JOHN McCLAIN

Time to work

What do you want to do tomorrow / when you grow up / graduate?  For many people it seems like the answer to these questions change on a daily basis.  Most Tepper students are career switchers and many have little formal business background.  As we’re exposed to new aspects of business people’s preference change rather quickly.  I think I was born to work in Finance though.  I grew up discussing the stock market at the dinner table with my parents.  They would talk about the companies they owned and why.  I learned a valuable lesson from them, know what you own and own what you know.  Instead of getting the usual pair of socks and sweaters from my grandparents I got shares of Gillette now P&G.  I thought in undergrad I wanted to go to New York City and work on Wall St.  Movies like Boiler Room and Wall St. were constantly in my DVD player.  What I didn’t realize was 100 hour work weeks = 68 hours of everything else. 

Once I got to Tepper I knew I wanted to be on the “buy-side”.  I have taken classes like Investment Analysis and Financial Statements and Fundamental Analysis that are critical for one to be successful in the field.  I also took the CFA level I and passed, whew that made mini 4 very interesting.  Then I went to my internship at Highmark Inc.  I was hired by a recent alum from the program, highlighting the strength of the Tepper network.  I was initially going to work on a project related to Asset Management but things change and I was put on a project working with Corporate Development.  Wow, I thought I had everything figured out again and now I’m a little unsure again about how to proceed going forward.  While Corporate Development and Asset Management are both Finance related jobs they are on the opposite spectrums of Finance.

I can’t say enough good things about my time at Highmark.  The work was extremely interesting and challenging and I gained a great insight into maneuvering through a large corporation.  My mentor arranged meetings with several high ranking employees ranging from the CEO to the head of their Treasury department.  It was a great summer and I am waiting to hear if the positions I’m interested in will have the budget to hire additional personnel next year, keep your fingers crossed.  Meanwhile, I can’t stay complacent and am sending out resumes to a few select companies, time to work on my cover letters.

Lots of work and some play

It’s about one month into the semester and well this is a bit overdue.  The last few weeks have been hectic.  I didn’t have the opportunity to decompress at all after my internship, as it ended only 2 days before school started.  I did go to the World Cup before my internship and was in Kaiserslautern Germany for the U.S.A. Italy match, so I can’t really complain.  I stayed right next to the emperor fountains in K-town and also visited Luxembourg and the Netherlands to see a fellow MBA student I met during the 2006 Graduate Business Conference.

The lack of down time coupled with the beginning of Management Game, beginning the full-time job hunt and getting acclimated to life with 4 roommates has made the last few weeks challenging.  I also was on campus frequently the week before school started to participate in orientation events for the incoming class while getting ready for final presentation to the Executive Vice President of Health Service at Highmark Inc., one of the nation’s largest health insurers.  Luckily, one of the first skills you truly develop at Tepper is time management skills.  I’m excited to be back and ready to meet the new class, hear about my classmate’s internship experiences, continue to learn, and most importantly figure out what I’m going to do with my life.  The challenge now is too figure out where I want to live and work and exactly what part of Finance I will enter into.

Check out K-town
http://www.smart-travel-germany.com/kaiserslautern-germany.html

Learn more about the Graduate Business Conference
http://www.graduatebusinessfoundation.org/links.html

Learn more about Highmark Inc.
www.highmark.com

About Me

Hey everyone, I am a first time blogger so please be easy on me. Here’s my summation of a quarter of century in less than 200 words. My name is John McClain and I am a second year, full time MBA student at the Tepper School of Business. I am concentrating in Finance, Economics, and Accounting. I grew up in Lexington, KY and also went to the University of Kentucky for my undergraduate degree where I majored in Finance and Economics. I had the opportunity to work in financial services as well as consulting, for a small organization, before heading to Pittsburgh and Tepper.

At Tepper, I try to stay extremely active, which isn’t difficult. Every week there are case competitions, corporate presentations, interviews, club events, and the normal social life. The problem is they all occur at the same time. Needless to say, my time management skills have greatly improved over the last year. I actively participate in the Investment Club, Graduate Finance Club, Wine Club, Robber Barron’s (school’s newspaper), and the Social Committee. I also co-founded the Poker Club with my good friend and roommate John Centeno and am Vice President of the Graduate Business Association (Tepper’s student government). These roles take up a good portion of my free time each week. I also some how managed to study and pass the CFA level 1, it’s a good thing a lot of our curriculum overlaps with the CFA. 

My future career goals are to break into the buy-side. Ideally, I would like to go in as an Analyst or Junior Portfolio Manager. The end goal is becoming a Portfolio Manager. I want to work with / for the best in class companies. Geographically, I am pretty much open to anywhere outside of the largest cities. I don’t want to have an hour plus commute to work and would really prefer to be able to afford housing. Eventually, I may end up transferring the analytical skills I have learned and will learn in the future and start up my own shop. However, that’s far down the road and you can’t predict life.