The Tulane MBA

Oliver – The Shakespeare Festival

Last weekend I saw a play called ‘Oliver’ in Dixon Hall.
It was performed as a part of the Summer Shakespeare Festival, which has been held every summer in NOLA for the last 35+ years.
The play was a musical performance, and was simply amazing. The live orchestra and atmospheric effects drew loud cheers from all.
You may be wondering that Oliver Twist was written by Charles Dickens. So how come it is a part of the Shakespeare Festival?
Well, my friend Asim asked me the same question, and honestly speaking, I do not know.

I had seen the ads last year, around the same time. I had just arrived in the city, and was busy with finding a house, MCOM classes etc.
I could not find time to go see one of the plays, thinking that I will see it later.
I would highly encourage all students who are arriving in the summer, to take some time out and see one of the remaining two performances.
Believe me, later on, you will find very less time on your hands.

Here is a link: http://www.neworleansshakespeare.com/
Also check the Tulane Calendar for upcoming performances.

M.Karthik; mkarthik01@gmail.com

First day on the Job !

I am working at Laitram Machinery, which is one of the divisions of Laitram LLC.

After waiting two days to get the paperwork from the International Student Office, I joined last Wednesday.
I have been given my own office. [ a pic to follow later ]

My first short assignment involves doing a market research on the Central American market.
Finding the data has been difficult, and I hope I can finish the report by next week.
The things we learned in the introductory strategy class are coming in handy.
Am also looking at some payback and profitability analysis stuff.

More updates later.

M.Karthik; mkarthik01@gmail.com ;

Internship Update- The beautiful world of beauty

So, I have officially been at my summer internship for one month. In that time period I’ve worked the fragrance counter at Macy’s on the day before the second biggest men’s holiday (Father’s Day), I’ve been made over to look like Claire Huxtable for the 100^th anniversary of L’Oreal (I was on the 80’s floor… don’t ask), I’ve sat in on meetings where decisions were made not just for U.S. Ralph Lauren marketing but for the entire world, and I have my first photo shoot in two weeks. Okay, so I’m telling you all the fun stuff first. I’ve also been here until 8 pm for a week straight, built Excel models for a presentation to senior management, run to Macy’s in the middle of the day to buy fragrances (very The Devil Wears Prada), learned many French terms (coffret anyone), and pretty much have been trying to wrap my head around what it means to be a Marketing Manager for the top beauty company in the world. New York has been amazing, in part to my internship and in part to the awesome neighborhood that I’m living in, and the fact that I’ve had guests every weekend since May. And while now I do feel like I’m getting settled into my job I still have lots to learn and am getting my project to work on in the next few days. At L’Oreal all summer interns present a project to senior management about a hot business topic. The project is normally something that everyone wants to know the answer to, but that no one really has time to dig into all the data and find it. It’s an actionable project that can be implemented within months, so at the end of the summer I can really say that I’ve had an impact on this business. When you land your internship next summer, make sure you know what you want to get out of it. This has been my first adventure into marketing, so I wanted to make sure that I really understood a day in the life of a marketer. It’s easy for interns to get bogged down with day to day tasks, but if you sit down at the beginning of your internship and say I want to accomplish x, y, and z then you’ll be much more focused and successful than if you just allow your manager to give you all the stuff that they don’t want to do. I’ve also been busy preparing for next school year. I know, I know, its summer and I should be enjoying my time away from Nola, but I can’t stop thinking about school! I want to be super organized when I get back to Nola in August, so I’m already working on compiling a list of prospective companies, getting RLGA activities organized, and trying to figure out how I can get more volunteer time in my schedule. Last year this time I was quitting my job and worrying about school, now I’m loving my job and excited about school. Oh how times have changed!

Amina

Back to NOLA

So I left New Orleans immediately after the semester-2 exams. The exams ended on May 7th, and I was on the plane on May 9th.
One more Indian student, Asim Jena, accompanied me on the trip back home.
I was extremely excited about going home for 3 months, and was finally going to eat good food !

After a long journey(which didn’t matter), I landed in Mumbai. After spending some time in Mumbai, I went to my home in Pune.
I started contacting people in India for an internship. Over the next 2-3 weeks, I did manage to get a couple of positions in India.
Over the same time, I was contacted by a local NOLA company, and was interviewed over the phone.
In the beginning of June I got an offer, and had to decide quickly.

I decided to come back, since I thought there was some exciting work to be done during the summer here.
The return flight was excruciating, and I hope I never have to do it again.
Pune -> Mumbai -> Frankfurt -> New Ark -> Atlanta -> New Orleans  !!!

After spending only one month back home, I had to come back. All my dreams of eating good food have been shattered.
But I am sure it will be worth it. By this time, most of the students have found a job, either paid or unpaid.
I am sure the remaining few will find something soon.



Karthik M

MBA Candidate 2010 - Tulane University; kmahadev@tulane.edu ; mkarthik01@gmail.com ;

Internship Update

One month into my internship I thought it would be time to give everyone a bit of an update on my activities. Initially, I was offered a position with Education Pioneers in New York City. Education Pioneers is a group that recruits JD, MBA, and Masters of Education students and places them in positions to help improve inner city education. I was very excited to land the opportunity to apply all I had learned at Tulane with my experience with Teach For America.

However, near the end of the school year, I was offered the opportunity to help launch a brand new charter school in New Orleans. The internship has me completing finance and operations work for the school such as meeting vendors, negotiating contracts, and running models to determine what financial decisions the school should make. With only a month before teachers report and 6 weeks before school starts, I still have plenty to do to ensure Pride College Prep is up and running this fall.

Now, here comes the advice part.
Part I: Your internship search will turn out the most successful if you know what you want to do right away. The search will begin at the start of the first semester while you also have tests and networking to worry about. With all of the opportunities available and demands on your time, focusing in on what you want to do will prove to be tremendously helpful. Stop by the Career Center early and often.

Part II: Develop a network in New Orleans. Whether you plan to stay in New Orleans following graduation or not, there is no reason to ignore all of the potential contacts in the city. I landed my internship because of a connection I made outside of the business school. Currently, there are many groups of people in the city working to keep young professionals in the city. I highly recommend you check out 504ward and the Idea Village.

-Eric

The Hurricane Factor

So today marks the first day of hurricane season, and I realized that I didn’t start blogging until after it ended last year so its never really been discussed on the blog. Yesterday I was at lunch with a friend who is considering law school and she said that she wasn’t going to apply to Tulane because she was too scared of hurricane season. Katrina and hurricanes past definitely crossed my mind when I was considering my acceptance to the Freeman School. I too had seen the horrific pictures of the Superdome and the Lower Ninth Ward and wondered if I could live in a place where there is almost a guarantee of misbehaving weather? The other schools I looked at had their fair share of weather related issues, snow, ice, and general dreariness. But there is just something about hurricanes that are well…scary. Last August when we first started hearing about Hurricane Gustav you could feel the tension in school. People were talking, worried, and wondering if/when/how they would evacuate. We all knew it was serious when Tulane canceled a day of classes. We would walk into class and our professors began telling us about their experiences in Katrina, how we should evacuate whenever we are told, and which website was the best for tracking the storm. I remember feeling anxious, we were literally weeks into school and my brain could only hold so much information. Econ and hurricanes do not mix. I was lucky enough to have classmates who were native New Orleanians and had lived through Katrina. Their advice, leave, and leave early. I will say that Tulane had an amazing system of keeping its students aware of what was happening. We got constant text messages and emails that told us what the school was doing to prepare including transportation and accommodations for students who had no where to go or couldn’t afford to go back home. There was also a website that we could direct family to so that they could be updated too. At the time, I didn’t have a t.v. so I really relied on the websites and my friends to let me know what was happening. Tulane ended up canceling classes for several days and urged students to evacuate before the mandatory city evacuation. I, upon the excellent advice of my good friends Ishaneka and Kyle packed up, secured my apartment and headed for my sisters’ house in Atlanta. I think the worst feeling was leaving New Orleans at 3 am before the mandatory evacuation started. It was just the uncertainty of not knowing what you were going to come back to, and knowing that the city could not take another Katrina. I got to Atlanta and constantly checked on my classmates to make sure they were out and okay. We had professors who emailed us and asked us to let them know that we were okay and where we were. The night before Gustav was expected to make landfall I was out with my sister. I didn’t want to be in the house watching t.v., I couldn’t bear the count down of the storm coming ashore. When I got back to my sister’s house around 2 am Gustav was on its way to Nola, with talks of its category number possibly increasing. I didn’t sleep that night, and when Gustav finally made landfall I couldn’t take my eyes of the t.v.  Once the storm subsided it then became a waiting game to find out when I could get back into the city. My apartment didn’t have power for about a week, but I had to head back to New Orleans because school was starting with or without me. New Orleans wasn’t spared, but it wasn’t underwater either, and all of my classmates were safe and sound. I’m not going to try and act like this experience wasn’t scary, but it definitely is not a reason not to attend Tulane. Hurricane season is a small percentage of the time that you’ll actually spend in New Orleans. Tulane is extremely well prepared and makes sure that students have the best information at all times. Part of the reason that I decided to go to Tulane was because I wanted to be in New Orleans post-Katrina. I wanted to contribute to the local economy, meet the residents, and bring my family and friends back to Nola. If I had let Katrina, or any hurricane for that matter deter me from going to the Freeman School, I can honestly say that I would have made one of the biggest mistakes of my life. 

Amina

Top 10 Things I Learned #1 - Stress Won't Get you a Job or an A

Top 10 Things I Learned #1

Stress Won’t Get you a Job or an A

The first semester of business school will put all the time management skills you thought you had to the test. During the course of two years you will become so accostomed to the fast-paced environment, that you will annoy everyone else outside of your class with your attempts to multi-task and “develop systems” for everything that is not business school.

Here’s a snapshot of your daily thoughts:

1. Even though I only started school a month ago, three of my friends are talking constantly about their awesome  interviews. Am I behind already?
2. I know X assignment is going to take me at least 7-10 solid hours to complete. I also know that I can start until teammate Y gets me the data. I won’t have that until 5 hours before it’s due. BEST CASE. It may also be disorganized.
3. I had midterms last week. Next week I have finals. They start on my Birthday.
4. The career people are hounding me because I haven’t reformatted my resume.
5. Professor Z has a class in 2 hours on a reading. I can’t skip, but I haven’t read and this guy cold-calls people to answer questions.
6. My phone is ringing because my partner on a project wants to know why I haven’t given him the research yet. I haven’t begun to write it up.
7. My significant other is complaining because I haven’t gotten home before midnight in 3 days.
8. There is an amazing speaker this evening in my field of choice, but I have a group meeting.
9. Tomorrow have I have a 5 minute presentation on something I vaguely remember hearing about last week in Q class. I can’t find my syllabus.

My point is: it is very easy to lose your cool. Over the course of the degree I have seen people yell at each other for no (good) reason at least once a week. Here’s some tips to manage stress:

1. Use to-do lists like it’s your job. Make one every night before you go to bed.
2. Put only actionable items on that list. No item should take more than 1 hour to compelete. Break up anything that will take longer into more items.
3. Use a calendar like an appendage. Don’t leave home without it. EVER.
4. Make sure to block off a half-hour before every meeting to plan what you want to say and what you want to get out of it. INSIST on this and reschedule meetings that drag on or contain useless chattering and no decision-making.
5. Be polite and always put favors at the top of your to-do list.
6. If things get heated, leave immediately and revisit later.
7. Write down everything you agree to do in your planner along with a to-do schedule.
8. Get a good night sleep 4 out 5 class nights. MUST.
9. Excersize daily. Even if it is just a 30 minute run.
10. Eat vegetables and bring snacks to class.
11. Don’t sweat anything. You are going to screw up. Just keep moving.
12. Smile often and apologize only when it’s your fault.