Arielle's MBA Blog

Guest Blogger Alert!!!!!! Luanne David Hill

September 30th, 2010 by asamuels under Uncategorized. No Comments.

As a first year MBA candidate, I was excited about attending National Black MBA Association conference; my first conference as an MBA student. I had my elevator pitch ready and my stack of business cards and my stack of resumes were nicely packed in my fancy leather embossed Smith portfolio; I was ready to go forth and conquer. As I entered the room the place was abuzz with students aggressively selling themselves to employers. I quickly became intimidated and decided to make my way to the Smith table to practice my pitch and solicit some last minute feedback. After speaking with people I was familiar with, I made my way to a few companies that were not my top picks to get a feel for the conference process without ‘blowing my chances’ with one of the firms that I really wanted to work for. Since I had not researched all the 300 – 400 firms there, I decided to treat every meeting as an informational interview and I truly learnt a lot about various companies, some of which were not even on my radar previously and one of which is now my first choice to work for.
If I could give a bit of advice to my then self, it would be:

1. Prepare early. Jobs are usually posted months in advance. Identify the ones you are interested
in, post your resume and cover letter and do your research.

2. You cannot research every company, don’t let this preclude you from speaking with recruiters at those firms. Approach the discussion as an informational interview and keep an open mind.

3. Don’t dismiss companies if their CORE business doesn’t match your focus area.

4. Almost all of the companies will have goodies. Don’t just walk around the conference grabbing goodies from each table – especially if you are looking for a job. There will be plenty of time at the end of the conference to get goodies; in fact companies will be begging you to take them.

A weekend in Baltimore

September 29th, 2010 by asamuels under Uncategorized. No Comments.

As a second year, I love that I have more freedom to tailor my schedule any way that I would like. The first year schedule does not allow for much flexibility until Term D, so this year it is great to have complete control. Its half way through term A and I am still reevaluating my schedule for term B.  This term, I only have classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, from 10:30- 5pm. Though they are long days, I am happy that at 5 pm on Wednesdays, I feel as if my week is almost over.

This fall, I also chose to take a weekend course at the Baltimore campus. This is different from a lot of the Saturday courses offered because the course only meets two weekends in total, with class going from 8:30 am to 6:30 pm on Saturday and Sunday. I was excited for a variety of reasons like, I was taking the course from Peter Morici, I was going to get a chance to experience the Baltimore Campus and I would get the chance to interact with a lot more part time students. It was a great experience, long, but great. All of the students were really nice and welcoming, especially since I knew only one other student, who is also in the full time program.  It’s always nerve racking when you have a group project in a class and you don’t know anyone, but luckily one of the Baltimore asked me to join their group. Needless to say, I was relieved and that the stress was gone immediately. Despite the weekend being very long, it was a great experience and I am happy that I branched outside of college park for a class. I am actually going to look for more classes at different campuses now to expose myself to the as much of the Smith Network as possible.