can be tricky for us bloggers here- the events and activities that you readers would most like to hear about often end up taking a lot of our free time and energy, making it hard to find a free moment to spare to describe recruiting, final exams, etc.  But whenever I can find a couple spare minutes I will try to share a little bit about my experiences in the run up to the end of my first year here at Anderson.

Welcome back everyone!

 

- Tara