Posted by Brian Cantwell on Tue, Jul 21, 2009 @ 02:51 PM
With my wedding coming up this weekend, I've got marriage on the brain. I'm designing ceremony programs in my sleep. My feet start spontaneously waltzing on my walk to work. I see seating charts in my Excel spreadsheets. Salesforce.com is looking suspiciously like my Crate & Barrel registry. Basically, I'm finding parallels with marriage in everything I'm doing, so it seems only natural to draw some connections between my upcoming nuptials and another huge committment in my life, b-school.
(sidenote: I hope my wedding cake looks as delicious as these cupcakes, courtesy of CleverCupcakes)
Parallels between B-School and Marriage
- The application process is long and hard: The seven years I dated my fiancee were far more enjoyable than the seven months I spent preparing my b-school apps, but required about seventy times more work.
- Leaving halfway through is frowned upon: There's really no such thing as a transfer or leave-of-absence in b-school. Like marriage, you're stuck with what you've picked so make sure you love it!
- It's really expensive: B-school costs a lot. I'm told that it is a good investment. Weddings cost a lot. I'm told they aren't such a great investment. My wife will cost a lot. I'm told that she is a fabulous investment.
- You marry the whole family: There's a saying that when you get married, you marry the whole family. When you pick a b-school, you also get the whole family. You get the broader university and its resources, the alumni network, the employer relationships, the geographic location, and the stereotypes. Make sure you like the "extended family" of your MBA program. It will have a major impact on your level of happiness.
- The benefits last forever: While my MIT Sloan MBA may not be as attractive, caring, or talkative as my fiancee, it will also make a terrific life partner. For the rest of my life I'll be able to enjoy the career and network benefits that come with being a Sloanie, just like I'll be able to enjoy the companionship that comes with marrying the most incredible woman I've ever met.
Posted by Brian Cantwell on Wed, Jun 17, 2009 @ 10:44 AM
Yesterday my MIT Sloan classmate @amandapey (check out her b-school blog) tweeted about a study that compared click-through rates on links posted to Twitter and links posted to Facebook. Twitter blew Facebook away with nearly double the click-throughs, despite having 7x smaller test audience. That got me thinking about why I use Twitter and what I find so useful about it.
One of the biggest problems I have as a b-school student is information consumption. When I was working as a consultant, I could focus my information consumption efforts on general news (NYT) and sources relevant to my job - mainly marketing (AdAge, Colloquy), consumer products (GMA Smart Brief), and the 5-10 weekly newsletters and research findings that my company sent out.
For me, the whole point of b-school has been to broaden my knowledge base and experiment with multiple areas of expertise. In order to stay on top of the most relevant information I need to consume information on a much wider variety of topics than ever before. RSS feeds, daily emails, article aggregation sites like Digg and Reddit, and the major news media outlets are either overwhelming or insufficient. In this age of distributed information, there really was no one-stop-shop source for the best content... until Twitter.
vs. 
Cartoon Credit
I go to Twitter to click on links. By following people who represent all of my interests (entrepreneurship, the MIT $100K, business school, social media, web/tech, marketing, the red sox, boston events, wine, and, of course, my future wife) and setting up saved searches for my favorite topics, I get a real-time stream of relevant information so that I can stay on top of trends and the latest news. I'm not surprised that Twitter had a much higher link click-through rate than Facebook, because that is exactly what I use Twitter for. I log in to Facebook to see what my friends are up to. I log in to Twitter to find and filter information - and information usually comes in the form of a link.
As I've mentioned before, I wish I had known about Twitter before b-school so that I could have engaged with the MBA community before setting foot on campus. If you are in b-school or heading there in the fall, I would definitely recommend getting active on Twitter. Hopefully you'll find it as useful as I have.
Posted by Brian Cantwell on Thu, Jun 11, 2009 @ 08:38 AM
It took a week and a half, but I have just about settled into the working rhythms of my b-school summer internship. You would think that after four years in the working world pre-MBA, I would slide right back into the daily grind - but it was harder than I expected. Even after nine short months of b-school, my physical and mental state had completely reconditioned to a new way of life.
In short, work is not school. Here are some of the key differences:
- Cubicles: One of the best things about school is that there are no cubicles. At Sloan we've got tables, benches, conference rooms, couches, lounges, classrooms, and (of course) chairs with built-in desks, but no cubes. At work, it's all about the cubes.
- Alarm: My alarm goes off at the same time every day. This is a novelty. During the school year, my alarm never went off at the same time for more than two days in a row.
- Diversity: In b-school, everyone is around the same age, taking the same classes, and pursuing similar business-oriented interests. Work is more diverse in that you have colleagues with a wider range of skills, experiences, and aspirations, but less diverse in the number of languages I hear being spoken in the hallways.
- Homework: You don't have any. Sweet!
- Responsibility: You are doing real work with real implications and real people depending on you. This is pretty cool because it makes work significantly more fulfilling than school. The downside is that there is more pressure. My advice, learn to love the pressure, or become a life-long student.
- Boss: A real person depending on you. See "Responsibility."
- Money: Getting paid is awesome. I didn't realize how much I missed it.
I've also learned that assimilation back into the paid workforce is much easier when you have a great office environment to ease your transition. This summer I'm working for HubSpot, a venture-backed internet marketing software startup in Cambridge, MA. HubSpot's office culture is high-energy, but with a funky and friendly vibe. While I do sit in a cube, at least the wall is painted bright orange and I've got an IKEA floor lamp next to me to spice things up. Even better is the stocked kitchen which boasts free soda, coffee, granola bars, and even Gushers (yeah, I hadn't seen those since middle school either).
So, no matter how accustomed to the workforce you think you are before coming to b-school, you will become unaccustomed to it during your first year. Give yourself some time to reengage with office culture when you start your summer internship, and don't worry if it takes a little while to feel normal again.
Posted by Brian Cantwell on Fri, Jun 05, 2009 @ 03:23 PM
With the completion of exams and the start of my summer internship, the time has come to officially close the books on MIT Sloan MBA Year 1. The year was exhausting, exhilarating, and full of surprises. For all you future MBAs out there, here at the things I wish I had known a year ago.
Five things I wish I had known before b-school:
- The economy would tank: Knowing that the U.S. economy would completely implode within the first three weeks of b-school would have opened up all kinds of opportunities. I could have funded my MBA with the proceeds of shorting the S&P in July of 2008 and covering my position in late November. I could have postponed my MBA by a year, banked another year of salary (assuming I would not have fallen victim to layoffs), and bought a house on the cheap. Most importantly, I could have read up on MBSs, CDOs, and tranches, so that I actually understood what was going on when the financial crisis went down. As it turned out, I learned all I needed to know from this PowerPoint.
- This is not college 2.0, this is b-school: B-school looks and feels like college - you are on a college campus, enjoying a student ID (great for discounts!), taking classes, participating in extracurriculars, and cranking out homework - but don't be fooled! Top three differences between b-school and college: Class (you can't skip it and you have to participate), Speed (it is all over in two years and you don't want to waste a minute), and Reality (you'll study and work with real companies, you'll try to get a real job, your classmates have done really incredible stuff in the real world).
- Twitter is awesome: I wish I had jumped on the twitter bandwagon well before arriving at Sloan so that I could have followed current students and gotten an unfiltered sense of what was in store for me. Fortunately I jumped on the twitter bandwagon early in the semester thanks to getting to know @hubspot through a marketing project. if you want to follow some interesting Sloan tweets, check out @mitsloanies or you can follow me.
- Math is hard: Upon arriving at b-school, I had K-12 math under my belt and some undergraduate statistics. Being a History major in college, I never fully appreciated the complexities of regressions, Monte Carlo simulations, and covariances. Thanks to the help of my awesome Core Team, I somehow managed to make it through courses like Data, Models, and Decisions, and Economics for Business Decisions. My advice for admits, bone up on your math skills (or acquire some new ones).
- Planning a wedding during b-school is harder than math: Don't get married during b-school. When my fiancee and I decided on July 2009 for our wedding, we thought we were being smart. The date would fall smack in the middle of my first and second year and the planning would take up a few hours every week or two during year one. Now remember, at the time I thought that the economy would be solid, b-school would be like college, and I wouldn't need to know math. In retrospect, adding the stress of wedding planning to the stress of a first year in b-school and planning a summer internship around a wedding and honeymoon weren't the brightest ideas. So, a word of warning to all you engaged future MBAs, elope now or wait until you graduate.
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