The Naked MBA

Applications to MBA programs continue to grow each year as more and more students see these programs as the golden ticket to a wealthy, rewarding career. There is a lot of learning packed into those two years, but it’s just as important to know what business school won’t teach you, and how to be prepared for that.

How to find your ideal career

I thought I would have two years to sift through all my career options, assess my skills and figure out what would be the perfect job for me. I had two weeks. There is a lot of pressure to hone in on an industry right away since the mad dash to get a job begins out of the starting blocks. No one is going to encourage you to spend time soul-searching to discover what you think will really make you happy pursuing as a career. You should take some time to do this before business school.

How to lead a balanced life

Between the all-night study sessions and the all-night drinking binges, business school is anything but a model for moderation. Although every conference you attend will have a panel on work-life balance, full of suggestions about how to have it all, you will have no opportunity to test out these suggestions in business school. Instead you will be rewarded for working hard and playing harder.

What the world looks like

Only 3% of business school professors are African American, Hispanic or Native American. I didn’t have a female professor until my second year. Let’s face it, even most companies do better than this in terms of diversity.

How to plan for long run

During the recruiting process companies throw money at you—sign on bonuses, relocation allowances, fancy dinners, etc. They make it easy to want to cash in on your MBA right away and accept the highest-paying job. But you should pick a job that maximizes your learning, not just your earnings. Working as a highly paid small fry low on the totem pole in a big company won’t teach you nearly as much as joining a small company or a start-up where you’ll have a wider variety of experience. You need to develop skills that will be valuable five years down the road so in the long run you can make the big bucks doing a job you really love.

How to pay for your MBA

Most students finance their MBAs entirely through loans. When that first disbursement of loan money lands in your bank account it’s easy to feel like you’re, well, in the money. But that money is not yours, so don’t treat it like it is. You have to pay it back, and the less you spend the less you’ll owe. Don’t get caught up counting on your future earnings as an investment banker to pay off the expensive dinners and spa trips you decided you couldn’t live without for those two years. You are a student now, and if you choose to live like one instead of maintaining the same lifestyle you had while you were making money you’ll end up with a lot less debt later on.

Networking is a scary word. For me, it conjures up images of guys with slicked back hair, glad-handing and passing out business cards or playing golf in funny looking pants. Nothing about it sounds natural or fun. Before business school I never gave any thought to networking. As far as I was concerned, I didn’t have a network; I had friends and friends of friends. I didn’t “network”, I just hung out with people who introduced me to other people. I talked about things I was interested in, and if I had those things in common with other people I met we exchanged emails or phone numbers. I didn’t shake hands and I didn’t have business cards.

Thus imagine my distaste when I got to bschool and found I had to attend a mandatory workshop on networking. I pictured some used car salesman teaching us the art of schmoozing through a crowded room of complete strangers. Then during the first five minutes of the workshop it hit me: I already knew how to network. I had been doing it all along. When I found an apartment in my favorite neighborhood through my ex-roommate’s cousin, I was networking. When I got free tickets to see my favorite band because I knew someone who knew the drummer, I was networking. My friends and their friends were my network. What I had going for me was that I was already interested in people; I liked to chat and find out about people’s lives and interests, particularly if they were different than mine. I just had to transfer these skills to a professional environment.

People tell you all kinds of things about how to network, but the most important thing is that you need to be able to meet new people. It doesn’t have to be a formal activity. Networking means striking up a casual conversation and getting people to talk about themselves until you find a common ground, whether it’s a shared interest or an acquaintance you have in common. And people love to talk about themselves so it’s not that difficult to get them started. Think about the last time you chatted with the person in line behind you at the supermarket, or when you met someone new at a friend’s dinner party. That’s networking. You don’t need golf pants or slicked back hair; you already know how to network.

Although nothing trumps a face-to-face conversation with someone, those of us who are part of the increasingly antisocial stay-at-home-and-surf-the-web generation have invented a new way to connect to people: online social networking. Sites like LinkedIn, Doorstang and others are now mandatory for successful networking and career development. If you’ve never used one of these sites, the co-founder of LinkedIn has some tips for you on how to get the most out his service.

By going to bschool you are already part of an amazing network, so one of the most important things you can do is develop and maintain these connections. You will spend two years with a bunch of talented, ambitious people who will have successful, interesting careers in all corners of the world. Get to know as many of them as you can during bschool, and keep in touch after graduation. You never know where people will turn up again later on.

For me business school represented a fresh start. I was moving across the country, leaving friends, family and my job. It was a chance to wipe the slate clean and remake myself into a smarter, better person. There was nothing holding me back from being anything I wanted to be. Nothing, that is, except for the hundred-pound barbell shackled to my ankle by a thick chain leading all the way back to the Midwest. On the other end of it was the Boyfriend.

The Boyfriend and I had met three years earlier. We dated, fell in love and we were happy. We even decided to apply to bschool together--he coached me through the quant section of the GMAT and I edited his essays. We were the perfect team. Then due to extenuating circumstances he found out he needed to wait a year to apply to bschool. We were confidant we could handle it. It was only a year, after all.

The day I left for NYC we said a tearful goodbye, telling each other that a year would fly by and that we would soon be together again. Four months later we broke up and he mailed everything I’d left behind at his apartment to my parents.

What went wrong?

Two weeks after arriving at bschool I met a second year who wanted to go out with me. He was rich, handsome, Italian, and impossibly arrogant. I told him I had a boyfriend. "Ah, I see," he said. "Ok no problem. I will get your phone number now and I will call you next semester." No, I told him, I still planned to have my boyfriend next semester. In fact, he would be moving to New York the following year to be with me and we were planning to live happily ever after. Then Italy explained the Rule to me. The Rule states that if you start bschool in a relationship there is a 90% you will have broken up by the end of the first semester. Long distance relationships are most susceptible to the Rule but it applies across the boards with few exceptions. Being married improves your odds but not by much. I assured Italy that I planned to beat the system. He smirked.

In the beginning the Boyfriend and I talked every day, several times. Bschool was more intense than I had bargained for and he was my lifeline, pumping me back up when the world got me down Classes were intense, group projects even more so, and on top of school the job recruiting process took every spare minute of my time. I rarely slept, lived on Power Bars and coffee and devoted all my time to keeping my head above water in my classes and in recruiting. The Boyfriend, on the other hand, still had his whole world. The difference was that while I felt I desperately needed him to lean on, he missed me but didn't need me. Bschool is a grueling and formative experience. It’s impossible for anyone on the outside to understand what you are living day-to-day, much less why you have no time left for them or why you are stressed to the point of a nervous breakdown. Not the ideal scenario for a lasting relationship. By the time first semester wrapped up we called it quits, him telling me I was no longer the same person and me trying to prove that deep down I hadn’t changed. But of course I had, and that was the whole point of going to bschool in the first place.

If you plan to concentrate on traditional on-campus recruiting then the career services office will be an invaluable resource for you. It’s a trap, however, to think of Career Services as your best and only resource. Remember that their job is to get everyone a job. Your job, however, is to get the job you want.

To get the job you want, sometimes you need to ignore Career Services and go it on your own. You know it's time to do this  when:

You end up with an offer for a position that doesn’t quite feel right.

Only you know whether to accept a job or to hold out and keep searching for one that’s a better fit. Career Services can help you consider all your options, but you are better off talking to friends, family, your therapist, or the guy you buy your coffee from every morning at the cart on the corner. They are disinterested parties; Career Services is not. Career Services will push you to accept a job—any job-- because at the end of the day they are building their placement statistics—the very same statistics that once upon a time enticed you to apply. They also want the companies that recruit on campus to hire their students, be happy and come back next year. It makes them look good. A friend of mine was set on Sales and Trading but didn’t have any luck in the on-campus interview process. Career Services convinced her that she should apply to lots of other positions being recruited for on-campus as a Plan B. She got an offer for one of these other jobs, then, as Career Services pressured her to accept it, she let it expire while she kept looking for a job she wanted. In the end she landed a Sales and Trading internship with a major bank and loved it.

You want a non-traditional job that you won’t find through the typical recruiting channels.

If there is one thing I wish I had known going into bschool, it’s that it is possible to get a great job without attending a single corporate presentation. It’s not easy; you need extreme amounts of self-initiative, networking skills and patience. You also need an unwavering belief in yourself, particularly in January, February and March when the majority of your classmates are interviewing and accepting offers through on-campus recruiting. I had a friend who wanted to work in corporate social responsibility (CSR) where there are few openings and those that exist are much harder to find unless you are well-connected. She plodded along through the winter while everyone else was in an interviewing frenzy, knowing that any company who did offer CSR internship wouldn’t be ready to advertise until much later in the year. Instead of attending corporate presentations she attended relevant lectures off-campus, networked through her undergraduate connections, and waited. In late spring someone sent her a posting for a CSR position with a major pharmaceutical company that fit her profile perfectly, and the woman who had posted the position turned out to be an alum from her undergraduate university. Karma, maybe. Chutzpah, definitely. Take note.

It’s February and everyone has a job but you.

This is not true, so don’t buy it. My experience was that only 50% of my classmates got their jobs through on-campus interviewing. It just felt like a lot more because the 50% of people with jobs talked about them--loudly and often. Remember that these people are not the majority; you still have time to find not just any job, but a fantastic job. I accepted a summer internship position I interviewed for on-campus and then all spring I read job postings that sounded so much more interesting. By this point in the year you have also built up an expansive network of fellow classmates, professors and others, so put the word out. Tell people what you’re looking for and you’ll be amazed at what comes back to you. Remember, it is your responsibility to get the job you want.

I didn’t expect to like anyone I met in business school, let alone make friends. I resigned myself to spending two years surrounded by boring, money-driven, ultra-competitive wannabe investment bankers and consultants. I could tolerate and rise about it all for two years, I decided, because it was such an important investment in my future.

The first week of classes we met our study groups. This was a group of four other people to whom I was shackled for the next two semesters as we did all our group assignments for every core class together. Oh, and did I mention that every assignment in business school is a group assignment? My study group had the typical make up: finance guy, token international student, a guy from the law school, and the token woman (me). Jorge was the finance guy. He was an engineer before business school and now he wanted to be an investment banker. In our first group meeting his study materials were already color coded according to class and he had downloaded all the syllabi onto his Palm. I couldn’t even find the one highlighter I had purchased. He triumphantly loaned me one of the ten he had with him. Total Type A, I told myself. We set about dividing up the sections of the project we had to work on. I thought I should make some of the Excel charts and graphs because I needed the practice. He peered at me with a look I took for skepticism. “Okay,” he said, “but let me know if you need help. I’m pretty good with Excel.” Arrogant jerk, I thought. At our next meeting I showed up with two graphs that resembled the doodles of a seven-year-old with a ruler. “Hmm, he said. “I think you might need a couple of adjustments.” He hit a couple of keys and the schizophrenic lines suddenly fell in to formation like Marines. He’ll probably take credit for it now, I told myself.

Recruiting started up and soon we were all scheduling around the investment banking presentations that Jorge needed to attend. Often this meant meeting after 9 or 10 pm. One week in October we had a project due and had to schedule one of these post-presentation late night meetings. I couldn’t have been crabbier; it was my birthday. Not that I had big plans—school had only been in session for a few weeks so I didn’t have any close friends and I was so overwhelmed by the workload that I didn’t feel even feel like celebrating. But it was still my birthday and knowing I would have to stay at school past midnight once again to accommodate Jorge’s schedule put me in a foul mood.

At 8 p.m. I stomped out of the bschool building to the West Village to meet my a friend from the Midwest who had also moved to New York. I hadn’t seen her in a month because I had been too busy with group projects. Over pad thai and Sapporo I raged to her about the inconsiderate investment banker who was ruining my birthday. At 9 p.m. I stomped back to school, late for my study group meeting. As I approached the meeting room I noticed the lights were out but saw a soft glow coming through the frosted glass window. I opened the door. “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you!” My entire study group was serenading me as Jorge finished lighting the candles on the cake he was holding. I hadn’t even said anything about it being my birthday. “How did you know?” I blubbered, nearly in tears.

“It was Jorge’s idea,” said one of my group members. “He noticed your birthday on the information sheet we have about everyone.” I stared, dumbfounded, at Jorge.

“I remember when I first moved to Chicago and had my birthday a few weeks later,” he said, shrugging. “It really sucked because I didn’t really know anyone, so no one marked the day for me. I didn’t want you to feel that way.” He smiled.

I’m not a fan of morals, but as lessons go I think this is an important one. It turns out I was the one making generalizations and writing people off before I got to know them. I was wrong about Jorge and I would have been wrong about so many other people had he not reminded me to be more open-minded. Jorge is one of my best friends from business school. He always remembers my birthday. He works in finance and he’s pretty good with Excel.

They say the hardest thing about business school is getting in. This is a total lie. The whole point of coming to business school is to leave with a job. Everything you do for two years culminates in this goal. The classes you take are based on gaining the knowledge you will have to demonstrate in interviews. The newspapers you read are those of the industry in which you’re trying to get a foothold. Most importantly, the summer internship you choose is seen as the key for securing a place with the company of your choice upon graduation. For career switchers, the internship puts them on track to pursue a brand new career–making it even more crucial to land the right position. Graduating from a top business school affords you a competitive edge; it also serves to ratchet up the competition. You are competing against the best and the brightest from your school and other top schools. Faced with this Intense competition, students are driven to spend hours preparing for interviews and perfecting résumés. Interviewing is the hardest thing about business school.

As an intense 6-8 weeks of corporate presentations wraps up you barely have time to take a breath before it’s time for résumé drops. For summer internships most deadlines (for the traditional, on-campus recruiting process) are in late November. I remember spending the entire Thanksgiving weekend ignoring my boyfriend, my family and that second helping of pumpkin pie in order to perfect ten different cover letters and versions of my résumé. Most career services offices provide a list of companies that are coming to campus to interview and application deadlines. Strategies for getting interview invitations range from the blanket approach--the more résumés you drop the higher the probability of being invited to interview--to the more discerning approach of applying for a handful of internships you truly want and putting more work into each application. I was somewhere in between, targeting a core group of companies and slaving over those applications, then tossing in a few “why not” choices at the last minute for good measure.

During the application process you start to see all the time spent in corporate presentations and informational interviews pay off. By flipping through the stack of business cards you have accumulated, you can casually drop names into your cover letters, such as “Through my conversations with Kitty Bingham, Brand Manager for Yummy Bonbons, I was able to get a sense of the collaborative atmosphere of Company X and feel confidant that I would be a good fit.” Just be sure to let people know that you are applying for the internship and dropping their name so that when HR phones them to ask about you they don’t say “Who?”.

After dropping your résumés the waiting begins. In my case we received interview invitations the last week of classes and most interview dates were mid-January, perfectly timed to ruin any relaxation we had planned for the holiday break. Invitations to interview implied that we were on the closed-list schedule, meaning that the company had selected us. For some companies there was also an open list schedule, with slots that could be bidded for through the online system of the career office.

Interviews are generally a two-round process. For the first round the company generally comes to campus to spend a day interviewing candidates in 30 or 45 minute slots. Interviews vary widely from industry to industry, and your career office will be able to provide more guidance as so what types of questions to expect. Still, you should be prepared for anything, whether it’s 30 minutes of relating your strengths and weakness or a nonstop barrage of technical questions. Above and beyond, the most important thing to any company or industry is the cohesiveness of your story. It’s up to you to make them believe that consulting is the natural progression for you coming from your science background, or that marketing is a perfect fit after spending four years as an engineer.

Whatever you say in an interview, say it with confidence. In one interview I had for a banking position, two grumpy bankers could not to get past the fact that I had been a French major in undergrad. None of my accomplishments in the last six months at business school, or the fact that my current résumé had landed me a spot on their interview list seemed to matter. Finally, after the third remark about how unqualified I was, I responded, “Look, I get it that I don’t seem like a good fit for banking. But because of that I’ve had to work twice as hard as everyone else to get into business school and to succeed while I’m here, and I will also succeed at your bank. I’m smart, capable and I’m a fast learner. I can do this job better than anyone else you’ll meet today.” As I said it I felt anything but confidant but it got the interview back on track. At the end, one of the bankers informed me, “You are by far the least qualified person for this job that I have met today, but somehow you seem convinced that you can do it. We’re sending you to the final round where you’ll get the chance to convince everyone else. Congratulations.” I ultimately decided I didn’t want to work for such crabby people but at least being confident gave me the option!

In a previous post I talked about how easy it is to overcommit, and how inevitable it is that you will. So now here is what to do now that you’ve said yes to everything:

First, start saying no. First practice saying no to little things. When someone stops you on the street to ask if you have the time, say no. When your friend calls you on the way to class to see if you can print an extra set of notes, say no. When the guy on the subway asks if you could move over to make room for his bass violin/pet gorilla/obese girlfriend, say no. Practice this for an entire week. And then, before you lose all your friends and become the world’s biggest jerk, switch to saying no to the important things. You will be amazed a how much spare time you’re left with once you’re not the one always picking up the food for the club meeting, or proofreading the group paper. Be selfish. When asked to head up a club committee or be a TA for a class, think about what you’ll get out of it. Are you being asked because your intellect and skills are valued and needed, or just because everyone knows you’re a pushover and will do things no one else wants to do? Get possessive of your time! Used effectively this strategy may even carve out enough time for you to catch up on the entire season of Lost that you’ve missed and all your back issues of US Weekly.

Next, start letting people down. My first year of business school I was the queen of canceling. I canceled brunch with friends. I canceled review sessions. I canceled trips to see my boyfriend. Later I canceled dinner dates with possible new boyfriends. I knew things had reached the breaking point when I finally found the time to follow through with plans to see a movie with my best friend, whom I hadn’t seen in two months. On the way to the movie I got a phone call from her, canceling. “I’m really sorry,” she said, “but usually you call to cancel so I made other plans.” You will inevitably let people down, no matter how much you try to avoid it. So the best thing you can do is try not to feel guilty about it. If people love you they will understand. My best friend, bless her heart, is still my best friend to this day. My family did not disown me. My (new, improved) boyfriend did not break up with me. They waited patiently until my life assumed a normal rhythm again, and I treasure our relationships even more for it.

An important note on letting people down: Avoid, at all costs, letting down someone who is or could be professionally important to you. This may sound a callous and shallow thing to say after I’ve just told you to stick it to your friends and loved ones, but remember why you’re in business school. These two years are for you to be completely focused on you and your new career. So focus. Don’t cancel interviews. Don’t even cancel coffee dates that could result in interviews. Even if you have an interview for a job you don’t think you want, make every effort to attend and do your best. You may not want the job now but you never know when you may want to work for that company in the future. Interviewing can give you an important contact you can use later. No matter how swamped with studying for finals or hungover from last night’s happy hour you are, drag yourself to any internships, presentations or other job-seeking activities you have scheduled. And once you’re there, be there. Be actively present and contribute. After all, you dragged yourself out of bed to be there so you might as well get something out of it.

The informational interview has the most misleading name I’ve ever encountered. It would have you believe that the purpose is, well, “informational”—that you’ll be asking someone about their job, in order to decide if it’s something you might want to do someday. Wrong on all accounts. The informational interview is really your first interview, so be prepared.

When you ask someone for an informational it’s best not to come right out and say “I’d like an information an interview”. I prefer to frame it as something more casual, along the lines of a cup of coffee, a brief chat, or simply “I’m wondering if you have time sometime soon to answer a few more questions for me about your job/the company, etc.” If it sounds like a minimal time commitment, people are more inclined to respond positively. When setting up an informational here are some things to keep in mind:

- You may be asked to send them your résumé so they have some idea of who they are dealing with. Send a clean copy, one you would be comfortable submitting for an actual job opening. Take the time to tailor it to the industry of the person with whom you’ll be speaking. If you’re interested in consulting and banking, for example, you’ll want to have a version for each industry you’re pursuing.

- Be flexible. Yes you are busy, and it’s often tough to squeeze yet another meeting or appointment into your day, but as a student you probably have more flexibility than they do in your schedule. Often people will only have time for a phone conversation with you, so be open to scheduling it “sometime in the afternoon the end of next week”.

- Be prompt if you have scheduled an exact time, especially if you’re meeting face-to-face with someone. And also be prepared to wait a little while if you are on time, and not to take this personally. They are doing you a favor by squeezing you into their day.

- Be prepared to talk about the company. Do some background research. There is no need to read a fifty page research report on the company but you should know the basic organizational structure, who the head officers are (CEO, CFO and anyone else important), recent market trends and who the main competitors are. Also do a quick scan of recent headlines so you’re up-to-date on anything important that might be happening with them.

- Be prepared to talk about yourself. While I expected to be asking most of the questions, I found that most of the informationals I had felt more like actual interviews. People would ask me to walk them through my résumé and talk about why I thought I wanted their job. They will want to hear your story so have a good one and know it cold.

- Show up dressed for an official interview. Although they may have invited you just to swing by their office to meet for a quick cup of coffee, this is a professional networking opportunity to dress accordingly . They may end up introducing you to other people in the company and you don’t want to meet the head of the department in your jeans and your favorite band’s t-shirt.

If all goes well hopefully you will have learned something more about the company and set yourself apart by showing your interviewer how interested you are in the opportunity. They will become a point of contact at the company for you and if you’ve established a good rapport with them you can periodically touch base during the recruitment cycle to let them know that you’ve decided to apply, that you have an official interview, etc. The payoff comes when if you actually apply for a job at their company; then you can include in your cover letter that you’ve learned more about the company through conversations with ____. Just make sure drop them a line when you submit your résumé to let them you you’ve mentioned them. This also reminds them to put in a good word for you if you’ve made a good impression!

There are cases when an informational interview will be purely informational and on a truly informal, off-the-record level. In this case you may be comfortable being more candid about what you are looking for in a job in order to get their feedback on whether you would be a good fit for the kind of work they do. But this doesn’t happen often so you should be prepared for something more official and rigorous--it’s always safer to treat it like an official interview and prepare accordingly.

Where your moolah is going

My decision to leave my job in banking was not an easy one. As a recent MBA graduate I was saddled with over $100,000 in debt and when the payments kicked in after my grace period there I could feel my bottom line wince. So when the job of my dreams came along, everything about it felt right, except that I would be taking a 50% pay cut. This might have seemed feasible in Madison, Wisconsin, but in New York City, where a movie ticket is $12 and a beer (the regular old American kind) will set you back $8, it just seemed impossible. But was it really? I told myself that plenty of people got by on less than I was making. Sure, they lived in Hoboken and ate lunch at Grey’s Papaya every day (two hotdogs and a papaya juice for $2.99!) but they did it and so could I. I did not lead an extravagant lifestyle, I told myself. I would simply have to make a few small changes: a beer instead of a dirty martini, a regular coffee instead of a latte at Starbucks in the morning. But the payoff would be worth it; instead of going to work every day to make lots of money for someone who didn’t need more money I would be doing something I believed in and that would make it all worth it. And so, after one last shoe shopping binge with my Mastercard and a couple of dinners at the Pearl Oyster bar, I said goodbye to Wall Street and hello to my new life of frugality and a lightened conscious.

All went well the first couple of weeks. This isn’t so bad, I told myself proudly as I sipped my Heineken at happy hour while friends around me ordered rounds of Grey Goose martinis. Then towards the end of the month I realized that I needed to dip into my already-meager savings if I was going to be able to eat or pay for my dry-cleaning the rest of the month. I became panicky. How did this happen? I was living so cheaply! Or was I? I realized that I had no idea where my money was going. There was only one remedy: the cold, hard numbers.

I took one month and kept track of all my expenses, down to the penny. This is easy enough to do with a pen and paper and a calculator, but I didn’t go to business school for nothing so I built myself a spreadsheet to do the heavy number crunching for me: addition and subtraction. There was a column for each day of the month and categories into which I though most of my expenses would fit. And for one month I kept every receipt for every cab ride, cup of coffee and pedicure. My wallet swelled to dangerous proportions, bulging at the zipper like a college freshman after her first semester, unable to fit into my fashionable yet impractical handbags the size of a pack of gum. At the end of each week I would diligently empty out the scraps of paper I had accumulated and enter them into my spreadsheet.

When the end of the next month came I was once again dipping into my savings, so as I sat down to total all my columns I was sure the numbers would reveal that there was simply no way a person could live in Manhattan on my salary and that I would have to get a night job as a phone sex operator. I was stunned. I had spent over 10% of my monthly income on cab fare! Even worse, I had spent over 20% on eating out (and that didn’t even include the Heinekens)! Right then and there, based on the numbers I had in front of me, I made myself a budget and continued to track my expenses on a monthly basis to make sure I was sticking to it. I built my own spreadsheet, but there is some free software out there that is helpful if you’re not very spreadsheet savvy. Pear Budget, for example is one of the better programs (http://pearbudget.com). It took a couple of months to get the allocations right, so I just kept making adjustments until I had something realistic that worked for me. Now I actually think through every purchase I make and ask myself if it’s something I really need, whether it’s a $4 magazine while I’m waiting for the train or a $400 Marc Jacobs bag. And in a country of excessive consumerism and a negative savings rate, this is something I should have been doing all along. Ironically I’m now saving more money month than I was when I worked in the private sector.

Three months into my new budget, I had dinner with a good friend of mine from business school at our favorite neighborhood joint. She had been working long hours at a bank since graduation so we had a lot of catching up to do. “I’m so stressed out about money,” she told me. “I thought things would be fine once I started working but I had to call my dad last month for an emergency loan to pay my credit card bill and I think I’m going to have to do it this month too!’’ I couldn’t believe it. Here was someone making twice what I was making who was still having trouble making ends meet. Then I thought back to when I had been making more money, and remembered several months that I barely ended in the black. “I don’t understand it,’’ she continued. ‘’I don’t spend money on anything…where is it all going?’’

‘’You know, ‘’ I said, ‘’I have this little spreadsheet I can send you…’’

I have friends who love dating. They love the first-date flurries, the anticipation of the unknown, and the excitement of the chase. I am not one of those people. The reality is that occasionally you have a great date and it results in a second one, and maybe even a relationship. But more often than not you bid adieu at the end of the night, exchange “Don’t call me I’ll call you” cheek kisses and head home wishing that’s where you had been all along.  Or worse, you have a great time and think you’ve finally met someone perfect and then you never hear from them again. And you start all over.

Recruiting, to me, was like dating. Except that it was easier to decide what to wear and I never had to pick the restaurant or worry about whether to split the check at the end of the night. For me it began around the fifth week of first semester when the Career Development office started sending out a weekly bulletin of companies that were coming to campus for corporate presentations. Corporate presentations generally all follow a similar format: there is a Power Point presentation with some rosy information about the company and a list of reasons why you should be honored to work for them. Then there is time for Q&A. The best advice I can give you in this scenario is to keep your mouth shut. Corporate presentations are not for making a good impression. They are to avoid making a bad impression. If you absolutely must draw attention to yourself in this scenario, at least avoid the following list of I’ve (real-life, actually happened) questions:

-          How much do you make? (Rude)

-          What are your hours like? (Lazy)

-          I know your company is currently facing a nasty sexual harassment suit from a former employee. How is that affecting moral? (Only if you’re looking to completely silence a room)

Next there is an hour or so of mingling with the people from the company who have the jobs you want. There are hors d’oeuvres and cocktails, not because you might be hungry or thirsty, but to separate the talkers from the eaters. You can distinguish between them because as the Q&A session is wrapping up, the talkers become agitated in their seats, poised to rocket out of them towards the nearest (and most senior) person from the company, ready to pull out the big networking guns. The eaters hang back, fortifying themselves with crudités and shrimp cocktail, telling themselves that they are just waiting for the right moment to make their entrance into one of the tight little circles that are forming around the company representatives. In the beginning I was among the crudités crowd, terrified of approaching someone to ask “So what is it exactly that you do?” and getting an answer so foreign and confusing that any follow-up question I could think up would surely show how clueless I was. To get over this I practiced attending presentations for companies lower down on my target list so that if, as I feared, I made a fool of myself, it wouldn’t be as big of a deal. I forced myself to approach someone immediately after the presentation, thereby bypassing the safety and camouflage of the hors d’oeurves table entirely.

It’s not easy to make your way into a circle, and there is a good way and a bad way to do it. Throwing a few elbows and interrupting the flow of the conversation is not the good way. Stand at the edge and listen to the conversation so you can make an appropriate comment or ask a question when there is a pause. If you don’t get a chance to introduce yourself when you enter the conversation you can always do it later on when you’re leaving the group.

Once in the circle, you may end up talking to someone who works in a job function that you’re not interested in. While you don’t want to waste the entire presentation chatting with someone in sales and trading if you really want to work in banking, you also don’t want to be rude. When there is a pause in the conversation it’s fine to politely say “It’s been very interesting to hear about your experience, however I’m actually more interested ______. Are you able to point me in the direction of anyone who works in that area?”

Don’t monopolize the conversation. Be concise and give other people the chance to talk. Prepare your story ahead of time so that you can answer commonly asked questions like “What did you do before business school?” or “Why do you want to go into _____?” in one or two sentences. Short answers also keep the conversation moving so that you can cycle back out more quickly and meet someone else.

Don’t try to impress anyone with your deep knowledge of the industry. I guarantee you that everyone in the room from the company knows more than you do so you’ll just look silly. Keep questions general, along the lines of “It sounds like you’ve been with the company for quite some time—what is it that keeps you here?” and “What do you think is important for someone in my position to know coming into this job?”  Don’t be afraid to ask questions if you don’t understand what someone is talking about. People tend to fall back on industry jargon that you would never be expected to understand, and admitting that you’re not familiar with something they’ve said can often make you look like you’re listening and trying to understand.

In recruiting, as in dating, at the end of the night you either hope for a second date (called an informational interview) or you decide you’re not interested in pursuing things further. If you decide it’s worth pursuing, getting someone’s business card is the best way to set up your second date. With a business card in hand you can send an email thanking them for their time and asking if you might be able to follow-up sometime to ask some additional questions about the company or their position. You carefully write this email, hold your breath and hit send. And if you’re lucky and they had a nice time with you, too, you just might get that second date.

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