Reflecting on my time at IE

This week is sadly my last week at Instituto de Empresa. L With that, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on my experience here. Hope you enjoy!

--Things that were awesome—

-Living in Madrid- IE is awesome if for no other reason than the fact that it is in Madrid. My favourite city in the world. As I alluded to in previous blog posts, the weather, food, culture, etc are all so phenomenal that having Madrid as a backdrop to your MBA studies automatically makes your MBA experience pretty great.

-The Profs- Among the profs I had anyways, almost all of them teach and work in the field in which they teach (rather than just doing research). I loved this. It made the profs seem very up-to-date on best practices so learning how to use those best practices in developing business strategies I feel has really helped prepare me for success in my post-MBA career.

-REAL diversity- Every MBA school seems to talk about how much it values diversity but for most, it is just talk, with the student body being dominated by 2-3 countries or regions of the globe. At IE, diversity actually exists. My classes included south americans, north americans, Europeans, Africans, Asians and Australians with no one region dominating over the others. This was a great way to open myself up to tons of different perspectives on life and business.

-The Campus- IE has several buildings spread out across a few blocks in the neighbourhood of Madrid called Salamanca. The buildings are NICE. I mean, really, really nice. It was pretty cool studying in such cool spaces!

-Support for your own entrepreneurial venture-IE has A TON of support for people looking to start their own companies- networking with venture capitalists, support on how to build your business, etc. If you want to use your MBA to start a company, IE is probably where you should study. Given I want to be a marketing director (which is akin to managing a business), it was really helpful for me to be a part of this environment, to be better equipped for becoming a marketing director one day!

--Things that were not so awesome—

-Student life- I could go on for a LONG time about the issues this school has with promoting and facilitating a cohesive student body,  creating a more enjoyable student experience, etc but will just leave it at this. Rotman is MILES ahead of IE in this respect.

-Networking clubs- I was a member of several clubs (marketing club, north American club, etc)  and in one semester, there was ONE event (a speaker event) across all of the clubs I am a member of. Why do these clubs even exist then?

Living in Madrid was a dream come true for me. I know I will miss it here and hope I can move back one day. However, I really miss my classmates at Rotman…I am excited to see them again soon!

Canadian Marketing Association Mentorship Program

The Canadian Marketing Association (CMA) organizes a “marketing mentorship program” with MBA schools across Canada. Rotman is one of said schools and I had the opportunity to get in involved in the program this year.

The name of the program is a bit of a misnomer though. When one thinks of a “mentorship” it is usually a relationship you have with someone who you look to for advice on various things over time. This program is not that. In this case you have to apply to the program and in your application, talk about the things you are interested in learning about/doing in the marketing world. If your application is successful, you are matched with a company that fits the interests you stated in your application. You (with a few other people from other MBA schools that are participating in the program) then spend at day at the matched company and meet their directors and learn about marketing (and business in general) at the company.

I am interested in working in marketing strategy and got set up with the agency, Carlson Marketing (soon to be AIMIA). I have absolutely no interest in working at an ad agency (which I thought Carlson Marketing was), ever. So you might think this would therefore be the worst day ever for me, right? Wrong! Luckily, the woman at Carlson Marketing that organized our day set up an amazing agenda for us. We had meetings with all of the leaders of the company, who were very experienced in areas unrelated to standard account services at an ad agency. So I had an opportunity to learn a ton, especially in the function I am most interested in, marketing strategy.

It is worth noting that some students do not get so lucky. Depending on who organizes your day and what company you visit, you might end up only meeting more junior people or company lifers who can’t shed insight on the world outside of their organization. So I was pretty happy I got to meet the people I did.

Because I was meeting such high-level people, it was almost like an unofficial job interview, as most networking events are. Like typical networking events, you should ask questions about the person, the company and industry but never straight up ask for jobs. However one of the other MBAers from another university who came on the site visit with us, was constantly asking everyone we met for jobs. Directly. Not cool, man! Also when we were asked to “tell me about yourself” it was very clear that my peers hadn’t prepared their stories specifically for our day at Carlson Marketing. However, anticipating we would be asked these sorts of questions, I prepared in advance and was ready to rock. Regardless of a lot of other drama that ensues with Rotman and its career services, it certainly does a VERY good job at helping us prepare for networking activities...

Takeaways from my first semester of my MBA

Tomorrow is my last exam for the second qtr of classes which also means the end of my 1^st semester of MBA life! So for people who might be considering an MBA (or anyone else for that matter) here are the key things I found for managing (for the 1^st 4 months anyways) MBA school thus far:

-Make time for things besides school- Given the insane workload, it would be VERY easy to spend all day and all night doing homework. However by the same token, if you just focus on school school school, you WILL get burned out. To prevent this, for me anyways, this meant taking an hour out of my day to go to the gym and get a workout in. I can’t tell you how good it felt to get away from academia for a bit and blow off some steam with some weights. It also let me come back to school-related work with renewed vigor. So be it the gym, playing some hockey, getting some Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 in, whatever…Taking a break helps!

-Prioritize your projects schedule- Because we had some many things coming at us every day, I found it really useful to create a “to-dos” list with associated due dates on my computer. That way I had a visual list of what I needed to do for when and therefore could plan my time every day accordingly.

-Participate in class- This is super beneficial for 2 reasons:

1. You get EASY marks in class for raising your hand and saying something. (sometimes a lot of marks at that!)

2. If by chance you need to ask your prof a favour, he/she will actually know who you are therefore be more inclined to help you out.

-Communication skills are EXTREMELY IMPORTANT!!!!!!!!- I really can’t stress this enough. Good communication skills makes so many things for you and your peers 1,000,000 times easier. I’ll leave it at that. Please be a good communicator. Thank you. :-)

-Network, network, network- I spoke about this in an earlier blog post but it’s worth mentioning again. Get to know as many people as you can in the industry you want to work in.

-Be nice to everyone- You never know when you’ll need to make a big business deal with one of the other future executives in your class. ;-)

-The Rotman MBA education is as rewarding as it is challenging- As you guys know, I busted my butt pretty hard this semester and despite lots of drama and stress, I’m really happy I have soaked up as much as I could. Yay for learning!

And with that, I am off to get 1 more exam done, then off to Punta Cana (thank you mom) until school starts up again in January. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Year and see you in 2012!!

Do you like networking? Then going to business school might be for you!!

After “Week of Stressful Exam Hell Part 1” we got a week free of classes. However don’t think it was a time to just site on your ass and do nothing. It was time for “Career Discovery Week”! This was a series of presentations from the Corporate Connections Centre (basically the Rotman careers centre) about how to go about the job search and panel discussions with Rotman MBA alum from various industries (finance, marketing, healthcare, tech, consulting, etc) about what it’s like to work in various fields.

Because I am somewhat unique amongst my peers in that I know exactly what I want to do after I graduate, some of the info was definitely skippable for me. But if you are on a quest of self-discovery for what you want to do with your life, everything that happens in the week will definitely help you out a ton.

One constant theme that was rammed down our throats hard is NETWORKING. Because I want to work in big corporations, I used to think it wasn’t that necessary because to apply for a job in a big company you have to apply though some anonymous job application tool online, get filtered through HR, then meet the hiring managers, etc. If things were so bureaucratic, what difference would it make if you knew anyone at the company? Apparently say you meet some random guy that works at Kraft and he likes you, then when you apply for a job at Kraft, he’ll tell HR to keep an eye out for my resume. So I guess when HR is doing their filtering of applicants they must have a filtering option: “Did someone internally mention this candidates name? If so, interview” ;-)

Anyways, me being Mr. Proactive, I already a) worked with the Rotman resume experts to get my resume ready for distribution weeks ago and b) set up meetings for networking purposes at the companies and industries I am interested in. I also needed to get away from Toronto for a bit to maximize my break before I get back into the swing of things with school. So this weekend I killed a whopping 4 birds with one stone!

1. Went to Vancouver- my favourite city in Canada- for 4 days

2. Got to see one of my really good friends who I hadn’t seen in a few months, and chilled with her

3. Visited my family on the west coast

4. Met with some of the main companies I am interested in working for in the future

Very productive weekend but I am VERY tired now. I feel like I could sleep for a week. But that’s impossible because tomorrow it’s back to school!!