Full-time MBA Blog

Hey there! It’s great to meet you. This is my first time blogging about my Stern experience. My name is Adrea and I’m a second year MBA specializing in Leadership and Change Management, Business Analytics and Strategy. I’m also heavily involved in many of the academic and social activities here at Stern. A few of my favorites right now are participating in Stern Consulting Corps, being a Teaching Fellow and serving as president of the Association of Hispanic and Black Business Students.  Because of that I wasn’t sure just what topic I was going to choose for my first blog post, but now, as I write this, I know exactly what I want to discuss: specializations at Stern.

The topic of specializations has been a huge area of discussion for me and many others as we prepare for our last semester at Stern and actively recruit for full time roles. This topic became especially relevant two weeks ago when we entered lottery submissions for Spring classes, our last time doing this. In a week or so we’ll find out which classes we’ll be taking. If you’re worried for me, don’t be! The lottery system actually works really well – taking into account our status and preferences to make sure that students with one semester left have the opportunity to take the classes we most want to take before graduating. But anyway, the bigger conversation is around specializations.

As I was choosing my last set of classes I began to reflect on my academic journey at Stern and whether or not my classes reflected the specializations I had originally decided on at the beginning of my first semester. The short answer: not at all. I’m incredibly happy about that! So a couple of points here–first, specializations at Stern are not set in stone. You don’t have to officially declare them and they don’t appear on your diploma. You can share them on your resume and leverage them to guide class selections if you’d like, but there is no binding commitment to them. As I look back on the classes that I have chosen to take, I am so thankful for that. Why? Because the process of getting an MBA is a formative one and if you let it be, it’s a great time for self-reflection. Likewise for me, it has been a great opportunity to learn even more about my values and explore new interests. Not having to declare and remain true to a specialization supports that process.

While I was updating my resume the other day, I took a look at the specializations that I originally listed during my first semester here. Those specializations were Product Management, Strategy and Marketing. In case you didn’t catch my current specializations at the beginning of this entry, they are now Leadership and Change Management, Business Analytics and Strategy. Only one remains standing. So how did that happen? Am I completely indecisive and illogical? Despite what you may think and what I sometimes think, no.

Like many Sternies, I decided during my first semester that, for my remaining three semesters, I wouldn’t rely on my Specializations alone when choosing classes. Instead, I chose classes that reflect my interests, or that have amazing teachers that I would be honored to learn from, or that would challenge me in an area where I previously struggled. In some cases those classes aligned with my previously prescribed specializations but in many others they led me down new avenues I previously had no clue would appeal to me. Now, as I reflect on my academic career and begin my job search, I can truly say that I have taken a set of classes that resonate much more closely to who I am. Accordingly, I feel confident that I will leave Stern with a new career that I’m passionate about, not just a job that I sort of like.

Where did we leave off? Since my summer, I have been busy! They say your second year is supposed to be a bit calmer than your first year, but for me it’s quite the opposite. Between interning, consulting, and TA-ing, I find I am running around more than ever. However, with this self-inflicted craziness, I find I am more fulfilled than ever.

This semester I am interning with the fashion designer Joseph Altuzarra. I conduct sales and inventory analysis for the small, yet growing, seven-person team. The Luxury & Retail Club posted about the opening over the summer and since then I’ve been building a relationship with the company so that they continue to partner with Stern. It’s been an incredible experience thus far. Joseph, along with his dog, Bean, is in the office frequently. Despite the industry’s reputation for being standoffish, I have found the people at Altuzarra to be warm, welcoming, and encouraging. Watching the process unfold from design to production and sales has been invaluable.  I consider myself extremely fortunate for this opportunity. Just by virtue of sitting in the office, I am able to absorb so much. I’ve never been closer to the product nor have I gained such exposure to the financials of a company. It’s also my first experience outside of the digital realm, which is enabling me to broaden my resume and experience.

Another amazing learning experience is with the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA). I am developing an investor-ready business plan for a designer looking to launch a high-end women’s clothing line. The access to industry advisors and information will certainly be helpful throughout my career. Next semester, Stern is strengthening its relationship with the CFDA by turning the consulting projects into a class. We will be working with younger designers looking to grow their existing businesses. I will be the teaching fellow for that class and cannot wait to tell you how it unfolds!

It’s the final countdown! As I write this last blog post, we are just two short weeks away from graduation. Wow. I seriously have no idea where the time went! Everyone is busily finishing up classes, wrapping up the last of their group projects and getting ready for their final exams. Last night was my final presentation and I am officially done with all of my school work! (I somehow planned this spectacularly without even trying, my class projects wrapped up early and I do not have any finals. Awesome). However the end of classes is definitely bittersweet.

We’ve got a crazy couple of weeks ahead with tons of fun activities planned for “senior week.” It is kicking off tonight with the Out Class’s “School’s Out, So Are We” annual party complete with a drag show lip sync contest featuring fellow classmates – definitely one not to be missed. Tomorrow night we have a boat cruise and then next week there is an event planned every night of the week wrapping up with a weekend in Atlantic City.

I am so excited to spend the next two weeks hanging out with my classmates before everyone heads back out into the real world. Within these halls I have formed friendships that I know will last a lifetime. We have spent countless hours together working on group projects, procrastinating in the study rooms, grabbing drinks around campus and traveling the world-it has been awesome.

To the Sternies of the class of 2015, best of luck and get ready for the adventure of a lifetime. I would give anything to be back in your shoes and I could not have made a better choice for my MBA than NYU Stern.

Hello readers,

So things are wrapping up here at Stern. As I write this, I have less than three weeks until my graduation, which is insane. These two years have been amazing, but they really fly by.

For those of you who have applied this year and will be joining Stern in the fall, first of all, congratulations are in order. I’m going to try to do something I don’t always do with this blog and give actually useful advice.

So you probably all know I’m going back into management consulting after I graduate, so I’ve been preparing for that for the last two years – taking part in the Management Consulting Association (MCA), networking, interviewing, and that often-forgotten part of business school, called “classes.” Prior to business school, I hadn’t really taken business classes, so I wanted to take the full core (minus micro and macro economics, since I had done that in undergrad), but I wanted to also make sure I got to take the classes I wanted that would help me in consulting and beyond. So I’m going to give you a resource that I wish I had before I started. Here’s a list of all of the core courses, and how each one helps for life as a consultant, so you can determine which cores to take and when. This week I’ll go into the four core classes that are only offered during the fall semester. Next week, I’ll focus on the two classes that only take place during the spring, as well as three courses that are offered during either the fall or the spring.

1. Financial Accounting and Reporting

This is one of the two required core classes, so you’ll take this (like it or not) unless you have a CPA, accounting major, or can test out of it. This class isn’t like an undergraduate financial accounting class (I know – I took one back in college). Instead of teaching students how to write journal entries, and essentially training students to be accountants, this class focuses on getting students to understand financial statements in a way that is relevant to a manager. A lot of time is focused on how different financial statements relate and interact with each other, and how a manager should understand what is actually happening in a business based on this information. Why should a soon-to-be-consultant take this course? If you want to fully understand a client to help them, say, become more profitable, you should probably understand how their cost structure works, how their working capital has changed, whether they have cash necessary to take on new projects, etc. A lot of that understanding comes from reading financial statements, and that requires some knowledge of accounting.

Interesting follow up courses: Modeling Financial Statements, Financial Statement Analysis

2. Statistics and Data Analysis

This is the other required core course, so expect to take it. You’ll learn probability through multiple regression, and will learn to analyze real data sets to draw out conclusions. From my experience in consulting, an understanding of statistical methods can really bolster your ability to draw insights out of large data sets. Since getting a solid understanding of statistical analyses, I’ve realized that many of the projects I’ve done in business school, as well as during my internship, benefited from this understanding, and I’ve been able to find better solutions to complex problems by understanding how different factors influence an end result.

Interesting follow up courses: Regression and Multivariate Data Analysis

3. Strategy

This course is probably the easiest to relate to a career in strategy consulting. Core strategy helps you understand the high level choices that firms can make to create and capture value. You’ll learn about how to create firm value, how to evaluate industries, how best to allocate scarce resources, and how to think in ways you probably haven’t had to before. These skills all directly tie to things you’ll actually do as a consultant, so it’s recommended to not skip this one.

Interesting follow up courses: Advanced Strategy – Tools, Managing Growing Companies

4. Firms and Markets

This is the name for our core microeconomics course. The basics of microeconomics focus on the interaction of supply and demand, the different market structures that occur in various industries, and way that firms interact from a game theoretical perspective. These are the forces that drive businesses to behave the way they do, and to make recommendations about what a firm should do, it would be wise to understand the constraints that a firm faces.

Interesting follow up courses: Game Theory, Urban Systems

That’s all for this week, stay tuned for next week’s post on Foundations of Finance, Marketing, Competitive Advantage from Operations, the Global Economy, and Leadership in Organizations.

3 weeks until graduation – I can’t believe it!

Even though we have a ton of fun senior week activities coming up, I still have a lot of work to do before the semester ends. Even more than getting good grades, I just don’t want to let my team members down! I have a final this week in my Pricing class and three presentations – one in Customer Insights, one in Entrepreneurial Finance, and one in Decision Models. Yikes, so much work!

In this post, I want to write about a guest speaker we had this week. The founder and CEO of Chobani Yogurt came to Stern to talk about his success story. Hamdi Ulukaya said, “I scraped together funding to buy an old yogurt plant in upstate New York in 2005, with help from a Small Business Administration Loan. I didn’t have any concrete plans, and the place wasn’t in good shape — with water dripping from the ceiling and paint peeling for the walls. But when I got the idea to start making Greek yogurt in the U.S., the company fixed the factory up and ran with it, and I basically lived in the plant for five years to get Chobani off the ground.”

He talked about his strategy to focus on a substantial, yet healthy yogurt solution for consumers. He brought a low sugar and preservatives product with catchy packaging to the shelves, and it was a hit from the start. He refused to outsource any part of the process and instead controlled everything from production of the product to it hitting the shelves in grocery stores. He also emphasized his appreciation for his dedicated workers and how they inspired him to do more for the community and give back to people (especially children) of the town Chobani started producing in.

It was an inspiring discussion because it was really about a man that came to the U.S. for the first time with nothing – no job, no money, no future. He saw a need for something in the market and had a very simple idea. From there, it was passion and determination…and now he is a billionaire.

Along with Hamdi, we’ve had some other great speakers come to Stern – people I would never have had exposure to had I not been here getting my MBA in NYC. Some of these speakers include the CEO of Twitter, CEO of JCrew, CMO of Diageo, Founder of KIND Bars, etc. So many amazing, inspiring leaders in today’s changing business world.

That’s it for today. More next week…have a good weekend!

 

This has been an incredible week. As we gear up for finals here at Stern, it’s nice, albeit challenging, to still have so many exciting events going on. Last Saturday was our Spring Gala at the Gansevoort. Students dressed in their best and danced the night away. What was nice is that I even met some second years I didn’t know already. It was a great way to bond with my classmates and, like almost any girl, enjoy a night of playing dress-up.

The second unforgettable experience this week was when Peter Gelb, the General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera came and spoke to a group of students about attracting new, younger audiences and the how opera must adapt to the digital age. He spoke with humor about his transition from Sony Classical Music to the Met and some of the errors he’d made along the way. He talked about the ways this old institution is striving to innovate and the financial difficulties it faced as an entity that must rely on donations to remain sustainable. Mr. Gelb spoke frankly about the need for opera to infiltrate culture on a wider level, which was his motivation for streaming performances in movie theaters across the globe. As an arts buff, his talk left me wondering how I could use my business education to give back to a place like the Met Opera one day.

The third privilege I had this week was that Ann Moore, former CEO of Time Inc. came to speak at my Leadership in Organizations class. Unlike many of the speakers, Ms. Moore did not allow Stern to videotape our conversation because she wanted to be as open and honest with us as possible. She spoke about the career challenges she faced as a woman and the difficulty she had letting people go during economic and industry downturns. She talked about managing her relationships from the personal to the political to those at work, and she discussed tradeoffs she has made along the way. What struck me most was that Ms. Moore did not have any regrets in her 33 year career at Time. She talked about the ways she had pushed the organization to allow her to change it and how we can all look to do the same in our own careers. Lastly, she discussed the difficulty of integrating digital natives from our generation with other generations, who may not be as comfortable or familiar with technology.

My last two adventures for the week begin now. I am starting my Friday off with a Luxury and Retail Club trek to men’s clothing retailer Bonobos. Then I will present the results of my Stern Consulting Corps project for the NYU Langone Medical Center Department of Integrative Health, followed by a reception. It’s clearly going to be another amazing Stern-filled day, but I wouldn’t want it any other way, especially as the year winds down. I will have to report back on these events next week!

This past Friday, Stern offered me a unique experience. As part of the Leadership Development Initiative, I attended a modified marine training course with some of my classmates. We left from Stern at 8am and headed to the course on Staten Island. Upon arriving, we had little idea what to expect. I was fearful that the activities may be more physically demanding than I was prepared for. A former marine was running the course and I hoped that the sneakers and athletic gear, including helmets, were simply a precaution.

We were put into groups randomly and then proceeded to the first obstacle course. We were given a task and asked to choose a leader for each one. Each obstacle required a combination of problem solving, teamwork, and trust. It was great to work so closely with a new group of Stern students. Even though I didn’t know several group members, I felt we shared a common bond as Sternies. It was comforting to feel like they would support me. I found the tasks challenging – activities such as building a bridge with three planks no wider than six inches, getting a barrel across a “booby-trapped” tight rope, etc. The activities required a lot of giving and receiving feedback. It tied well with the course material from Leadership in Organizations.

I learned I could adapt quickly in unknown situations, even where I didn’t know my team well. It was nice to see how we bonded with ease over the course of the morning. While I was initially hesitant, I’m ultimately glad I participated.

Happy Monday everyone!

This weekend was a whirlwind. It was Pre-View Weekend at Stern for Admitted Students. I wasn’t able to attend in 2011 when I was accepted but am grateful to have had the opportunity to volunteer at it the past two years. The weekend is full of fun and informational activities to help admitted students figure out if Stern is the right school for them. Specifically, I volunteered to speak to admitted students at the Marketing table for the “Explore your Path” session on Saturday. Students interested in pursuing a marketing career came by to find out about what companies recruit on campus, how the GMA helps students prepare for interviews, etc. I also volunteered to facilitate one of the icebreaker sessions, where students sat around a table and answered some funny questions to get to know each other better.

Also, I am sad to say that I am officially no longer a GMA Co-President. Yesterday was our end-of-year board dinner, and we finally passed the torch to the new presidents and board for 2013-2014. It was definitely sad – Jennifer and I have loved every minute of leading the club this year and will dearly miss it. We are so happy to have had the opportunity to make an impact on students with a similar passion for marketing.

Fun week ahead though! Tomorrow, 20 of us are going to the Comedy Cellar for a show after class. We’ve been wanting to go for so long and thought it would be fun to do it on a weeknight when everyone is available and when the place isn’t as crowded as it would be on the weekends. And Saturday is the SPRING GALA! The Spring Gala is our formal open bar and hors d’oeuvres event in April. This year, it’s at the Gansevort Park Avenue. This will be one of the last opportunities to have the entire school together in one venue. We have senior week coming up in mid-May, but that’s just for the MBA2’s obviously.

That’s it for now…will have more later this week or next!