The interview day - part II

Sometime ago I wrote about my thoughts on my interview day and you can find a description of the whole day here (http://mycambridgemba.blogspot.com/2007/03/interview-day.html).

I receive many emails asking me about the interview so let me dwell on it a bit more and give you my take on it. 

Receiving an interview invitation is a great milestone in your application process so if you got that nice letter you should feel confident. I think that’s actually the hardest bit. If you were invited it means you have the profile they are looking for. At the same time they are not going to invite you if they have many doubts about you. I’d say your chances at this point are looking pretty good! 

The interview day is not meant to be a torture. In my view it has two main objectives: put a name and a personality to the application and sell you the Cambridge brand. 

Starting with the latter, you have to remember this is a two way process. Cambridge wants to best candidates and the best candidates are likely get offers from many places. In order to beat the competition for the best talent, the interview day is set up to allow you to meet the staff, future colleagues, the facilities and the city. I would advise everyone to attend that day and not just do it over the phone. It really gives you a good taste of how that year is going to look like.

The other objective is to get to know you better and see if you are the person who prepared that application. Remember that many candidates get help from professional services in order to create the best possible application. Like for any interview, you should prepare well but let me tell you that you are not in for a grilling session. Some questions may be challenging but the idea is just to get to know you, assess your personality and ambitions and whether there’s any mismatch between you and the application you submitted.

So my advice is be honest, relax and really enjoy it! 

The right of rebuttal

After having posted about some of my dislikes of the Cambridge MBA and got a few interesting comments. In particular, when I referred to the disappointing way the alumni community is coordinated I got a comment from my dear friend and classmate Jenny Dean, currently the Executive Director of Cambridge Centre for Health Leadership & Enterprise.

She was kind enough to inform me about what’s going on at the moment to ensure a more dynamic alumni community which to some extent addresses some of my concerns. You can find below some excerpts of her comments which I found very informative:

“Although the current alumni website, does in fact include a searchable database of all CJBS alumni, it is not very well used, with most people not updating their contact information. However, in order to address this and increase the visibility and value to the network, we are on the verge of launching a new web platform called the Common Room , which will include all alumni members, as well as current students and staff. This has a great deal more functionality including all those on your blog’s wish list: There is a searchable database; you can see who is on line; contact people; join special interest and regional networking groups; post discussions and blogs including advertise jobs and events on the notice board and calendar and much much more. “ You can find the full comment here.

This is indeed very exciting news. I know many top business schools already have one of these for a long time and I truly believe everyone will benefit tremendously with such initiative. I sure will be following the developments very closely!

And thanks Jenny for letting me know!

What I don’t like about Cambridge – Part I

It’s easy to praise the Cambridge MBA and to share great memories. After all it was a remarkable year spent with amazing people. However, I’m sure it’s equally useful for prospective students to hear about the things I didn’t like about it or those things that could be improved. That’s what I’ll try to do during the next few posts.

My first note regards my current status as an alumnus. While a student, I had access to many resources, many interesting people and many facilities. As an alumnus, a get close to zero from Cambridge. As I mentioned in a previous post, we don’t even get an email account that clearly identifies us as Cambridge alumni. Unlike most top B-Schools we don’t get an email account like first.lastname@mba08.cambridge.ac.uk or something equivalent. Instead we get a very basic and poor account with the domain @cantab.net, which let’s be honest, few people know what it stands for. This is a very simple thing that has not been solved yet.

More importantly, there is no connection amongst the alumni community. Most top B-Schools have bill boards or some kind of forum where alumni can share thoughts with other alumni, share employment opportunities and simply find business partners. Cambridge does not have any of that, which I find almost shocking. A great deal of going through business school has to do with the powerful network you’ll belong to once you’re done with your MBA. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen in Cambridge. All there is at the moment is a newsletter, a few pub nights available for the London alumni and a few series of speakers, usually also in London.

Even job opportunities are rarely shared with alumni, except for the odd job that the careers team decided to send out, which happens once or twice a year.
I guess this reflects the young age of the Cambridge MBA. However, ii believe the creation of a strong and well connected network is paramount for any MBA.

Instead, what we have seen so far in the past few years is an increase in numbers of each yearly intake of students and not so much emphasis on the alumni network.

Show me the money!

Doing an MBA is expensive and represents a big investment for most people. Not surprisingly, knowing the payback time of such an investment can be of the utmost importance. Although I already posted something about the payback time, I really didn’t elaborate too much on salaries. Yes, I know, shame on me!

The post-MBA salary is very important to understand whether this is a worthwhile investment and I get many questions on this, so it’s about time I write something about it!

If you look at the career outcome stats posted on the MBA website, you’ll see that the average salary is around £55.000. After taking the Management Science course, you’ll surely understand any average hides a lot of information, so what does this really mean and what is reasonable to expect after graduation?

Salaries after graduation will vary a lot and so will the type of packages offered. It depends mostly on industry and location. I would say the two areas paying the most are consulting and banking. In these areas, it’s possible to get offers that go from £55.000 up to £90.000, depending on the consultancy name. Top consulting companies tend to reward their employees well, but only a few students will end up landing those top jobs and in most cases you’ll end up giving up your personal and family life.

The industry pays slightly less, but again, it’s highly variable. But these are the ones around the £55.000 mark. Some slightly above, others slightly below. In some well-known companies salaries can be very competitive and be almost at the level of consulting and banking. Usually not-for-profit is around £45.000 to £60.000, depending on the role.

Of course there are other things to have into account when choosing a job, such as sign-on bonus (a common practice in the UK…really makes me feel like a football player!), performance bonuses and other perks.

In terms of region, I’m still under the impression the UK has the highest salaries, following by Germany and the US.

All and all, this means if you land the average package, you should be able to pay your MBA in around 2 years, especially if you get a nice sign-on and annual bonus.

Class numbers

As far as I understand, the Cambridge MBA is undergoing some changes with regards to class size.

I have my own view on increasing the class size. I understand the Cambridge MBA needs critical mass and a good alumni network and that can only be achieve by increasing the numbers and aiming to compete with the 300-plus-student MBAs across the world. It all makes perfect sense from the programme’s point of view and in the future, the alumni community will benefit a lot.

However, it also contributes to killing one of the things that made the Cambridge MBA unique. One of the reasons that made me choose Cambridge was exactly the class size. I thought with the class size of 150, it would be possible to know all my colleagues and get more of a family feeling when attending the course. And that was spot on! I feel like I know a lot about most of my colleagues and I learnt a lot from them.

There’s a lot to be learnt from your colleagues and fewer students also allows us to get to know our colleagues, share experiences, spend time together and connect with them. There is a very strong bond between most of us and we keep in touch regularly. I’m not sure how that would be possible with 300 students.

I think there’s a big trade off between getting the right scale and providing a great experience to the students. I just hope Cambridge is able to keep the right balance and doesn’t become like some of other business schools which resemble more of a mass production MBA-making machine.

The Cambridge email account I don't have

I just received an announcement from my Cantab email account letting me know that if I want the full service account, I need to pay, otherwise I'll be downgraded. The Cantab.net is the official alumni email account for graduates from Cambridge. Most people don't know that because "cantab.net" or the alias "cambridgejbs.net" seem more of one of those email accounts you get for free such as engineers.co.uk or doctors.co.uk.

There are many nice things about Cambridge, but one of the biggests faults is actually one very simple thing: the lifelong alumni email accounts. Harvard, Stanford and all the others give their alumni free lifelong email accounts that are recognisable....using domains such as Stanford.edu. I expected to have a @cam.ac.uk account, with my name and year of graduation, like they do it in Harvard. That doesn't happen in Cambridge. For some reason, we loose our email accounts when we graduate.

How difficult can it be to make sure alumni keep their emails? Wouldn't it also be good for the school to have it's name advertised by the alumni community?

Instead...we have to use a very basic webmail service with cantab.net as domain....honestly, I'd rather use my personal email!

My MBA pass

After working for slightly more than six months in one the world’s largest bank, I decided banking is not for me. Like many MBAs, I was attracted by the glamour and challenges of the banking industry but it didn’t take me long to realise things aren’t what they used to be anymore.

Banks are bleeding inside, the morale is low and the challenges they face are more related to headcount cuts than anything else. Therefore, I decided to move on to a more exciting industry: renewable energy! If you read earlier posts on my MBA projects, you’ll know I did them in this area.

Many people wonder if an MBA is still worth it. As far I’m concerned, I really think it is. The way I see my MBA is almost like a pass that everyone recognises wherever I got. Don’t get me wrong, the job market is still very tight. But I am also positive that without my MBA I wouldn’t be able to change industries again!

More importantly, I’m going to an industry where I have very little experience and I will be based in a different country. I can’t imagine I would be able to do so without my MBA. I think having the name of a top business school in my CV opens me doors that otherwise would be completely closed.

As far as my personal experience goes, I highly recommend doing an MBA!

More than an MBA

I decided to end the year with a completely different topic: relationships in the MBA. I guess we all expect to make friends for life in the MBA. A career change and a life experience also come with the territory. But every year, for some people the MBA gives them something else. It seems like every year something like 5% to 10% of the class engages in some kind of romantic relationship. This year was no exception and there were some couples formed, which have resulted in two scheduled weddings for 2009 amongst MBA classmates!

To be honest, it doesn’t surprise me that some couples are former during an MBA. It is a very intense experience where we get to know each other very well. MBAs spend many long hours with each other in group work and doing many different sporting and social activities (already described in this blog) and travelling for holidays or projects.

MBAs usually have many things in common. Most of them are ambitious, hard working, well educated and the MBA admission acts as a filter to create a group that despite being very heterogeneous, it has many values in common. Therefore, relationships during an MBA don’t surprise me at all. In fact, I had heard stories before about MBA sweethearts and seeing couples being formed during the MBA was normal and not surprising.

However, there was something that did surprise me about the couples that were formed: I am part of one of them!

Looking back, I went for the for the MBA completely open minded regarding my career, job location and all those things but quite frankly, the idea of finding a partner never crossed my mind. I was seeking for many things by signing up for an MBA. This wasn’t one of them.
Sometimes we can only find something when we’re not actively seeking.
I’m very happy I found what I wasn’t looking for. I must say this was a great year that changed my life. This whole year was definitely much more than an MBA!

Goals and expectations: reality check

On the 8th of September 2007 I was one week away from starting my MBA. I was still in my home country and had many expectations and some goals I wanted to achieve with and after the MBA. In this blog, I listed most of them so I could go back some day and compare what happened with what I expected.

A bit more than a year has passed now and in this post I want to do that exercise. I will list again my expectations as of 2007 and will comment on them as of December 2008.
This is a very interesting (and nostalgic) personal exercise that I hope can help some of the readers too. So here it goes:

Looking back at my expectations, it seems like I achieved almost all of them with distinction. It's actually very rewarding to look back and see how things turned out to be in all items. If you are thinking of doing an MBA, as I was in 2007 maybe this will help you make up your mind!

The job hunt

This topic is one of the most important ones for someone doing an MBA, and shame on me for not posting about it before!

I guess getting a good job is one of the main reasons to do an MBA. We all have the expectation of landing a great job in the end and most of us have the expectation of changing careers and industries and usually an MBA is a great means for doing so.
Unfortunately, the world has changed really fast. When we first started the MBA, we all were living in a different world. The economy was doing well and the expectation was we all would have jobs at the end of the MBA. As time went by, we started to realise the world was changing. We all were in the middle of a crisis with an uncertain duration and unforeseen consequences. Finding a job under these circumstances is harder. But it is even harder when you are changing industries, which is exactly most people enroll in an MBA for.

I started my job hunt around February 2008, which is rather late. I should have started before and I advise everyone to start as soon as possible. Obviously, it is hard to know what we want a month into the MBA. And I had many areas that I wanted to explore and investigate a bit more. I applied for many different things and was called for some interviews and I guess I used some interviews to practice and to know a bit more about some companies.

Job hunting can be frustrating. Sometimes we get interviews sometimes we get rejections and we don’t even know why. It is very important that you check your CV and Cover Letter with friends and colleagues so you don’t get myopic. Many times I was under the impression I had the perfect profile for a vacancy, but the ones who got called were the ones with totally unrelated backgrounds. So, sometimes it is a gamble. And we need to keep our hopes high and not give up, as it is very stressful too.

In the end, I had job offers from banks and consulting firms. Having been a consultant previously, I decided I wanted to try the banking industry. Joining a bank in a middle of a crisis is a risky move, but I thought it would be interesting to see a crisis from the inside.

So right now, I’m working in Canary Wharf, London, for one of the biggest banks in the World. I joined one of those MBA tailor made programmes which will allow me to have rotations in different functions and different countries across Europe. It sounds interesting and it has been a learning experience so far. Let’s see what the future holds!

The Individual Project with the World Bank

The Individual Project (IP) is the final deliverable for the MBA. It can take the form of a research paper or an internship report. It runs from late June until the end of August so it suited for summer internships.
Sourcing the IP is not easy, especially if you have particular interests. The process is the same as the GCP. If you really want something in particular, you really have to go for it and try sourcing your own project. The list provided by the University is decent but doesn’t cover some areas of interest.

I was torn between doing something in the financial services (asset management) or digging deeper into the renewable energy industry, following my GCP. Fortunately, I was offered summer internships in different industries such as asset management, consulting and even not for profit.

After an eventful month of June, I ended up taking an internship with one of my dream institutions: The World Bank. I’m an economist so I always had the World Bank in high regard and the prospect of working in its headquarters in Washington D.C. for the summer was really exciting.

The internship was a really good experience. I worked with the Energy Unit and the internship allowed me to see how people work in the World Bank and how their work impacts thousands of lives throughout the world. It was a great opportunity to meet fantastic and interesting people and to travel in the United States and Canada.

I don’t think it could have gotten any better than this!

Three months later

It has been more than three months since I last wrote on my blog. When I last wrote, we just had our ball and took a class picture. Since then, many things have happened and the only reason I stopped blogging was the crazy pace of the last few months (along with some laziness, I admit!).

Things have changed a lot since the 13th of June. I am now living in London and about to start working in one of the biggest banks in the world. My class mates are scattered all around the globe. Fortunately, there is still a very good community of MBAs in London, which helps making living in a different city much easier.

I have received many emails asking about careers, IP and so forth, so in the next couple of weeks I’ll try and pick up the pace to update the blog to provide some inside information regarding all the issues I’ve been asked.

The end is the beginning...

Friday, 13th. Where I come from, a Friday the 13th is associated with bad luck.

Rather than unlucky, I would say that was a sad day. Yesterday, the MBA has ended. It was the last day of classes and from now on we are all in the Individual Project stage.

What that means is that from now on many of us will fly to many different places and some of us will not come back to Cambridge at all. It is a very strange feeling and it is amazing how fast this year went by.

It has been the most amazing year where I got to know lots of fantastic people and more than dwelling on all the fantastic things we did together, I just wanted to pay my tribute to all these amazing people and leave my big thank you for all we've gone through together!

The MBA Class of 2007

The Oxbridge

The Oxbridge is an annual sporting meeting between Cambridge and Oxford and each university takes turns in hosting it. This year Cambridge was the host and it was held on the 24th of May. As hosts, our class had to organise a full day event with 15 different sports.

I must say the day was amazing. It was brilliantly organised and everyone recognised it as being the best organised even ever! Everything went so perfectly and even the British weather helped! We were blessed with an amazingly shiny and sunny day and it was a lot of fun. There even was some family entertainment to make the event children friendly.

May was a great month with the MBAT and the Oxbridge running almost together. In the end, Oxford won the thing as they won 8 of the 15 sports. I still don’t understand how could we have lost in punting, which is the home sport....had we one that won, we’d get to keep the trophy!

But not everything is bad. We beat them in Rowing, Cricket and Football which are the really important sports :)

And the football match was just fantastic. I must say we played really well. We beat them 3-1 and we probably played the best football of the entire season. I guess we were saving the good stuff to show those Oxford people how to play ball!

The Oxbridge was really great fun!

Climate Change

The MBA is very intensive but some extraordinary people still find the time to do other activities. That is the case of one of our class members, who is organising an international summit on Climate Change and Renewable Energies. The summit will be held in late September, so the next intake can take the opportunity to attend it.
Here’s the link. Check it out...it will be a big and great event!

http://www.cambridgeclimate.com/

The MBAT

The last weeks have been very hectic, therefore the lack of posts in my blog. There are many things going on at the same time. Job hunt, Individual Project hunt, assignments to do, presentations to make and plenty of sports.

And today I want to focus in one of the most important sporting events in the MBA Calendar: The MBA Tournament (MBAT). The MBA is a tournament held in HEC, France and brings the Top European MBAs together to compete in many sports. The event lasts for 3 days and it is lots of fun.

Obviously, being one of the smallest MBAs, Cambridge still has little chances of winning the whole thing, but our participation was very decent. We ended up in a mid of the table position after having very good performances in sports like rowing, sailing and even football (we reached the quarter finals!). But more than sports, the MBAT is a great networking event where we can meet people from the top MBA schools in Europe.

It also translates de philosophy of some schools. LBS is clearly there to win and they look very professional in their impeccable matching uniforms. They had more than one team for most sports! Rotterdam school of management is very colourful and cheerful. Cambridge is very collaborative. Even though we didn't practice for most sports, everyone was willing to play everything and help each other out in forming teams for all sports. Most of us played more than one sport and believe me...that was tiring! Oxford is…well…I’m not talking about “the other place”! :)

Rivalries and jokes aside, I highly recommend attending the MBAT. It’s great fun, very healthy and a fantastic break from the crazy world of the MBA. And if you go you might see some of the most amasing live salsa performances that you will ever see. I still can’t figure out how on earth do they have time to practice and become so good! If you like, check some of the following links. They are very worthy!

LBS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0iRW0zjgtU
SAD Bocconi (The winners): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YecYyGnK1E

International Worker’s Day

Today is the International Worker’s Day or Labour Day, celebrating the achievements of the Labour Movements. To be able to fully appreciate all the fights for better labour conditions and the eight hour working day you must have something very basic: a job.

Today seems to be the perfect day to talk about something I’ve been asked many times by prospective MBA students: jobs and how the job market is. Jobs are a crucial part of any MBA, as most people do an MBA either to change jobs or to get promoted. As the MBA reaches its final stage, everyone is pretty much focusing their energies in finding a job. But the important question everyone who’s thinking how doing an MBA is: how is the job market?

Sadly, I have to tell you the job market is not doing very well. In particular, the investment banking industry is not recruiting as it did before. Due to the credit crunch, many investment banks are actually downsizing and, obviously, not recruiting. This is particularly relevant as a significant part of the MBA students aspired to get a job in this industry. The other main destination of MBA students is consulting. Consulting is not suffering as much as banking, however some of the main consulting firms are recruiting less or postponing their recruitment agendas. Again, these are not great news for MBA students.

Despite the not so encouraging news from these industries, it seems like there are still many opportunities out there to be harvested. Most MBAs get a job from the open market and not from the MBA Leadership Programmes so not everything is bad. If you like statistics, I’d say by now around 20% of our MBA class has secured a job. It’s not a great number but there’s still plenty of time to go and most jobs are actually found closer to the starting date. As far as I know, it’s a bit below last year’s number, but not dramatically below. So it seems this is just the way it is.

I’m part of the group that still doesn’t have a job. However, I think the open market should not be underestimated. Like I said, most MBAs get their jobs on the open market and not on the fancy programmes that recruit on campus.
Does this mean this is a bad time to do an MBA? I would say there is no bad time to do an MBA. Some years ago getting a job would probably require less effort than it requires today, but it seems like an MBA is still a very valuable asset to have and the networks that are built here should not be underestimated either.

So using my own medicine, now is the time to apply massively to the open market, be patient and be prepared for when the opportunity comes!

Dennis & friends

Last Friday a new subject called Leadership in Action started. It is part of the core courses of the Easter term. When you see something like that on your time table you wonder what is going to happen there. Interestingly enough, after attending one session the name of the course actually starts to make sense.

My first impression was that I was watching one of those concerts like Pavarotti & Friends, where a big start calls his friends to do some singing together. The principle of this course is the same. Lord Dennis Stevenson brings some of his friends to talk for 20 minutes each. In that time, they are supposed to summarise their entire careers into some hints and tips for us.

The concept looks very interesting and I must say it is interesting. 20 minutes is the perfect length. Whenever we start getting bored of the speaker, it is over. And the speakers are very diverse and interesting people with some good insights. Even listening to the obvious tips is interesting as it reinforces their importance. In a way, it reminds me of the Enterprise Tuesday (already mentioned in a previous post) but more diverse and shorter.

After the session, there is a get together at the restaurant next door with nice food and drinks, giving us the chance to speak with these people. Because it is in a restaurant it also means we finally get good food (yup...the food served after recruitment sessions at JBS is horrible!)

Believe me, if I’m praising a course that is taught at a Friday night, the thing must be pretty interesting!

Easter term

I’m back. And I mean, back to the blog, back to the UK and back to classes.
Almost two months have gone by since I last wrote on this blog, but I’ll try to make an update in the next weeks.

But let me start with the end. Yesterday, the Easter term has started. The Easter term goes until the 13th of June and it is the last term of the MBA. It is amasing how time flies here. Not long ago I was just starting and now the end of it seems so close. Yesterday many prospective students where here for their interviews and it is very funny to think that roughly one year ago I was in the same situation, and now I’m almost done.

Anyway, the Easter term has started and despite the unattractiveness of the idea of having classes again, it is nice to be back and seeing everyone again after one month of GCP. Because the GCP involves companies all over the world, the last month was spent with my GCP team and part of it was spent outside the UK. So being back is nice.

The Easter term seems to have a different structure from the previous ones. For starters, there are no exams, which is quite nice. Secondly, the course courses last roughly for a week. After these core courses, we have some electives but in general they last for 6 hours only. So it seems like I have some very light days form the second week of May onwards. That looks nice, but I guess things are designed like this so we can have more time for job search. This is also the term we’re supposed to look for jobs in the open market, which takes a lot of time.
I’m looking forward to this term, but most importantly, as most people in the MBA, I’m looking forward to finding a job soon. So let’s see what happens. In the meanwhile, I’ll try to update the blog some of the events that happened during these last two months, namely during GCP.

Just as a side note, I’ve been receiving many emails from prospective students. I’m not always very fast to answer but I try answering to all your queries. Also, I’ve been asked to post more often, so I’ll try to do so...if time allows me!

Online shopping

One thing that is very different about living in Cambridge is the means of transportation I use. Since I moved here my only way of moving from a place to another is my bicycle. I must say I miss my car because I love driving but other than that it’s great to move around in a bike. It’s healthier and helps keeping me in a minimum physical shape.

Cycling only has two disadvantages for me. One is the rain. When it rains it’s not that pleasant. Fortunately, despite what people might think, it doesn’t rain very often in Cambridge, so this problem is manageable. And when it’s really pouring…oh well…I just walk with my umbrella.
The other disadvantage is shopping. It’s not very easy to go shopping in a bike. It is ok when I want to buy small things but when heavier things are need, it’s just impossible. Recently I just start buying things through online shopping and I must say it’s great! It’s very convenient to select whatever I want online and have it delivered to my door. Obviously, they charge a delivery fee. But it’s also true on average things are cheaper at the bigger supermarkets so the difference is price actually compensates for the delivery fee.

And it makes my life so much easier! So in case you're wondering how we manage shopping with our bikes, that's the way it works :)