Coy Ross

Choosing a Business School

I guess this is serious admissions time for B-schools.  The applications are in and some people already have some sense of where they want to go.  As I approach the finish line, it makes me revisit my own personal decision to attend Carnegie Mellon.  At the time I was only thinking of the next step after business school. Where will this school help me go after the 2 years ended? That equation evolved over the process as I started to look at more and more angles. You get bombarded with facts and figures and too much information from each school, but the important things do stick with you. For me, the primary focus was always where can I go after business school, but class size was something I kept coming back to. It drove the relationship between faculty and students.  It drove the relationship between the staff and the students. I fell in love with the idea of personal attention.  By the end of welcome weekend, I felt like I knew the staff pretty well and that they had some sense of who I was. I just think the number of students is so manageable that you can’t hide. As a bonus, I felt very good about the job possibilities at Carnegie Mellon. It turned out that my gut was correct.  There are no jobs that are out there that a Carnegie Mellon graduate can’t get. My own personal experience as an investment banking intern at Lehman Brothers speaks to that fact.

I hate Charles Murray

Not many people know who Charles Murray is.  Like Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, Charles Murray is a social scientist who blames the collapse of Western Civilization on social programs like Affirmative Action.  Murray co-authored the book, "The Bell Curve" which goes to extraordinary lengths to prove that Asians are inherently the smartest of the races and that Blacks are the dumbest.  He has also written countless articles describing the gap in IQ between blacks and other races.  It is his belief that on average, we are less intelligent and therefore social programs intended to even the playing field will always be doomed to failure, because of the nature of the people.  Every day I come to school I think about his statements.  He has many statistical studies to prove and validate his research.  All I have is anecdotal evidence to the contrary.  I will admit though, his writing is compelling and every so often it plants a seed of doubt in my head.  Perhaps, he is one of the reasons that I decided to come to Tepper, a quantitative school.  Not just to prove to him that Blacks often succeed in such fields (why would he care?), but maybe I came here to prove it to myself.  It has also been positive to see other minorities succeeding here.  Again, it is just anecdotal, but there are some brilliant Black mathematical minds here that are former engineers, consultants, or computer programmers and their achievements inspire me.  As a freshman in college I once got into an argument with a classmate that there was no such thing as a Black millionaire in the business world.  I knew that there were entertainers, but I had no experience or even frame of reference to believe that such accomplishments were within the reach of African-Americans. The most consistent images I saw were all about what we can’t do and that even includes famous academics like Charles Murray saying that academic inferiority is a genetic certainty. It’s funny, I got accepted to Harvard University and even there, I had a famous professor, the aforementioned Harvey Mansfield who published a huge full-page article in the Crimson blaming the 7% of students who were African American for grade inflation. He did not point to graduate school admissions policies, increased overall admission, but he believed that the entire faculty of Harvard catered to the roughly 350 Black students on campus. All of us were also grossly under-qualified in his estimation. I am glad to say that today I know that there are Black captains of industry, as well as Super Bowl coaches.  It’s nice to know that there are other Black men and women not just trying to prove Mr. Murray wrong, but also succeeding.

I got a job!

If anybody out there is still following my blog, I would like to report that I finally found a job. And I am pretty excited about it.  I will be joining GE next year in their energy financial services division. It’s an exciting time to learn about about energy transactions and I am glad that I will be learning the business with a firm like GE.  It really was a difficult process for me to finally settle on a place of employment. There were a lot of firms that I was extremely interested in, however the feeling was not quite mutual. Conversely, some of the firms that were most interested in me were not what I was looking for.  It is a great feeling to no longer have to search. Mini 2 was extremely difficult, as a I had to balance academics with an interview schedule that was demanding.  Business school isn’t necessarily about balance though, it is about prioritizing.  This is the last time I would have the opportunity to go through school recruiting for jobs, and I was not going to waste it.  For the seven weeks of the Mini I was out of town for five of them. It isn’t just the traveling that makes school difficult, it is also the fact that you really have to study for 2nd year interviews. At this point, companies do expect you to have some knowledge of the businesses, as well as knowledge of their firm. I feel a little bad a bout complaining because everyone deals with the same stresses during school, but it’s my blog so I can do what I want. On the plus side, since I am only taking three classes per mini, and I have a job now, I am looking forward to writing about the social scene. It’s time for me to meet and hang out with some first years before I graduate.  First Pub Crawl of the new school year is at a bar called Silky's...

Confidence

Everyone's confidence is tested at business school.  It is the nature of the beast.  No one is great at all the aspects of business that are learned.  In addition to academic pressures there is also the process of recruiting which demands that you get rejected at times from positions you may feel that you are qualified for and that you might think are a good fit.  Not just that, companies often will not even contact you to let you know they are going in a different directions.  Or you get a standard e-mail.  (It must be what K-Fed felt like when he received a text that his marriage was over)  Anyways, I still have faith in the process, about what it is teaching me about myself.  Many of the people in good business schools like Tepper don't often meet disappontment, and understanding that even though you won't be right or the best 100% of the time, you are still a tremendous person.  This is a good life lesson for high achievers.  I personally have had to remember this.  Recruiting for some people is easy.  Some people know exactly what they want and they find a match in a company right away.  I however have had a more difficult time with it.  Much like my adolesence, I have had to learn that finding the right partner can be tough.  You have to look at like finding the right partner.  I have now had enough experience to know that fit is what matters.  You have to have the confidence that the process will lead you to the right place.  Hundreds of students have been through the process and it will work fo you too.  That's what I keep telling myself.  It is my faith in this process that propels me through the recruiting season as my classmates accept offers and I am still on the dance floor looking.  But I do believe there isn't a challenge I can't handle and that it will work out in the end. 

Business Acting

On another note, I am currently enrolled in a class called Business Acting. The class teaches performance techniques used by actors in plays and movies. For those who are unaware, Carnegie Mellon has one of the most distinguished drama schools in the country. The class is taught by a professional director who teaches at the drama school. We literally take scenes from famous American plays and we learn the techniques by performing the scenes in class. I initially took the class because it sounded fun, but I have gotten a lot more from the class than I ever imagined. “What does this have to do with business,” you might be asking? I thought the same thing. But what I have learned is that actors get on stage and try to persuade you in a way that makes you believe that they are the character in the story. If they are compelling enough, the audience is engaged in the story that they are trying to tell. I feel like I have become a more engaging public speaker already.

The area in which I hope to gain the most from the class is in my interview skills. Actors audition constantly. At all times they have 80% or more unemployment. (It puts recruiting season in perspective.) Often directors see hundreds of actors all reading an identical set of lines. They have only 2-5 minutes to wow a director. In that small amount of time they have to create a believable character and take the director on an emotional journey tells a story. Essentially that’s what a good interview does. You persuade your interviewer to believe the character that you have presented. You have to engage the interviewer into your story and themes. There are certain techniques that actors do, that I hope will come through in my interviews. Wish me luck, my first one of the season is Thursday.

FYI I will not be leaving business school for Hollywood anytime soon.