The benefits of visibility on campus

Hello everyone!

You probably thought this blog was retired right? Well much like what happened during the first year of my MBA, while I was going through the interview rounds for my full-time job, I didn’t want to blog since if I did write anything it probably would have been me being angry or frustrated that I wasn’t employed yet which isn’t useful to you guys in any way whatsoever. Now that I am set for employment, how I got my job is a good lesson on what TO do when you are looking for a job post-MBA.  So here is my story on how I got my job:

As I might have alluded to in previous posts, I was VERY committed to making sure I get a job post-MBA. This meant many, many emails and meetings with my career advisor to ensure I was presenting myself as strongly as possible to potential employers. I also went out of my way to do some pretty creative things with companies that recruited on campus (while I was on exchange in Madrid and while I was completing my last semester in Toronto) so that those companies remembered me as well as possible.  As a result of all of this, the Rotman Career Centre knew me very well and I was probably often top-of-mind to them- to the point that I am pretty sure they wanted me to get a job so that, if nothing else, I’d stop getting on top of them for help!

As a result of the above, one day I got an email from the director of the Career Centre telling me that the Admissions team was telling her in passing that it was interested in hiring an MBA grad to join their team and the Career Centre director, knowing my passion for the Rotman brand, my strong networking skills, etc, thought I might be interested. I was indeed interested, so she told me to apply, so I did. Note that this job was not listed on the Rotman job listings site (but it was listed on the “careers at the University of Toronto” website). However if it wasn’t for me being told about the job, I never would have even known it existed.

So I applied, did my interview preparation, did my interviews and got the job! So I will be the new Assistant Director of Admissions for the Full-Time Rotman MBA Program.

I know some MBA students might feel like:

-They know everything they need to know for their job search

-They want to go at their job search without Rotman’s help

But as my story proves, it pays (literally and figuratively) to ensure people know you on campus! So get out there, get involved, be friendly with people and good things will happen!!

Future Rotman students are in for some real awesomeness!!

One of the directors of the full-time MBA program, Kevin Frey, opened up time slots over the next few weeks to meet with us students to address any concerns we have about the program, hear from us how we can make the program even better, etc.

I really like Rotman and want it to maximize its awesomeness even when I am gone so I decided to attend one of Kevin’s sessions. SO fantastic!!  While I feel like I have gotten a lot out of Rotman, I am jealous of the class of 2014, 2015, 2016, etc. You guys are going to be SO set. Here are some cool things I learned:

--Recruitment--

The recruitment process will have changed COMPLETELY going forward. Rotman will be placing much more importance on employability upon graduation. This means in part, an emphasis on admitting candidates with sufficiently strong verbal and written communication skills and these skills will be explicitly evaluated in the application process. I am SO happy to hear this as this helps in so many ways:

-Group work becomes less stressful as ALL members of the team can pull their weight equally

-Class discussions become more enriching with more students able to clearly express their viewpoints

-The pool of viable candidates to employers becomes larger which increases the prestige of Rotman students on the whole

The interview process is also becoming much more rigorous. This means applicants can expect to be pushed a bit in their interviews. Also, each Rotman recruiter is assigned to and is responsible for specific applicants. So if, for example, X is interviewed by Y and upon admission, X turns out to be an all-star, Y will be recognized for their good job spotting an excellent candidate. Conversely, if X is a real dud, Y will be held directly accountable for admitting a dud. As a result, you can be sure awesomeness per capita at Rotman will increase.

Something that I didn’t realize until I spoke with Kevin was the importance of increasing the class size from about 280 (what it is now) to 400+. It turns out the big and most prestigious US schools have AT LEAST 400 students in the class (i.e. MIT). Many have about 1000 (i.e. Kellogg). Back when I first heard that the class size was increasing, I was worried about the talent pool diluting. But apparently MBA applicants don’t think that way. What tends to happen with a small class size is that they think “the class is so small I won’t apply because I won’t get in.” In reality, by admitting more students, you give more confidence to the all-star people of the world that if they apply they can actually get in and therefore more all-stars end up applying to (and getting in) the school. Increasing class size is also important from a recruitment standpoint which was the other big thing touched on by Kevin....

Insight into the fun world of product and service pricing

Hello friends!

So this semester I am taking my electives at Rotman, one of which being Pricing. I took this class because I figured if I am going to be a brand manager or work with brand managers, understanding how to price the brands which I am involved with is probably pretty important.

Also, from when I worked at Dell, when we made any new marketing initiative, the price of the products we were advertising was almost always the biggest issue.  Pricing was in fact such an important consideration that several members of the marketing team’s job was almost entirely pricing products! I had a basic understanding of what they did but now wanted to really get it, so I could be a more complete marketer upon finishing my MBA so here I was.

I know MBA school often gets knocked for making students study cases of really random industries unrelated to that which you will ultimately work in but the cases are actually pretty useful for practice, in this case, practice pricing products and services. Especially because there are so many ways to do it. 

It’s a lot of math to even figure out how much your products COST never mind what you will price them at! Things that one normally takes for granted, like the electricity in your building (overhead), is actually built into the costs of stuff you buy. This actually helps explain why Walmart can offer such low prices- they cut corners on almost EVERYTHING in their company (note that I said “almost”; they spend a lot on technology and such which helps give them their competitive advantage but I digress). So for example, by having offices that look like they belong in 1960 means their costs are lower and therefore can ultimately price lower.

This also explains in part why when I was working at Dell, we were always undercut by Acer. Acer had SUPER lean Canadian operations compared to Dell- like 5 people working in its Canadian marketing department while Dell Canada had like 25. So of course now, each Dell computer had to recover the costs of more salaries than Acer thus the price difference (all else being equal). This would be cost-based pricing and is I think, why my pricer colleagues were using most of the time.

Besides cost-based pricing there are some other pricing varieties as well. One thing that I thought was pretty cool was a study my prof (Dilip Soman) did on how different pricing plans influence product use. i.e. for a gym membership, to encourage usage, it is better to offer monthly pricing plans than annual ones. This is because when you pay each month, it is a reminder that you are still paying for the gym and therefore should probably use it. But if you pay annually, a month after paying your membership fee, life gets in the way of going to the gym and you forget about it. (I am probably the exception to this rule- annual or monthly membership…I am going to work out!) Consumer psychology with pricing! Fascinating.

Besides psychological or cost-based pricing like what I talked about above, another way is “value based” where you basically just pay for what you actually want (i.e. what you value). This is why cellphone plans exist, for example- by having different pricing options for different types of people, Rogers, for example, maximizes profit because they can meet the needs of every type of customer. People will be more likely to buy if they know they are paying only for stuff they actually want.

Thanks to our delightful pricing class, once I get back to work in a few months, I will be ready to make some awesome prices for whatever I am marketing to help my team make some big $$! 

Back to the Toronto Routine!

I am living in Toronto again after 8 months away and it was a pretty weird feeling at first. After living exceedingly well abroad it was definitely a bit of an adjustment coming back. Although Rotman being Rotman, I got right back into the thick of things! Between:

-Class

-My involvement in the Rotman Marketing Association and Rotman Entertainment and Media Association

-Helping 1^st years with job applications/interview prep

-Keeping up with networking for my own job search

My life has been pretty busy.

While I was gone, I was pretty removed from everything my friends were doing on this side of the atlantic. But coming back, everyone has been awesome getting me right back into the fold, like I never left. I am lucky to have awesome friends and classmates! If I could have taken my classmates with me during my time in Madrid, life would have been ever better over there!

For those looking to go on exchange, some important things to consider:

-Before you pick which semester you want to go abroad, consider when recruitment is for the jobs you are interested in. For example, if consulting is your thing, recruitment happens almost entirely in the fall. So you’d want to be at Rotman for that. So obviously then go on exchange in the winter.

-Everyone that goes on exchange gets a scholarship that essentially covers the cost of your flight. So no worries on that front!

-If you plan to get involved on the exec of a club, I strongly recommend you DO NOT go on exchange AT ALL. More on that below.

It is really challenging coordinating things across time zones and because the Rotman administrators (and any execs in the business community you hope to work with to visit Rotman or whatever) get so much email daily, dealing with them is faster and easier face-to-face/by phone.

That’s not to say it is impossible to manage club stuff abroad (I managed club stuff abroad after all) but you have to be committed- which might be a challenge for some people when you are living it up on exchange in another part of the world. :-)