The Milkround

Summer internship recruiting is in full force, and only five days after the New Year. Over the past five days I've attended eight company presentations. The model is very simple - company presentation followed by networking event (and then repeat two or three times per day).

All the investment banks and management consulting firms made an appearance. However, the investment bank line-up was a little unique this year...Merrill is in the process of merging with BofA, all the Nomura reps were from Lehman, Credit Suisse just sold their asset management division to Aberdeen and Deutsche Bank is recruiting for sales/trading roles but their star credit trader just quit to start his own hedge fund after losing $1 billion during '08. Morgan Stanley and Citi, who are dealing with their own issues but didn't have any news last week, now are in talks to merge their wealth management divisions, transforming both companies. Goldman, who recently has been fairly quite on the news front, also was on campus, but surely it won't be too competitive to land one of those internship spots.

It'll be a fun, interesting and stressful next few months as my entire MBA class attempts to find their dream internship.

A Taste of the LBS Life

Here is a photo of my study group, taken in November during an all-day case study project as part of our Strategy course. The case study was on Zara, the Spanish clothing company.

There are many horror stories about study groups getting stressed out and not working well together during this project. It's a little stressful because we don't know the project until that morning, and we must spend the rest of the day writing a report and then submit it by 9pm. Our report was a nine page, 2000 word masterpiece.

Fortunately, for us, we didn't kill each other AND we managed to get 91 on the project (class average = 79, median = 75)!