Nostalgia Boulevard At Georgetown

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Friday, 4 a.m. Alarm starts screaming at me. Faster than a hummingbird's average wing speed, I snooze it off. Hummingbirds. I know. Trust me -- when you sleep as little as I did over the span of a week, you too will feel like little birds are flying in circles above your head.



Friday, 4:10 a.m. More screaming. I look at my clock this time and it says 5:10 a.m. In my stupor I tell myself that my train leaves in 50 minutes and I must get up. Must. 4:20 a.m. Clock says 5:20. I believe clock. I jump out of bed, throw myself together in 11 minutes, pack in three, print 15 pages of Vault and Yahoo! Finance information on the three banks I'll be visiting later that day, and I'm in my elevator by 5:40. Or so I think in my half-asleep, panicked state. Rushing through my lobby I glance at my watch to gauge how much time I lost in the elevator. One minute? Two minutes? At this point, every minute counts.



My fog clears as my watch says, "Rachael, get some more sleep, it's only 4:45." And since I'm such an optimist, I remind myself that this is why I didn't set my clocks back like everyone else.



B-School Just Chugs Along

The reliable 6 a.m. train leaves at 6:30, obviously, which is no problem since my first informational interview is not until 10:30. Informational interviews are meetings we set up with alumni at our target companies. The technical definition is something along the lines of an opportunity to find out more about the industry and the relevant company.



The reality is that it's our way of sending the message of strong interest, getting face-time with the company, and finding out exactly what we need to do to make that company want us. If you have a moral problem against kissing up, I'd get over it very quickly. Trust me, it's possible to maintain pride and flatter others in the same sentence. Should this confuse you, contact me regarding my seminar, "Suspend Disbelief, Pause Reality."



Our class has about 240 people divided into four cohorts. We all have the same core classes in our first two modules -- each module is six weeks long, goes by in what feels like two weeks, and by the end, the beginning feels like a year ago. Business school flies by at lightning speed, but the beginning feels as far away as high school.



Fortunately for the smart people, the professors teach to the top of the class and then make themselves readily available outside of class for the students who are seeing z-scores and time value of money for the first time [gently termed "poets" by a favorite economy professor]. Since we all have the same classes, we help each other. Touchy-feely perhaps, but trust me, it returns full circle.



The Common MBA Choice

Working with people we do not choose is a true exercise in patience, diplomacy, and management. This is where the MBA skills come in. This is where we find our own differentiation advantages. The level of maturity we must adopt in order to get along well and get the job done at a level not just of competence but of excellence requires a talented exercise and blend of soft and hard skills.



As we sit in our first class, we learn that the prior business experience runs a full spectrum. But everyone there has done one same thing: Each one of us went through the same hard, life-changing, and disconcerting decision that it was time to go back to school and that an MBA was worth the economic cost [thank you, Professor Macher]. And when I voiced my uncertainty to these people who seemed more qualified than me, I realized that most people understand how it feels because they did the exact same thing.

The trip down Nostalgia Boulevard also commenced on the first day of school. [Memory Lane is overdeveloped and the traffic is a nightmare]. It's like every other first day of school we've ever had. We are once again 14, in AP Biology class. All of us are stripped of our tie, our desk, our Starbucks vanilla skim latte with a double shot of adrenaline, our Blackberry, and our phone extension. We don our backpacks, which in turn force our backs into a slight hunch. All of a sudden we have homework, fellow adults telling us to get to class on time, and S___ is sitting next to someone who reminds her of a man she fired but better-looking. We consider ourselves humbled and mildly confused.



But I digress. I'm still on the train up to New York City from Washington, D.C.



Inside Internship Interviews

At 9:30 I wake up bleary-eyed yet again, a jacket button imprint on my tired skin. I have one hour to learn as much as I can about three different banks, their specialties, their stock price, their competitors' stock prices, the industry, the economy, current financial events, investor confidence, and, most importantly, the respective banks' competitive advantage over all the other banks on the Street. I have to also bring about 10 intelligent but not cocky questions regarding how Company X and I might form some perfect union. And this is just for an internship.



At approximately 11 a.m. our first informational interviewee, a first-year associate at an investment bank, wrapped up the conversation. We gave him the requisite, firm, business-school handshakes that we learned in our informational interview informational seminar. Just before he left he handed each of us his business card which, in the world of the MBA program, is about an inch away from hard currency. I'm one card richer. YES!



Our second associate walked in, demanded resumes, and the three of us gracefully scrambled to hand them to him. This man was a first-year associate as well, but he grilled us to the ground, throwing the "Why Georgetown?" question at us. And as testament to Georgetown and somewhat of an answer in and of itself, we knew this was coming and were ready with our own carefully crafted and recrafted insightful answers.



That said, I will pretend that no one who has hiring power will read this and give you some true insight into "Why Georgetown?"



Reason 1. I lived in California my whole life and determined that unless I got into Haas at UC Berkeley, I was leaving California. And even if I did get into Haas, I wasn't sure I'd go, stupid as that may sound given the recent gravity-defying leap in rankings that Haas can now boast.



Reason 1b. I got in.



Reason 1c. Georgetown has a great brand, with ambitious administrators who are doing everything and more to push Georgetown up in the rankings. It's become almost a sleeper school, a diamond in the rough, and I could probably go on flattering myself forever. Sincerest apologies.



Reason 2. I was getting antsy and interested in living abroad and helping societies develop and grow. Seriously, I was. I've since been cured of such idealism and now refer to it as an interest in working on financing emerging economies. Georgetown prides itself on its international quality, with high ratios of international students, a yearly graduating class with 100% of the students having international work experience. Not to mention the: a) International Business Diploma option available to MBAs, or b] the joint degree option with the School of Foreign Service. You will learn about differentiation advantages in your strategy class. This defines it.



Reason 2b. Not only that, it gives you a superb selling point as you try and convince bulge-bracket banks to hire little ol' you.



Reason 3. Intellectual curiosity is cultivated and encouraged at Georgetown. Our accounting professor regularly brings in applicable articles and balance sheets to show us exactly what it looks like when a company commits audacious fraud. He doesn't just teach us accounting, he teaches us how to understand it, apply it, interpret it, and look through the numbers. Professors here genuinely encourage question and application.



I have about 25 other reasons I could tell you but I only have 1,500 words in which to write them so I'm trying to put the ones that might best explain my departure from sunny, beautiful, beach-lined, and palm tree-filled Southern California.



A hugely helpful way to research a school is to interact with the current student body; that will tell you what a school is really like. And Georgetown's students were energetic, excited, and had this enviable sense of camaraderie that made me want to be part of their club, too.



Comrades in Econ -- and Ale

But they also admitted to being pretty exhausted from their first year. And it's true. It's exhausting. The workload is ferocious. But the solidarity of the student body is what gets us through. The fact that everyone has the same work is a relief, and well, let's be honest, misery loves company.



A typical night at school involves me sitting down alone to start my microeconomics problem set. Two classmates [known technically as "colleagues"] walk by and say, "Hey, what are you working on?"



"Econ," I answer.



"Oh, we're about to start that." They throw their bags down on the couch and get settled. Another person walks up "Hey, are you guys doing econ?"



"Yeah, we are."



"Can I join you?"



"'Course you can." And then someone inevitably pipes up with "Does anyone feel like a beer?"



At which point I realize that I could really use a beer and one beer will not prevent me from completing the assignment but might very well make the process a little more bearable.



The next thing we know, the four of us are sitting around in the school study area, nursing glass bottles, discussing game theory, and painlessly finishing the assignment. Only drawback, we have about five other assignments to tackle before bedtime. But still, the experience and the overly sentimental unity we feel during times like this can't be helped. It's a great feeling, and one none of us will forget.