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Downtown New York – Why It Matters

Alex-wsq

In the fall of 2014, on the cusp of applying to business school, I found myself frequently mulling over the many options of each institution I was considering. At the time, I was feeling quite settled in my downtown Manhattan life, yet frequently daydreamed about reliving my undergrad days at a small, rural college.

Simply put, I was torn between the competing ideas of “going back to the woods,” keeping my new urban lifestyle, or splitting the difference via a school in a small-to-medium sized city.

Adding to my decision discord was the fact that while I had a decent idea of what I wanted to do after my MBA, I still had curiosity about certain industries that I wanted to at least dip my toes into during my two years of school.

Ultimately, I decided that coming to NYU, which offered the same kind of intimate community I cherished in undergrad, as well as the power of being in downtown New York, provided me the best path to scratch my proverbial professional itches.

A semester and a half in, all I can say is that if anything, I underestimated just how impactful being in downtown New York is. I remember one week, about halfway through the fall, that illustrated this quite fully.

At the time, I was deep into the consulting recruiting track but still exploring marketing, technology, and entertainment and media. My schedule was as follows:

  • Monday
    • 12pm-1pm: Consulting firm lunch & learn
    • 6pm-8pm: Consulting firm on-campus presentation
  • Tuesday
    • 12pm-1pm: Consulting firm lunch & learn
    • 5pm-7pm: Film studio corporate presentation
  • Wednesday
    • 12pm-1:30pm: Informational interview with a top online retailer
    • 6pm-9pm: Dinner and drinks with a friend in the movie business
  • Thursday
    • 6pm-9pm: Graduate Marketing Association’s “So You Want to be a Marketer?” information session and panel
  • Friday
    • 10am-11am: Trek to a major news organization’s headquarters
    • 12pm-2pm: Informational conversations at a top tech firm’s New York headquarters
    • 3pm-5pm: Coffee chats with consultants from top-tier firms

Now you might be thinking, “well, every school arranges treks to visit these companies, so what makes your schedule so special?”

To this, I’ll answer in two different ways. First, the remarkable thing is that I was able to attend all these sessions as part of my normal, everyday routine – no flights across the country, no train rides up and down the coast. The furthest I traveled out of my way the whole week was about 15 minutes by subway.

Second, not only was all this easy for me, but easy for these companies as well. If you choose to come to NYU, I think you’ll be amazed at just how often the same firms that are making headlines in the Wall Street Journal are here at Stern, whether they are sending someone to be on a panel, recruit students, or drop into a class.

So why does this matter? By being in downtown New York I had unprecedented access to companies, their employees, Stern alumni, events not-specific to business school students, and so on. Within a week, I was able to conclusively rule out all but two industries through this constant exposure and subsequently focus on what I now know concretely I can be passionate about.

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Just a semester in, and already seeing the world through a new lens…

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My alarm clock jolted me awake at 8:45 a.m. on Saturday, December 19th. Having completed the last exam of my first semester at Stern just a day earlier, I was feeling relieved to have a relaxing, if temporary, respite from the academic demands of business school. With tickets in hand to see a morning showing of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” I was ready to slip out of MBA mode and into the “home-for-the-holidays” state of mind.

A few minutes later, my friend Sam, who I was visiting up in Boston, poked his head into my room. “Hey man,” he said, “I’m heading to the gym before the movie – there’s some Special K cereal in the cupboard and K-Cups for the Keurig if you want anything – oh, and feel free to eat in the living room, Apple TV’s all hooked up.” He started to walk out the door then added, “also, I figure we can grab some Chipotle after Star Wars if you want.”

As Sam shut the door behind him, I sat there, surprised at the thoughts that came rushing into my head. While on the surface, our morning exchange might have seemed rather innocuous, for me, it was the first time I truly realized just how much Stern has changed my perceptions of the world. In the time it took Sam to utter a few quick sentences referencing everyday items and brands, my mind was making linkages back to all I had learned and experienced in one short semester.

Rather than just thinking about which flavor K-Cup I wanted to make, I was again pondering Green Mountain Coffee Roasters’ acquisition of Keurig, as I had been just a few days earlier in Strategy. Mention of Special K cereal took be back to another case study on big companies like Kellogg contracting out excess production capacity to make store-brand cereal products for retail stores. And of course Apple, a company that, as Professor Scott Galloway eloquently puts it, has “moved down the torso” from the consumer’s head, to the heart, and beyond, to maximize margins while transforming from a tech company into a luxury brand.

I always believed that undergrad was where you “learned how to think,” and grad school was where you gained a specific set of technical skills. But my early morning exchange with Sam was revealing that at Stern, your way of thinking and perceiving evolves as well, and there is no such thing as “slipping out of MBA mode.” Where I once saw brands, products, and prices as a consumer, I was now seeing the fruition of behind the scenes business processes – strategic decisions, supply and demand analyses, complex pricing models, and the like – as an MBA.

Of course, as a result of my first semester, I can comfortably put together a CFFO, build a game theory decision tree, and analyze a regression. But more importantly, I can now see the world in a whole new light, and think in a way that would have never been possible without my Stern experience.